“My name is Amber, I’m the oldest sister.”
“My name is Sarah, I’m the middle sister.”
“And I’m Julia, the youngest, the baby.”

The sisters that make up the pop group Everlife introduce themselves, approaching our interview in the same way they approach life, with gleeful enthusiasm.

“We’re originally from Indiana, Pennsylvania, which isn’t two states, it’s actually a town.. Our parents were not in music; they don’t play instruments at all.. They worked in youth ministry. When we were really little, we saw our parents shuffling teenagers in and out of our house, helping them with all these crazy issues,” explains middle sister Sarah, 22. “When she was eight years old, Julia, came to us, and said ‘I want to do what they do and inspire people, but I want to do it through music.’ All three of us had been involved in music in school when we were really little. We were involved with a lot of theater and drama groups, so we always knew that some type of performance was in our future. Julia, seriously, has been singing since she was a baby, since before she could talk. That’s not even a lie, we have proof!”

“Yeah, my cries were in the key of E,” Julia, 19, jokes.

Sarah continues, “We didn’t have any training in the beginning. At first, we were just singing a capella at our house. Our first performance was in front of our plush animals and our parents. We didn’t understand that we could sing cover songs, so we just immediately started writing.”

“Our parents had been event coordinators as well as youth ministers. They started to book shows and festivals in the area where people could play around the area (but, actually, it was so we could perform.) After about a year and a half, we started getting phone calls back. We didn’t even know you got paid to do this. The first person that offered us money we were like, ‘Oh my goodness! We could make a living at this? This is awesome!’ We did that for a couple of years, just by our selves.”

After making contacts in Nashville, Tennessee, they traveled back and forth recording an EP, eventually making the move to Music City and releasing an album in the Christian industry in 2004.

“When we first started, we were trying to be cool and named ourselves Tri, but when we came to Nashville, they said that we had potential, but they hated our name. For six months we tried to rename ourselves, which is such a strange thing to do when you’ve been called something for five years, how do you encompass who you are with a name? But it turned out to be the best thing for us. We were all sitting around and my mom finally said, “I want you to do something ‘ever’ we said what do you mean? She said, ‘you sing about eternity, your faith, your relationships so let’s pick one of those, then she said Everlife and we were like, ‘what is that? It sounds like a battery, like a flashlight.’ But then we looked it up on the copyright site and nobody had it. It really just colored in all the lines of what we were missing.”

While promoting their Christian album, they crossed paths with Disney and began playing shows for Radio Disney stations, appearing on compellations and eventually signing to one of Disney’s labels. “We were on there for about two years and we did some amazing tours. It was an incredible learning experience because it was so much bigger than anything we’d ever done. October of last year, the option came up with Hollywood and we just eventually decided to part ways with Disney cause they were kind of at a point where they were like -we don’t know exactly where to go from here - and we were saying, ‘We would love to do this on our own because we feel like we’re actually capable now to take over.’”

The young women of Everlife, who are gearing up for the release of their a new CD in mid-February and two month European tour, are enjoying their newfound independence both personally and professionally, “We’ve been thinking a lot these past few years about how we’re really individuals. It’s tough because, obviously, we’re family, we’ve been together forever, but with the band, we’re always together. There was a time where everybody was like, ‘You guys are so alike and we can’t tell you apart.’ We look a lot alike, too, and then it kind of got to us really figure out who we are as individual people. We just did a Christmas tour this past December and it was the first time that we did everything.” Sarah recalls, “We did the shows and the staging. Each of us were in charge of our own thing, working together as a team for once without anybody telling us how to do it, we just did it. I handled most of the business stuff. Amber was doing anything that has to do with the creative art side of it. Julia did all the stage design. The shows were amazing and I think that was such a great feeling.

Expressing their feelings on being a band of sisters Julia is quick to say, “It’s awesome!”

“We didn’t realize that it was weird,” says Amber, 24.

“It definitely keeps us accountable,” says Sarah “It’s great that there’s three of us coz two of us can take care of the other one. If one of us is in a bad spot then the other two get to kind of pull them out of it. It’s never really been all three of us. We’re always there to be an encouragement. People ask, ‘Do you fight?’ and we’re like, ‘well, yeah, we totally fight, we’re sisters and we’re girls, obviously, but we’re really best friends.”

When they aren’t singing, the sisters, especially Amber and Sarah, occupy their time by reading, “That is a credit to our mom. We were home schooled and mom would tell us we had to read 250 books a year, when really it was only 50, but we didn’t know that so we made a competition of it. We just read and read and read, now it’s paid off, coz it’s great to kill time on the road.. We watch a lot of movies. Julia does a bunch of video editing.”

Their parents have been have been incredibly supportive, Sarah explains, “People ask if our parents pushed us into this and we’re like, ‘NO!’ We did not have stage parents. When Julia was little, she hated rehearsing, she was like 8 or 9, she would like run away down the driveway and be like, ‘I Quit.’ And mom was like, ‘honey if this isn’t what you want to do, we’ll support you in anything you want.’”

Amber, Sarah and Julia are committed to writing songs based on situations real to them, always remaining truthful to their audience with every lyric, thus producing a straightforward glimpse into the essence of the Everlife sisters. “Something that has been the core for all three of us is that we’ve always tried to be as honest as possible, completely transparent, we’re really not good at being anything else, honestly. It takes too much effort. We sing about our faith a lot because we try to in everything we do. That’s the key.”

Amber speaks up, “When we first started writing, we would just be taking journal entries and poems and putting music to them. One thing that has carried through in our career that we all fight against constantly is that we are extremely wordy. We talk a lot and we’re constantly trying to describe every single thought. So as we’ve grown, the two basic things we’ve learned is don’t self-edit and also learning how to clearly communicate because, sometimes, you just want to write a thirty-five minute song that encompasses your whole life and it’s like, wait a minute, no one is gonna want to listen to that.”

Julia remembers the first show they opened for The Cheetah Girls, “The first show of that tour was breathtaking, it was amazing. I think it’s going to stick in our minds forever. We only played one arena show before that and we couldn’t hear and it was just a mess and I had just had a tonsillectomy, it was my first show back. You can’t explain 17 or 18 thousand people screaming at one time, the volume of it and the feeling of it and the three of us just like looked at each other, we just started crying, and we turned around and performed the heck out of the show. It was amazing!”

Amber says, “One of the other shows we got to perform at was the festival with Switchfoot just a few months ago. It was always a dream of ours, it was one of our goals - we wanted to someday share a stage with Switchfoot.. We were doing sound check beforehand and their sound check had taken quite a while. Jon Forman came over to us and said, ‘I’m so sorry this is taking so long’ and really apologized for it. We were basically just dumbstruck thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s talking to us’. That was a really cool experience.”

“We spent so many years having people tell us who we were and what we were supposed to do and we’ve finally come to the place of understanding what it really means to be yourself. Hopefully, we might be able to inspire that in someone else.”