[Cover photo credit to Mitch LaGrow]

Making Room for Light, is Mae Powell’s debut album for Karma Chief Records, and it focuses on a dreamy sound, like the time between the night and the full rays of the morning, and is “shared with friends and lovers both absent and present.” Album opener, “Tangerine,” is out now and the album arrives on August 15th, 2025.

Writing the album over a transitional period in her life, Powell’s sophomore album presents the singer/songwriter “as both healer and healed.” The sketches that compose Making Room for Light’s eleven-song cycle began while Mae was living on her mother’s farm, two hours north of San Francisco. 

Produced by Loving’s multi-instrumentalist David Parry, the album was recorded at Risque Disque studio off the coast of Vancouver Island. 

Mae Powell says of her latest single:

I wrote ‘Tangerine’ as a testament to my squishy heart. This idea of a tender heart being akin to a fruit getting smushed in the bottom of a bag, making a mess but also making everything smell really good. I will always be an advocate for living with your heart on your sleeve, telling the ones around you that you love them, because we never know how things might change. I’m also looking for the balance between open heartedness and boundaries that can also serve as an act of self-love and care.

We were channeling Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline on the day we recorded ‘Tangerine,’ a beautiful sunny day on Vancouver Island. We all wore sunglasses and drank whiskey while we were tracking this one, and after Sam (Jones) tracked drums, he and David (Parry) baked a pie. Garrett (Barley) rips the electric guitar and the Hammond organ in this one. It feels like a summer day and the drum-fill into the organ set the stage, sonically and thematically, for the whole album.