On Sunday night in Indianapolis, we made it 2005 again through science or magic. George W. Bush was president, the coolest phone in America was a hot pink Motorola Razr, and the Chicago White Sox were World Series champions. I even saw someone capturing memories in the glorious 480p resolution of an admittedly anachronistic Nintendo 3DS XL. That’s right, in a show of deference to our increasingly nostalgia-based economy, the Spill Canvas and Mae have embarked upon a 20th anniversary tour, playing their respective 2005 albums, One Fell Swoop and The Everglow, in their entireties (sort of). The second leg of this undertaking wrapped up in the Circle City, rocking a basement venue two flights down from a show headlined by an artist born nearly three months after Mae released their debut album. It’s best not to dwell on it. Undeterred by how what “it” is keeps changing, a dedicated crowd gathered to celebrate two classic albums of the mid-aughts emo scene.
This leg of the tour featured Ace Enders, a singer and guitarist best known for his work as frontman of the Early November, as the opening act. Enders played an acoustic set sampling a discography that spans 25 years, including several songs by the Early November in addition to songs from his solo career and another project called I Can Make a Mess. It takes a brave man to open as a solo artist for two bands touring beloved albums, but Enders is a consummate professional. His time on stage was short, only enough for about seven songs due to the sheer length of the co-headliners sets, but he made the most of the time he had. Enders was an unexpected treat as an opener, an experienced artist who has built a respectable career churning out quality music. He put on a good show, although it seems he was eager to be done with his set. This was his final show of the tour because another artist is taking over the opening slot for the final leg. In his haste to get home to New Jersey, Enders split by the time the next set began, leaving nothing but a tumbleweed bouncing across the table that had served as his merch stand. Regardless, I am glad to have seen him perform. The man-with-guitar setup works particularly well in a venue like the Deluxe, where basement acoustics often leave vocals fighting to be heard over the instrument in the mix. Being on the stage with nothing but a an acoustic guitar allowed Enders’s singing and songwriting to truly shine.
The Spill Canvas won (or perhaps lost) the coin flip to perform first on this tour date, having closed the previous night’s show in Chicago. I had last seen the Spill Canvas perform on their 10th anniversary tour for One Fell Swoop, so I was perplexed by how we could already be observing the 20th anniversary. I’ve been reliably informed that it’s possible due to the linear nature of the passage of time. The years really do start coming, and they don’t stop coming. This is how the Spill Canvas and I found ourselves back in the basement of the Old National Centre ten years and change later. Maybe this is the purpose of anniversary tours—to force you to confront where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going. On the other hand, it could be about celebrating music and community, a shared voyage on this Spaceship Earth. Perhaps two things can be true.
The Spill Canvas got right to business, launching into “Lust a Prima Vista,” the opening track of One Fell Swoop, without further ado. It’s a strong opening track to both the album and the set, and got the crowd moving immediately. The influence of time was immediately apparent, although the band still sounds great. Lead singer Nick Thomas, the sole remaining band member from the recording of One Fell Swoop, is in his early forties now and his voice has inevitably deepened with age. The near-whine typical of vocalists in the genre has taken on a more growling edge, but the heart is still there. Thomas has good musical chemistry with bassist Landon Heil, guitarist Evan Pharmakis, and the band’s touring musicians, although Thomas naturally has the strongest personal connection to the material as the sole original band member.
The set continued as a pretty straight forward playthrough of the album, minus a couple of pauses for technical difficulties and a short tangent about vampires. The sole diversion from the album’s tracklist was to swap out the track “Secret Oath” for the song “The Tide” from 2004’s Sunsets & Car Crashes. Thomas explained this away as “a little break from the record” and stressed that the band still loves “Secret Oath,” although it has been cut from every show on the tour as far as I can tell. The song is a product of its time, but so is the record; the album has an underlying thread of unrequited love that can lean aggressive or stalker-esque depending the track, but this is arguably more overt on songs other than “Secret Oath.” That aside, the inclusion of “The Tide” was a smart move. The song is a fan favorite, highlighting Thomas’s storytelling abilities, and this is where the band really began to their stride. Thomas’s vocals were fully warmed up by now, the band was in their element, and the rest of the set was smooth sailing.
Thomas played the album’s final track “Self-Conclusion” by himself before the rest of the band returned with an extended intro to the Spill Canvas’s best-known song, “All Over You” from the 2007 album No Really, I’m Fine. The band said their farewells after this, thanking the fans and launching into one final song, “All Hail the Heartbreaker,” also from Sunsets & Car Crashes, where the audience shouted the final (titular) line together. The set, like the tour overall, was a celebration of the Spill Canvas and their longtime fans, giving due deference to a beloved album (although I’m more of a No Really, I’m Fine girlie) while also trotting out crowd-pleasers from elsewhere in their discography.
Mae, the final act of the night, played for a noticeably smaller crowd than the Spill Canvas; there were times when I don’t think I was standing within ten feet of another soul. I cannot fault anyone who left early as it was a school night and Mae did not take the stage until minutes before 10pm. I have been at shows where the performers were clearly thrown off by a small crowd, but if Mae noticed the drop in attendance, they did not draw attention to it. Maybe it was professionalism, maybe it was the exhilaration of completing another successful leg of the tour or the camaraderie of the bands—the artists’ support for one another included shouting out Ace Enders as “a good guy” and Mae’s touring bassist sporting a Spill Canvas t-shirt. It helps that those who stayed to the end were certainly fans of the band. It was clear that everyone in the audience was intimately familiar with The Everglow. They knew the words and sang them loud, exuding the energy of a much larger crowd.
Mae, comprised of vocalist Dave Elkins and guitarist Zach Gehring (both still remaining from the recording of The Everglow), as well as a slate of touring musicians, began the set oddly enough with the ominously titled “Sleep Well,” a dreamy track first released on a 2011 EP titled Evening. It was a fitting though unexpected opening as The Everglow is a fairly dreamy album. After this, Mae dove into the album, including the brief opening track “Prologue” that leads into the album’s first real song “We’re So Far Away.” Much like the Spill Canvas’s set, this was essentially a straight playthrough of the album with few surprises. The set was technically proficient if over-rehearsed, even if the band seemed tired at times from the demands of 24 previous shows on the tour. At one point, Elkins couldn’t even muster the energy to fill time during a break between songs, and all of the band members, minus the drummer, turned their backs on the audience to silently re-tune their instruments. Luckily for Elkins, he’s a good actor. Mid-album, the band detoured to play “Embers and Envelopes” off Destination: Beautiful (2003). Elkins pretended this deviation was just because we were such good concertgoers, and I almost believed him, but this was either preplanned or else Mae has made this spontaneous decision on every date of the tour so far. The crowd attempted to cajole the band into playing an additional Destination: Beautiful track, but bullying did not work here. Mae promptly jumped back into The Everglow, continuing on with the next song on the track list “Breakdown,” a song that made excellent use of the audience to provide vocal harmonies. The remainder of the set adhered to the album, playing the rest of the tracks without alteration, minus a pause in the middle of the final song to give the band’s thanks and goodbyes.
Despite my nitpicking, it was excellent set, and the band hit it out of the park from the start, in part due to the strength of Elkins’s voice and the talent of the band’s instrumentalists. Indianapolis oftentimes seems to be an afterthought when planning tours, either skipped entirely in favor of neighboring states or placed at or near the end of a leg or the tour itself. This leads to musicians that are either too tired to engage the crowd between songs or so over-rehearsed that I fear they have been replaced with automatons. On the other hand, I recognize the inherent difficulty of making a 20-year-old album sound fresh when the band has played it and the audience has heard it countless times before. This is not made easier by the logistics of the venue, a room with notoriously difficult acoustics. The Everglow is still a great album, and Mae are very skilled musicians and a pleasure to see live.
I have complicated feelings about anniversary tours as a backwards-looking exercise. It’s so easy to focus on old albums that we love instead what else might have been accomplished in the last 20 years, and I worry about nostalgia as a service. How thin is the line between anniversary tours as a celebration of our shared history and anniversary tours as a cash grab targeting adults chasing reminders of when they were young? I loved these albums and I enjoyed the show, but I still struggle with the utility of a setlist that barely deviates from the track list. Performing in the studio is a different animal than performing live, and I think it is worthwhile to use live shows as an opportunity to make different musical choices, to play with track orders and instrumentation in ways that aren’t just because we are older and have trouble hitting the original notes. It’s fun to visit yesteryear, but I don’t want to live there. It was a relief to wake up in the morning back in 2025, without a single worry of cafeteria politics or pop quizzes on Where the Red Fern Grows. The past is a foreign country, and for one night only, we were tourists. My qualms aside, I still hope to see everyone back at the Deluxe in 2035.
