197. Song No. 2,971: “Embers and Envelopes,” Mae
Destination: Beautiful, 2003

Absolutely nothing else sounded like Mae when they first hit the scene.

They didn’t reinvent anything so much as augment indie-rock standards with more of an inclination toward experimentation than most of their peers, a gentle nudge toward something no one else was doing more than an abrupt deviation from an admittedly already loosely defined genre. Their novelty came from a wooly fuzz creating more warmth and dimension than anything even remotely synthy should be able to pull off; the accompaniment of a full-throated keyboard going toe-to-toe with traditional instrumentalization; a layering of instruments and vocals that created a melodic wall of sound rife with emotions all kinds where every track, no matter how soft and unassuming, roaringly announced itself and just kept plowing through the predominant feeling fueling it.

“Embers and Envelopes” being the very first song on the very first Mae album I ever heard set the stage for everything to come. I’d see this band with boyfriends and my brother and friends and friends’ ex-boyfriends and the ex-girlfriend who wound up marrying one of my ex-boyfriends, Mae meaning as much to me in as many different ways as each relationship merited, a strangely amorphous constant that I somehow was able to share with so many different people at so many different stages of our respective journeys. But no matter how the intensity of my love for this band ebbed and flowed across the years and their own flavor of music evolved, this song always felt like the same kind of anthemic and charmingly wintry and stuffed with promise, evidence that those truly significant songs can stand as measuring sticks you can always revisit not just to chart your own progress but to catch a wisp of the best parts of the past preserved in musical amber.