Bass music producer Everen Maxwell has released Waiting for the Dream to End, a concept album out now on Disciple that traces his real-life experience with family estrangement from the first fracture to whatever comes after. It is not a short EP or a quick genre exercise — it is a full narrative record, moving through grief, disillusionment, and the kind of reckoning that only shows up once the anger burns off.
The album is rooted in something Everen lived through rather than imagined. When he was eight, his mother Jeseca passed away from cancer following a procedure meant to treat it. His father enrolled him and his brother in ARTS (A Reason To Survive), a music therapy program meant to help the family process the loss — and that’s where Everen found production in the first place. Music carried him through that first loss, and years later, it carried him through what he describes as a second, more symbolic one: estrangement from his family.
That rupture began not long after Everen married his wife Colleen, who he got engaged to just 22 days after meeting and married two months later in March 2022. Caught between loyalty to his family and his new marriage, Everen says he didn’t know how to set boundaries with either side, and the pressure built instead of easing. By 2023, after starting therapy and doing his own reading, he recognized some of the patterns he’d grown up in weren’t healthy, and made the difficult call to step back from his family entirely — not out of a lack of love, but to figure out who he was outside those roles.
That first estrangement produced ‘Goodbye for Now,’ one of the more emotionally direct tracks on the record. Everen wrote it purely to process what he was feeling, with no plan to release it — the vocal chop actually surfaced first on his remix of Virtual Riot’s ‘Reconnect’ before becoming a lead single in its own right.
Attempts at reconciliation followed over the next couple of years, but none of them stuck. The conversations were well-intentioned, Everen says, but left everyone more hurt than understood, since the internal changes needed on both sides hadn’t actually happened. Eventually he separated from his family again, and this second distance turned out to be one of the more transformative periods of his life and marriage — giving him room to reflect and take ownership of his part in the situation instead of just assigning blame.
It was Colleen who pushed him toward turning the whole story into music, suggesting in 2025 that he hadn’t fully processed the estrangement and that writing it out might help. That conversation became the starting point for Waiting for the Dream to End. Everen has said the songs came with an urgency he hadn’t felt before, describing much of the writing process as a flow state. Near the end of making the record, he made an apology to his family he felt he still owed — one that didn’t change the relationship, but gave him a sense of closure he needed regardless.
Vocally, this is a different record for Everen. He’s sung on previous releases, but Waiting for the Dream to End is the first project where he spent real time developing his voice as a focal point rather than a texture — tracks like ‘Goodbye for Now,’ ‘To a New Place,’ ‘Die Trying,’ ‘Happy Now’ and ‘Mythic’ all put his vocals front and center.
The title track is a collaboration with Bianca, a songwriter who’s recently featured on records from Trivecta & Capochino, SIPPY, Darude and CHYL, and who has also written for Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull. Elsewhere on the album, Everen brought in Insomniac Discovery Project winners The Living Proof (selected by Excision) and Phocust (selected by Zomboy), along with Nokae (better known as VGR), SpaceYeti and hyper bass producer Killin’ Void.
Perhaps the most personal feature comes from Everen’s wife, Colleen Graves, who contributed vocals to two tracks — ‘Holy’ and ‘Happy Now.’ ‘Holy’ is sung entirely in Latin, a nod to Everen’s Christian roots that runs through the record’s undercurrent of faith and forgiveness.
Everen has said the album wasn’t written as an attack on his family or as an olive branch, but as something he needed to make for himself — the same instinct that led him to music after his mother’s death. He’s dedicated the record to Colleen, who stood by him through the entire process.
Here’s what Everen had to say about the project:
“When I was making this album, I honestly didn’t plan to ever share what it was really about. For the past couple years, I have been navigating family estrangement and everything that comes with it. It affected pretty much every part of my life, and for a while I didn’t know how to process it, let alone turn it into music. One day I was talking with my wife, and she said, “Why don’t you write songs about what you’ve actually been feeling?” It sounds obvious, but for me it wasn’t. Family estrangement felt too personal to talk about publicly, and honestly too complicated to put into a song. Still, I decided to start with one track, not realizing it would later turn into an entire album. The first track I started building was Goodbye for Now, and one line in it sums up this whole season for me: ‘It’s one thing to lose someone; how do you cope when it’s you who leaves?’ I lost my mom to cancer when I was eight years old, so grief is not new to me. But this was a different kind of grief because my family is still alive, and I still love them. I could go back, but I’m also forced to ask whether going back is actually the right thing. After Goodbye for Now, something opened up creatively. I started writing with a level of urgency and honesty that I have not felt in years. This project was not just me trying to make a “concept album.” It became the last several years of my life turned into melodies, lyrics, and storytelling. At first, I thought Goodbye for Now would be the album title, but the deeper I got into the writing, the more I realized the album wasn’t just about grief or goodbyes. It’s about waking up from a dream you believed in for a long time, and realizing you cannot live inside that version of reality anymore. That is what ‘Waiting for the Dream to End’ means to me.”
Full Tracklist – Waiting for the Dream to End
- Overture of a Dream
- End of an Age
- Goodbye for Now
- To a New Place
- Waiting for the Dream to End
- Goodbye Again
- Die Trying
- Holy
- Happy Now
- Mythic
