Mae Powell Finds Clarity in Transition on ‘Making Room for the Light’

BY: DIGITAL WAX MEDIA STAFF

Mae Powell’s Making Room for the Light arrives as her debut for Karma Chief Records, but it doesn’t sound like a first step. The album carries itself with the assurance of someone who has already tested the edges of her voice and knows what she wants it to hold.

Written during a period of personal upheaval and recorded with David Parry of Loving at Vancouver Island’s Risque Disque studio, the record reflects both dislocation and grounding: music conceived on her mother’s farm in California but shaped in the slower rhythms of a Canadian summer.

The result is a set of songs that resist urgency. Tracks like opener “Tangerine,” “Meet Me in Memory,” and lead single “Rope You In” move with patience, built around textures of guitar, keys, and Powell’s jazz-informed phrasing. They feel less like narratives and more like spaces to linger in. The feeling is that of songs which take stock of time passing rather than trying to outrun it.

Not everything here leans into hushed reflection. “Contact High,” inspired by a friendship of Powell’s, provides the album’s liveliest moment. It’s an upbeat gesture of solidarity that carries a faint echo of Beat Happening’s looseness, tightened by Powell’s vocal control. Elsewhere, “Hot Headed” puts words to volatility, framing anger as something both human and workable. Powell laughs about feeling like “an angry little gremlin,” but the track underscores how her writing frequently points toward healing without pretending the conflict isn’t real.

That balance between the confessional and the communal is what gives Making Room for the Light its weight. “Where Will Love Go?” takes the fallout of a breakup and reframes it as an exploration of love’s redistribution: what happens when the care once given to someone else has to be rerouted. Powell’s answer is to turn inward first, then outward, an idea that finds resonance in both her lyrics and the arrangement’s lift.

Across its eleven songs, the album traces a cycle of searching and release. Closing track “Again” lands as a quiet resolution, almost lullaby-like, as though Powell has said what needed saying and can finally let silence do the rest.

Making Room for the Light is less about reinvention than refinement: a record that doesn’t demand attention so much as reward it, built with the patience of someone willing to sit with change until meaning surfaces.

The album is now available to purchase and stream.