"Michelle has just continued to grow as a songwriter," says older brother and vocalist/guitarist John admiringly. And he isn't patronizing Ð the keyboardist/singer takes center stage on five new tracks that add feminine mystique and sensuality to Straylight's artillery of emo anthems. From the Hush Sound-ing "Still Alone" to the willowy weeper "This Is the End," her collaborator and kinsman says Michelle has proven her musical mettle since her more subtle role in the band's 2004 self-titled debut.

Furthermore, John says with The Needles The Space, it's the first material he's released that wasn't weighed down by comparisons to his and bassist Shaun Cooper's former band, Taking Back Sunday, from which they departed in 2003. Straylight Run was born soon after, when they acquired Will Noon on drums and later enlisted Michelle.

"For a while, in the beginning, we were fighting hard to separate ourselves from our past," John says. "At this point, though, it seems that with this album coming out, people are more looking at what we are - the way they would with other bands."

But to call Straylight Run "just another band" would be a disservice to the experimentation and grandiosity of its songs. A track like ambient album-closer "The First of This Century" melds John's bleeding-heart delivery with shimmering, spatial bleeps that cascade into an ocean of sound. Then there's the swaggering, optimistic piano-pop of "Take It to Manhattan," where the band smacks the frown off the Hot Topic crowd with the lyrics, "I've had enough of all these songs of self-imposed unhappiness." French horns, trumpets, accordions, and glockenspiels pepper the sprawling musical landscapes. In taking such an exploratory route for this album, Straylight Run found itself in rather ironic confines during the recording process.

"Our engineer, Bryan, who is a good friend of ours, his dad owns this office building in Pennsylvania," John says. "We just thought it'd be cool to go in there and make it into a studio. We spent about two weeks in there. We were planning on spending more, but the people who owned the company went in there to show it to somebody they wanted to sublease it to and saw all of our equipment and they freaked out."

The sessions reconvened in various New York locales, all financed out of the band's own pocket. Following the release of the Prepare to Be Wrong EP in fall 2005, the musicians were back on the market, which John found liberating. They eventually signed with Universal Republic for the sake of creative voice. "We were looking for [a label that] would take what we did and not try to change it around or make it something else," John says. "That's what [Universal] did. So it just seemed like the right place to go."

Where he's going has always been the most resonant mystery in John's life. From his and Michelle's staunch Christian upbringing to Straylight Run's frightening van crash in 2005 to living in a time of war, the topic of fate and mortality is frequently on his mind. Even this album's first single, "Soon We'll Be Living in the Future," mulls life and death.

"Because of the way I was brought up, I did accept that born-again Christian point of view and the belief in the Bible," John says. "But it wasn't the be-all, end-all that I was told it was. That was what sparked me to thinking a lot more, and opened me up to, 'Well, if this isn't right, how many other things that people believe in wholeheartedly and are so positive about could be completely wrong?' It's sent me more through life with an attitude of trying to be open to things and to be thoughtful about things and not get caught up in trends or the ideas of people you're surrounded by."

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