“Lost Boys” by Mike Maines & the Branches, Thursday, April 4, 2024 (Trigger Warning: Suicide)

In December 2022, I opened up my Instagram one morning as I often did after my 5 a.m. alarm. There was a post from mikemainsmusic, who hadn’t been very active on social media. Mike Mains and the Branches hadn’t released an album since 2019 and had only released a few singles between 2020 and 2021. In the post, Mike Mains wrote about his suicide attempt in 2021. He wrote: “1 year ago today I attempted to take my life. I am here because of my wife Shannon.” He went on to say that we wrote the post “to encourage those who’ve danced with this dark devil.” After his suicide attempt, he wrote that he “bought a one way ticket to the desert to get help.”

DARLING, MY HEART IS FULL OF REGRET. After talking about his suicide attempt, Mike Mains told fans that he and the Branches would return with new music in 2023 and tour dates. Mains also talked about how his sobriety contributed to his mental healing after his suicide attempt with the Bringin’ It Backwards Podcast In June, Mains released the first singles from the upcoming album, Memory Unfixed. Like the band’s previous album, When We Were in Love, Mains’ latest album was released through Tooth & Nail Records. Mike Mains and the Branches have been touring with the album since, many dates of which are “living room shows,” shows that gracious fans open up their homes for intimate concerts. Memory Unfixed isn’t much of a departure in sound from When We Were Young. The lyrical difference between Mains’ second album, 2004’s Calm Down, Everything Is Fine and 2019’s  When We Were in Love is stark, with the former being a more straightforward Christian album. Both Mains’ third and fourth albums discuss suicide and marital issues frankly, which is seldom heard in Christian records. 

I AM MOSES; MARY, TAKE ME DANCING IN THE RAIN. “Lost Boys” opens Mike Mains and the Branches’ Memory Unfixed. Alluding to the band of boys over whom Peter Pan leads in J.M. Barrie’s classic children’s book, “Lost Boys” sees Mains imagining himself as one of those lost boys trapped in Neverland. The song doesn’t strictly stick to the Peter Pan metaphor but shifts to the Old Testament story of Moses. Furthermore, the “good girls crying in their beds” feels like a channeling of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.” Peter Pan is a common motif in music from Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” to Tyson Motsenbocker’s “Wendy Darling.” Each song that alludes to the children’s novel meditates on different parts of the story’s narrative. However, one of the most common purposes for the metaphor is to show the speaker’s arrested development. The metaphor only seems more relevant for millennials and Generation Z who are struggling to meet the benchmarks of an adult life laid out to us from our parents’ generations. The meditation on the Lost Boys of Neverland could have been a look at men and masculinity in the 2020s, but instead, Mains makes the song insular. He looks at one lost boy, rather than the collective. But if we look at the issues in the collective, one lost boy’s story might make a bit more sense.   

Read “Lost Boys” by Mike Mains & The Branches on Genius.