Written by: Dave Cantrell

A heartfelt, swaying outlook on mature but still eternal love, Chris Robley’s early track from his Great Make Believer album “Evangeline” both proves the primal power of the singer/songwriter format and undermines any and all criticisms regarding the form’s navel-gazing tendencies. Full of a wounded hope and rich with an incipient acoustic pop sense, “Evangeline” imbues the deeply-lived poignant with a still-hopeful optimism. In short, it’s love at its most plain-spokenly poetic, the type of love that keeps you imperishably awake at night, one of “Evangeline”‘s central tropes and something Robley himself addresses:

“I have a hard time getting to sleep without the whir of a fan or white noise. Silence is deafening. I like that cliché. It’s particularly true when you’re at a low point; the mind becomes an echo chamber for your worst voices. “Evangeline” is about that frazzled place at the edge of sleep, and banging your head against a figurative wall that separates you from the people you’ve hurt. Oh, plus the blue light of television at 3am. Musically, I have to give a shout-out to Anders Bergstrom for his drumming which brought all the pieces of this song together while the rhythm shifts kind of diaphanously between the verse and chorus and back again.”

Here’s proof.