Semi-emo punk rock band Mae will head out on tour this month, after releasing its sophomore album, “The Everglow” earlier this year and spending the summer on the Vans Warped Tour. Guitarist Zach Gehring recently talked with Weekender about touring, creating the band’s storybook album and painting.

Weekender: What are you doing right now?

Zach Gehring: I’m just doing some painting. I’m painting a piece of wood block. We’re just doing a little homemade construction for some of our gear before we leave on tour so this way we can custom fit them. It’s cheaper that way.

WE: How’s the tour?

ZG: We’re getting ready to leave and we’re rehearsing. We leave Wednesday night so we’re doing a little bit of last minute shopping runs.

WE: You’re coming to Chicago Oct. 16. Have you ever been to Chicago before?

ZG: Yeah we’ve been to Chicago numerous times. It’s actually one of my favorite cities to play. We’re playing the House of Blues this time. We’ve played the Metro the most. We played the House of Blues one time before with Something Corporate. This will be our first time headlining the House of Blues. So this ought [to] be awesome, I can’t wait.

WE: What are you looking forward to with this tour?

ZG: We’re adding a lot more technology. It’ll make the show better for the audience. We haven’t had this massive of a tour in a while. We’re all excited to tour no matter what. It’s kind of weird to be home for so long. We’ve been home since the end of the [Vans] Warped Tour. When we’re on tour, we’re actually more in our element than when we’re at home, oddly enough, just because we’ve been on tour for so long. So we’re looking forward to getting out there and doing it again, just because that’s what we do.

WE: What was the idea behind the album cover art?

ZG: All of the songs that were written at the time kind of follow this loose theme that’s kind of reflective of the band and the band’s career so far. It kind of had this storybook feel. So we just started thinking about what we could do to use that. We thought it would be cool to have the artwork reflect that. The storybook feel with the watercolors and stuff like that.

WE: How did you meet up with Charlotte Martin, who is featured on the album?

ZG: We told Ken Andrews, our producer, we wanted a voice to open up the record. Storybooks are always like, “Hello, this is this book. . .” I thought it was going to be an older lady at first to make it more soothing, but Charlotte’s voice came out perfectly.

WE: There’s a theme running through the album, like a mixture of depression and hopefulness. Where does that come from?

ZG: It just came from things we were going through. Certain times, you go through the lows and the highs of touring, it gets stressful. It’s a personal journey, paralleled with the band’s journey. It didn’t really come from one solid source all the time. It just came from being out on the road all the time. You get to these points of, “Man, I want to go home,” and “This is not working out right now.” Then you have the other extreme, which is, “I don’t want to do anything else forever. I just want to tour.” It was all pretty much written forth in a weird way just because it was the lives we lead. We took experiences from the road and put them into song.

WE: What band are you most compared to?

ZG: I’ve heard Jimmy Eat World the most, I can see some of the similarities on “Beautiful.” I think it’s not so much anymore with “The Everglow.” We were all fans of Jimmy Eat World growing up, so to be compared to a band like that could always be worse. So I take it as a compliment, and I hope that either by now or in time we obviously want to create our own identity and have people talk about other bands and how they sound like us. I like it. It’s just one of those things that is going to happen. People want to categorize and compare things; at least it’s Jimmy Eat World.