The Everglow — Mae

Mae's second album, The Everglow, came out on Tooth & Nail Records on March 29, 2005. It's fifteen tracks and a little over an hour (61:10). The band produced it with Ken Andrews at Red Swan Studios in Los Angeles. Andrews also engineered and mixed it, and Adam Ayan mastered it. Dave Elkins sang and played rhythm guitar, Zach Gehring played lead guitar, Mark Padgett played bass, Jacob Marshall played drums and Rob Sweitzer played keys and sang. The five-piece came out of Norfolk, Virginia. The record's built like a storybook, with a Ryan Clark illustration for each song, and singer-songwriter Charlotte Martin narrates the Prologue and Epilogue. It sits on our emo shelf, at the bright, piano-driven end of the Tooth & Nail lane. It scores a 9/10.

What you're hearing

We're So Far Away comes in on piano right after the prologue and sets the tone for the whole album. You get big, warm guitars, Sweitzer's keys up front and Elkins singing about distance like it's something you could fix by driving. AllMusic's John D. Luerssen gave the album 4/5. He singled out the "airwave-ready" Someone Else's Arms, the "buoyant" Suspension and the "infectiously poppy" Breakdown, and wrote that This Is the Countdown "just may be the most rollicking, immediate, lovelorn pop song in recent memory." He called the whole record "a shining moment in modern rock."

Jesus Freak Hideout's Spencer Priest gave it 4.5/5 on March 27, 2005, and said it "exceeds expectations." He admitted it may not be completely original, but he heard a technically strong band. He also told readers to follow along in the lyric booklet, because the storybook frame is part of the point. Sputnikmusic scored it 4.1/5.

Mistakes We Knew We Were Making is the song people asked about most. At a Salt Lake City show in 2006, Elkins explained that it imagines a couple facing an unplanned pregnancy, and said it wasn't meant as a pro-choice or pro-life statement. His point was that love isn't always black and white. That kind of care, a hard subject with no slogan attached, runs through the album's quieter songs too.

How it was made

After the 2003 debut Destination: Beautiful, Mae took the follow-up to Los Angeles and to Andrews, the former Failure frontman, who co-produced and mixed it. The storybook idea shaped everything from the running order to the packaging, with Clark's drawings paired to each song and Martin's spoken bookends framing the story. Then the band toured the record hard, including stretches on the Vans Warped Tour. On April 18, 2006, Tooth & Nail put out a special edition. It added Where the Falls Begin, a cover of the Beatles' A Day in the Life, a demo of Suspension featuring Kenny Vasoli of the Starting Line, and a DVD. Ten years on, in 2015, Mae went back out on a reunion tour to mark the album's anniversary.

Where the score lands

It gets a nine because the songs land, the concept holds together for a full hour, and critics inside and outside the Christian market heard the same thing. A 4/5 from AllMusic, 4.5/5 from JFH, 4.1/5 from Sputnikmusic and a best-of-2005 nod from JFH make a strong, consistent run. So why not a ten? Priest's point stands that the sound isn't new. Mae borrowed openly from the piano-pop and emo records around it, and sixty-one minutes asks a lot in the back half. And why not an eight? Someone Else's Arms, Suspension and This Is the Countdown are as good as anything this scene put out in 2005, and the reunion tour a decade later shows the album still pulls a crowd.

Watch

Someone Else's Arms leads with its official music video. After it come the official Suspension video and the album version of the opener, We're So Far Away.

Where this album sits on Loud Faith

The Everglow is the friendliest door into mid-2000s emo on the Christian labels. It's less raw than the screaming records on the same label, but it shares their honesty, and it never turns a song into a sermon. It belongs on our emo shelf, and it leads this week because it's the most complete record of the five.