Making music has always seemed to me a bit alien and magical; even though I’ve done it myself, I still couldn’t really tell you how that happened. How is it possible that humans, and yes, you do thankfully still need them to make music that doesn’t suck, can take the complexity of being alive and turn it into not just sound, but place, and memory and connection? How can a person in Salt Lake City and another one in Tokyo, make a record that reaches my ears in Sheffield and makes me feel something? I don’t think I’ll ever cease to be amazed by that experience, and quite possibly by that record.
I’m talking, of course, about If I Let It Quiet, the new record by Josaleigh Pollett released last week via Audio Antihero. It was written and created shortly after their musical collaborator, and crucially, as you’ll soon see, friend, Jordan Watko moved to Tokyo. The story is fascinating, but that’s for Josaleigh to tell in wonderful detail as they soon will once I’m done waffling about how good this record is. It’s a record of voices and bleeps, real organic instruments and the most wonderfully odd production choices that make them scream and sing. In a single song, they’ll engulf you in dense sound that drags you down like an undertow, only to bring you back to the surface and slap you with the spaciousness of the widest vistas imaginable. It nods to emotional electronics of The Postal Service, to the thoughtful arrangements of Karima Walker, to the evver-creative mind of Squirrel Flower, and a host of other bands you probably love, while never feeling entirely like anyone other than Josaleigh Pollett. It is an astounding record made while Josaleigh and Jordan were navigating profound changes in both their relationship and their creative process, making sense of how they could still make sense and maintain a trans-continental friendship like no other.
I guess what I’m trying to say is this is very special indeed. So buy this album, listen to this album, and while you’re doing so, read on for Josaleigh’s beautiful explanation of how it came into the world and what it means to them (you can even get a really nice Track-by-Track guide over on GoldFlakePaint if you’re really into it).
Similar to its 2023 predecessor In The Garden, By The Weeds, our new album If I Let It Quiet didn’t start out with any intentional decision to create a new album. After 5 years of collaborating in the same geographical place of Salt Lake City, Utah, my creative partner Jordan Watko (Crowd Shy) and I were about to experience a drastic change in the way we create together. In early 2024, Jordan would be relocating his whole life to Japan. When Jordan shared this news with me at the end of 2023, I can’t say I handled it well. I’m no stranger to close friends moving to new cities, but this hit me differently. I’ve had many true loves in my life, but I can honestly say that none have shaped who I am as a person, a friend, and a songwriter the way that the love and creative collaboration between Jordan and I has.
We met in early 2019 – our two lives intersecting at a really opportune time for both of us. I had recently started dating one of his close friends, who, upon listening to some recently recorded demos of mine, excitedly shook me by the shoulders and nearly yelled, “you’ve GOT to meet my friend, Jordan. He’s going to want to make music with you.” I don’t remember it being a question once we met – we just clicked. We bonded over our love of the new-at-the-time Sharon Van Etten album Remind Me Tomorrow and Sheer Mag. We spent the following year driving to and from our friend Casey Romney’s recording studio in Ogden, UT every weekend working on what would eventually become our 2020 album No Woman Is The Sea. We were both in our late twenties, recently divorced, and navigating queer adulthood in the weird soup of Utah culture. We never ran out of things to talk about on those drives to the studio, and we were starting to learn each others’ creative language through the creation of that record.
In 2020, we spent a brief amount of time as involuntary roommates due to the pandemic. We did livestreams of the songs from No Woman Is the Sea as it never got to see a proper release show (release date of March 13th, 2020 – woof!). We stayed close friends through those following years as the world opened back up, regularly sharing meals and stories and song ideas. No Woman still felt so recent but we were starting to feel inspired by new things. We continued to pass ideas back and forth together until we realized we were sitting on what would become our 2023 album, In The Garden, By The Weeds. Where No Woman had been two individuals awkwardly feeling out the sounds and intention of the other, In The Garden was us beginning to lean into the world that we could create between the two of us. Limited by the nature of quarantine and self-isolating and sheepishly coming back into the routine of things post-2020, In The Garden was all created at our respective homes, with Jordan at the helm of all of the recording, production, and mixing. We put the album out in the summer of 2023 and sort of collapsed into the rest of the year.
When Jordan told me he was moving to a new country, I panicked. I felt like the only outcome to this information was the end of our creative partnership. So much of our process was just hanging out. I’d grown accustomed to long, lazy “working on music” Saturdays with Jordan where I’d show up in the morning with coffee and breakfast, we’d catch up for hours on the week’s happenings, and then maybe record some stuff if we felt like it. I couldn’t picture a world where we could do that from different countries. I started to feel self-conscious about my songs on their own – Jordan’s partnership had helped me love my art more than ever before – had shown me the endless possibilities of true collaboration. I didn’t know what I would do with my music if he wasn’t there to do it with me. He never wavered in his assuredness that we’d keep making music – that the very nature of how we made music (me writing a demo, throwing it his way to noodle on production, him throwing it back to me) would lend itself perfectly to long-distance collaboration due to technology being where it’s at. But I was skeptical.
So many of our conversations prior to and right after the move were around a sort of mantra of “things are going to be different, and we cannot expect them to be the same.” It became clear to us that we had to break apart the process and let it take a new shape. That if we held on to anything too tightly and didn’t let things change, then we’d be in more serious trouble. Our friendship was the priority after he landed in Osaka. It was important to us to let things breathe and give us both the room to see what our friendship needed.
You hear a lot about how in romantic partnerships you need to focus on yourself and your own needs in order to show up for the partnership. In my experience, this creative-platonic-friendship has held a level of intimacy and vulnerability that has out-paced most of my romantic relationships, and I realized that this was very true for the health of Jordan and I as creative collaborators as well. I focused on myself that summer of 2024. I wrote a lot. Most of the songs on If I Let It Quiet were partially written during this time. I wasn’t sure if Jordan and I would pick them up to work on together, but I was spiraling regularly about so many changes and writing has always been how I process the world. I took myself on a small solo tour to reconnect with my songs as my own. I needed to know I was enough on my own again before I could show up fully to what we make together.
Jordan and I continued to have weekly facetime hangouts where music wasn’t the priority, me catching him up on the chaos of my everyday life, him catching me up on settling into a new city/ country/language. Week by week, we figured out a new way to stay close, to stay friends. We were even tinkering on some new songs (Radio Player specifically, but others were starting to take shape). We kept it loose and talked about music really casually – not wanting any pressure of a song to have to release or a new album looming over us. When I booked Kilby Block Party for spring of 2025, I told Jordan about it with no expectation. He told me he wanted to come back to visit and play the show and I was thrilled. By the festival in May, I’d only had to go a year without seeing him in person. In between practices for the show with the rest of the band (Andrew Goldring on lead guitar, Ken Vallejos on drums, and Julie Boswell on bass), Jordan and I got to catch up on our in-person time. We cooked curries and watched Youtube essays on wrestling and read Ursula K. Leguin stories. We worked on song ideas and let ourselves speak it out loud that we were working on a new record. By the time he went back home to Osaka, we had a theme and a some-what baked sonic identity to the new songs, and knew what we wanted to spend the next 6 months working on.
We knew early on that Jordan shouldn’t have to do everything again on our new album like he had on In The Garden, but knowing who to bring in to mix and provide some production ideas was feeling tricky. Jordan and I have such an intense friendship that strongly influences the way we work together. But once we played live with Andrew and got to know him on a personal level, it was so clear that this was the right person to allow into our intense little friendship bubble we’d been building for years. Jordan was building the If I Let It Quiet world sonically using a lot of field recordings, attempting to make the space between us feel more real, present, small, and less vast than an ocean apart. Andrew speaks a language within audio engineering that places him firmly in the present moment, always seeking to understand and protect what’s already there. Working with Andrew on these songs allowed Jordan to do what Jordan does best as a producer, and it brought a new dynamic to our work together. It even made it worth finding meeting times that work for Salt Lake City, Nashville, and Osaka.
Making this record was really hard. We took a lot of big swings, explored new sounds and structures, trouble-shooted so much tech, wrote and re-wrote and re-recorded and re-recorded. It was exhausting. Especially coming at everything from different parts of different days due to the time difference. I’d step into my sweaty, hand-made vocal booth at the end of a long work day while Jordan was groggy and making coffee the next morning. He’d remote in and direct me, giving me notes, laughing in my headphones.
When we listened to the final mix of the final track early this year, we sat on our zoom call and smiled through tears at each other. We’ve always been proud of the music we’ve made together, but where it used to sound to us like two awkward teens trying not to step on each other, I think If I Let It Quiet feels like two people suddenly realizing they are fluent in each others’ language and having a full conversation after studying it for years. We wrote our parts alongside some of the biggest changes in our respective lives. The sound of a holiday parade chimes through Jordan’s downtown apartment window. A plane flies overhead as my footsteps crunch through my backyard alone. Voice notes of encouragement from loved ones snake in and out of the intro and transitions. My now-deceased old dog Townes snores through the outro.
If I Let It Quiet is an exploration of what it takes to quiet the noise of geographical and emotional distance in order to hear ourselves and the ones who see us. It’s a really special album to me because the subject matter is based in the fear of uncontrollable change, and the process of making it was the real-time acceptance and navigation of that uncontrollable change. It is both of and about mine and Jordan’s friendship. It is both about and how we let it change into something new. It is two people (and more) learning how to speak to each other again and again and again, through more than words, by first learning how to listen.
If I Let It Quiet is out now via Audio Antihero. For more information on Josaleigh Pollett visit https://linktr.ee/Brosaleigh
For The Rabbits 