Track-by-track guide: Josaleigh Pollett ~ If I Let It Quiet

Introduction by Tom Johnson

Despite having something of a wonky memory, I hold a strange knack for remembering exactly where I was when hearing a specific piece of music. It can and does go back years and years, passed houses I've forgotten the layout of, passed faces whose names have faded.

Today, while listening to Josaleigh Pollett's new album If I Let It Quiet, my mind drifted to her previous record, 2023's beautiful In The Garden, By The Weeds. In the memory, I'm in the passenger seat, being driven back along the road from the loch, where we'd just swam, back to home. The sky is gold and sweet, open windows let the fresh air in, limbs tingle from the aftermath of the cold water. Said album's opening track, 'YKWIM' bursts into life as the road curves and opens up ahead of us. Everything that's come before sits behind us.

I was thinking about that moment today, in a new version of the same life. This time, I'm listening to 'Escape Routes', the eighth song on If I Let It Quiet. "Everything fit for a minute, in the bright light," Pollett sings, as shuffling instrumentation bubbles away beneath her voice. The song soon bursts into life too, I watch big grey clouds gather on a new horizon.

I guess what I mean to say is that we carry songs with us. Or, as David Berman said, “songs build little rooms in time.” Pollett's songs are the kind to build rooms, they paint vividly and draw you in. There is light and shade, pockets of comfort and hiding places too.

I was thinking this as I read through the track-by-track we're sharing below, as I read her talk about her desire not to lose the sonic elements of inhabiting a space – "creaking floors, my dog snoring, burps and banter" – after her long-time collaborator Jordan Watko moved to Japan, entirely shifting the nature of their relationship and way-of-working.

Which makes If I Let It Quiet a transcontinental album, but one that still feels earthy and human, in spite of the technological building blocks it would have taken to bring it all together. It's a beautiful too, full of colour, sweeping and radiant and gripping in its messy, gnarly evocation of human endeavour. Warm blood fills its limbs. You'll find that warmth in different places to me, but you'll find plenty of it, I'm sure.

The album was released in full last week, and you can stream it now wherever you choose to do such things. When you find it, you can hit play, and then scroll down to read Josaleigh's notes on each and every one of its songs. The rooms are already built, these words add character to all of them.

Track guide written by Josaleigh Pollett

Shed Piano, Birds

When Jordan first moved away, we wanted to find a way to keep the sounds of our respective physical spaces in our music. Creating in the same room together has always been really important to us and we didn’t want to lose the sonic elements that come from that - creaking floors, my dog snoring, burps and banter. He suggested I carry my phone around while I was getting ready to record something more intentional just to pick up the noise of the space. This song is built off of my footsteps crunching in my backyard to my actual shed where I have an old out of tune piano. An airplane flies by that Jordan turned into a droning sound that carries the listener into the next track. We also used a lot of voice memos of unexplored song ideas, encouraging notes from friends, and my own voice memos I recorded after processing some therapy appointments during the confusing time right before and after Jordan moved away. I feel like this song does a good job replicating both the physical and the emotional environment that the rest of the album was made in. 

Cherry

I wrote this song about wanting to feel close to my brother, and about wanting to feel close to a lot of the men in my life in general. Exploring the emotional distance in familial relationships and the physical distance in my friendship with Jordan make up a lot of the lyrical and thematic elements of this record. I was thinking about how much pressure we place on blood relations to be this sort of gap closer in loving people and how it felt like eating something that doesn’t really nourish you. Food and eating and consuming and being nourished were on my mind. Andrew Goldring wrote such a beautiful harmony for this one which felt important to me to represent a sort of brotherly connection through a male voice, while also being gentle and delicate.

The Witness

One of those rare songs for me where I sit down and the lyrics just come pouring out. I didn’t edit these much between the initial writing of them and the final takes. I had just deleted my twitter account and ended a relationship where traditional gender roles were completely dismantled and it really opened up so much for me and how I view myself and wanted to be perceived by other people. Jordan and I struggled with this one a lot in structure and production though - we took it through a lot of different presentations. One where I was BELTING the choruses and trying to channel my inner Chappell Roan, which didn’t end up working for the song as a whole. When we were mixing we did end up bringing one of those big choruses back in at the end as sort of a weird, unhinged background thing snaking through it, which I love since the song is a little about multiple timelines. The hint of the song existing in a totally different way if we’d gone down a different path buried in the production.  

Bed of Quiet

A song about doubting your intuition and overthinking every possible thing. I remember sending an early voice memo of it to Jordan and saying “I think I wrote a pop punk song,” but when we facetimed a week later he said it was still stuck in his head and we needed to explore it. Chris Walla had sent this really cool old instrumental recording from around 2008/2010 that he had never used, and Jordan really latched onto it as inspiration for what became the production on this song. It’s also the only song that Jordan sings on - the little post-chorus high-pitched voice is him and I’m so obsessed with it. We had so much fun adding the beefy guitars and drums on this one with Andrew Goldring, too. 

Like a River

When I stopped drinking in late 2023, something that was unexpected and very overwhelming to navigate was just how noisy my inner thoughts were. I tried my hand at a lot of different meditative practices to try to quiet a lot of the noise I was wading through. I remember staying up late one night trying to get my brain to shut the fuck up and accidentally wound myself up into a weird anxious internet rabbit hole reading about Paul Simon’s song Peace Like a River, which he took from this old Christian hymn and was talking about what an oxymoron it is. How rivers aren’t peaceful, they are violent and powerful, changing the land and creating life and death. I stole a line from the Paul Simon song for the outro. One of my favorite things about this song is some of the percussive elements Jordan created out of my bonking my head against the microphone on the scratch track that felt so much like bongos.

Repeating

One of the first songs written for this record before we ever knew it would be on a record. Jordan and I started playing around with this one before he moved to Japan in early 2024. I wrote it about being afraid of myself and my patterns, and about how laying on the floor is one of my favorite things to do when I’m in doubt. 

Second Guesser

I lovingly call this song my e.coli song! In the summer of 2023 I think I got e.coli in a lake called Pine View in my hometown of Ogden, Utah. I thought I was in a much shallower place when I hopped off my paddle board and ended up swallowing a lot of water. In the weeks that followed, I felt a level of non-stop nausea that I could not escape. I was pretty depressed and trying to navigate some helplessness and big life changes already, and the physical sickness on top of it made everything feel astronomical. It’s the first song I’ve ever written where I put someone’s name in the lyrics - Natalee is my stepmom and her pep talks have saved me so many times in my life. Hal Johnson also recorded some incredible cello on this track that really captured the intense feelings I was feeling at the time. 

Escape Routes

Another I had started writing before Jordan moved, and was the first song I shared with Jordan where he said he could see himself in the lyrics. This meant a lot to me as I’d written it in a time where my own emotions were threatening to make his move harder on him, and I wanted to put myself more fully in his shoes and look at how wild it must feel to be getting ready to move your whole life to a new country where you don’t speak the language. This song is really special to me as it felt like one of the first I wrote for both of us. 

Radio Player

A song about seeing the movie Poltergiest at much too early of an age, and how it sometimes feels interwoven with my own young memories of events. I’d shown Jordan the idea of this song around Christmas of 2023. I was laying on the floor of his house at the time, and he was noodling with a drum machine on the couch. He kept playing the same loop and telling me he was feeling it for the song. I didn’t quite see the vision yet, but when Jordan says he’s feeling something for a song, I always trust him. This was our full dive into working with Andrew Goldring on a song and I love how immense it ended up feeling.

We All Got It Right

I started writing this song while riding my bike home from the bar and feeling a lot of admiration for a woman who I had only known as someone I had an ex in common with. I was thinking about how strange it is that so many of us, especially if you’ve lived in a small city for a long time, hold these narratives and understandings of each other that are only based on someone else’s perception of them. I wanted to imagine a world where when you tell someone that you have an ex in common, you only have kind things to say. That’s so rarely the case, so I made up a new timeline for it. Where we all got everything right, because like Jason Molina said, the real truth about it is that no one gets it right. Ken Vallejos brought big incredible drums to this one that make me want to kool-aid man through a wall. 

Yasaka, Natsu

Similar to Shed Piano, Birds representing my physical space here in Salt Lake City, this track is more representative of Jordan’s physical space his first full summer living in Japan. He was recording a lot of environmental sounds. Japan has a lot of celebrations bringing in seasons and reasons for parades. A lot of the sounds on this one come from people in the street celebrating, his partner’s family laughing in a rental car, and just the general feeling of where he was during this time. It felt important to us to include more focused instrumental pieces on this album since it felt so representative of both Jordan and I and it’s no longer just about what I have to say lyrically. 

Tacit

Probably my favorite track on the album, simply because of all of them it feels the most like both Jordan and myself. It partially originated during my January of 2025 adventure to write a song every day for a month. The prompt was “destroy your favorite thing.” I had so much worry and fear about Jordan moving away that our creative partnership wouldn’t be able to withstand the distance. Lyrically this song is about expressing that fear and knowing that holding onto it without allowing it to change would certainly be the death of it, but the magic to me comes from the fact that the creation and writing of the song was Jordan and I changing our creative partnership into something new. Allowing it to grow into something so deeply different than the sum of its parts. Something so wholly both of us. We were both in tears when we listened to the final mix on this one. It still makes me cry. Especially now as it ends with the subtle snores of my noisy old man dog Townes, who passed away in between us finishing the album and releasing it. His snores and barks and twinkle toes on the tile were a near-constant through the creation of the album.

If I Let It Quiet is out now, via Audio Antihero

And available to buy, via Bandcamp

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