By Josaleigh Pollett’s latest album, entitled IF I LET IT QUIET, is now available everywhere you get your music. In order to understand the inspiration behind the record and how it came together after the release of their 2023 project, we sat down with Pollett to discuss their experience.
Your latest single draws on childhood fears and nostalgia. I was wondering what made you visit that emotional space and what you can talk about if that’s something you plan on visiting more across the whole record that you’ll be releasing.
Josaleigh Pollett: Ooh, I love this question. Definitely. Yeah. “Radio Player” was an exploration of some childhood nostalgia memory-places. I started writing it because my dad and I had taken a drive up to a town in Utah called Logan, where we had lived when I was a kid. We were, like, “We should drive by our old house; that would be a fun activity to do.” And we did. It had been completely leveled, completely taken down. But all the other houses were still around it and it looked very spooky. There was also this little cabin thing, like a shed in the backyard when I grew up there, and it was still there, but the whole house was gone, and it was just really surreal.
Yeah, it was just a really surreal experience of looking at this space where you could remember being somewhere as a kid, but it’s completely no longer a structure anymore. But then this spooky place was back there, and I was just exploring a lot of different themes, like nostalgia as a comfort place, kind of losing yourself in nostalgia a little bit, so that’s kind of the world I was living in when I started writing that song. And it’s interesting, because I think that it’s one of the few places on the album where I really lean on nostalgia as, like, the comfort escape. But I do think that the themes that kind of pull through the record are using lots of different things as escapes and lots of different avenues through kind of distancing yourself from the thing you need to be feeling or thinking about and lots of distractions. So I think that nostalgia is for sure one of those distractions that we just really explored on “Radio Player,” and not too much on any of the other songs.
When talking about the record and the process of making it, was it escapism? That process was something that you knew you wanted to cover going into it, or did that kind of unfold naturally as you were experiencing writing and everything?
JP: That’s a really good question. I think that it kind of naturally evolved a little bit. A lot of the subject matter of this record specifically is Jordan and me. Jordan’s my producer and my best friend, and we write songs together, and it was us kind of exploring this really big new phase in our creative partnership, which was him moving 8,000 miles away to Japan and us kind of figuring out this totally new way to work on stuff together. It was a really emotional experience for me, because we’d gotten so close and we had this very set routine when he was here. So then it was that drastic change that is going to be so uncomfortable and come with so many weird realizations, and it’s grief for sure. Even though he would tell me all the time before he was leaving, he’s, like, “I’m not dying. Everything’s fine. We live in the perfect time for me to be far away,” It [was still] really this very present grief in my life at the time.
Writing the album together was kind of us processing a lot of these feelings out loud and navigating some of this uncertainty and a lot of this distress that was coming with this really big change. And I think that anytime you’re faced with that big level of a distressing event or some sort of big grief, the normal human reaction is to be, like, “How can I distract myself from this immediately?” Like, how many routes can I go to just really put distance between myself and whatever the thing is that’s happening? And so I think it kind of naturally evolved with a lot of those themes, because it was me trying to kind of navigate [feeling like] I’m maybe not feeling the thing I should be feeling and maybe leaning on these bigger distractions or not really processing the thing as it comes up in the right way. So it was not really an intentional thing. When we sat down to write it, neither of us were, like, “Here’s what the album’s about.” It was kind of just, like, I guess we write through these feelings and we see what happens.
What was it like working through that process, even just in a creative sense, and how did your routines look different from each other when working on this once you were separated?
JP: It was so drastically different. But because both of us have so much dedication to it, we were able to find a new routine for it pretty quickly. Before Jordan moved away, we kind of had this set routine where he would come over on a Saturday morning, and we would make breakfast together, and we’d talk for, like, several hours about non-music-related stuff. It was just a friend catch-up. We would just talk about our weeks, talk about our childhoods and our lives and everything, and just bond over everything we possibly could. We were just really close friends. And then we would work on music, and we’d tinker on things; it didn’t always need to be part of the hangout, but it always ended up being part of the hangout. We’d spend so much time building this comfy, open, vulnerable place before we even started working on music. That was my biggest fear when he moved away. How do we build that? How do we keep that going while we’re so far away from each other? But thankfully, through a lot of dedication and a lot of talking through everything, I think we’ve been able to find a way to still virtually create a lot of that same vulnerability. I think so much of that came from setting an intention; we do a weekly FaceTime. We’ve basically done FaceTime every single week except for when he was here visiting since he moved away over two years ago now. So we actually probably see each other with more frequency now then we did even when he was here, because it was, like, we’d hang out most Saturdays, but sometimes a few weeks would go in between. It was never, like, “Oh, this is the sure plan every week.” Now Jordan is on my calendar every Tuesday or Wednesday night.
It was really tricky at first to adjust that big full day of a hang out with your friend into a couple hours of FaceTime, but I think [it helped] just knowing that we were both really committed to keeping the creative partnership and the friendship alive and we were both really committed to making sure we prioritized it even after he had moved and after we had so much distance between us. It helped me know that there was a lot of vulnerability there still, and commitment there. So it was, like, we didn’t have to have a seven-hour-long hang today for me to know that this person loves me and cares about our project. And that was a really reassuring place for us to get to. It helped that right after he moved, we would do our Zoom hangs and not talk about music for a while. When he first moved away, it was, like,we were prioritizing the friendship. We were just talking about our week for a while, and it kind of naturally bubbled up into working on music again. But I think it was because we really just prioritized our friendship first. We were able to find a new routine surprisingly quickly. If you would have told me right after he told me he was moving away that things would be fine, and in this consistent routine, I probably would have just been, like, “No, there’s no way, it’s never going to be the same,” but it’s all fine. One of the great joys of my life is being in this creative partnership with Jordan, and it’s because it’s such a fulfilling and comforting friendship to me. I feel so crazy lucky about it all the time. I’m just, like, “People have lots of great true loves in their lives.” And I’m, like, this platonic creative partnership is one of the truest loves of my life. And he’s stuck with me wherever he moves. Platonic love is so underrated.
What is it like taking that vulnerability that you have with each other and that comfort in the music and then translating that to the audience? And is there any hesitation with some of that vulnerability or how do you balance it?
JP: I think there’s probably always a little bit of fear when it comes time to share the music that we’ve created in our little friendship bubble with an audience and with the outer world, because I think we can get so involved in our little sphere. Well, we love it, and we feel that it’s very representative of us. But, like, we don’t know how it’s going to translate to a live show or to how people are going to listen to this. Especially with this record, because we started working on it and were, like, “I don’t think it’s going to be a record. It could be just, like, a single or an EP, or maybe it’s not a record. Maybe it’s just—we take some years off and we work on stuff together just for us.” I feel, like, there wasn’t a lot of structure in it for the first little while until there was, so we were getting a little bit weirder with it. There are some vocal takes on the record where I was glad that we did that because I was on, like, another planet that day of just singing in a way where I’m, like, “Because this isn’t going to end up anywhere, we’re just playing around with some stuff,” and then it ends up on the record.
I think there’s always that little bit of fear that comes with it. But I also think that that’s one of my favorite parts of making music in general; it’s just so vulnerable. It’s so integral to who you are as a person. It’s just, like, saying, “Here is this thing that’s so implicitly me, and I’m going to give it to these listeners or whoever wants to listen to it and hope that they can take something away from it that’s meaningful to them or that moves them in some sort of way.” Whether they do or not, I have no control over that at all. I feel, like, any sort of connection that people can have to music is always just going to be a cherry on top of everything else. It’s so important, but it’s also, like, you can’t rely on it, because you don’t have any control over that piece. So it’s for sure a scary moment to translate that vulnerability from writing something, especially [something] this intimate and especially [since] Jordan is very good at being behind the scenes and likes to be a little quieter. And now we’ve made this album, and it’s about our friendship, and I’m going to post pictures of us all over the internet to promote it. And he’s, like, “All right, that’s a little bit scary, but it’s going to be OK.” It’s always a little terrifying, but it’s, like, this balance of wanting to be real and representing what you’ve created in a way that’s relatable … Jordan and I have always just been, like, as long as we’re making something that we’re proud of, whatever else happens is cool. We’re never banking on anything else to happen.
When I was listening to some of the music, I got the impression that you have a strong sense of atmosphere in your work. When you’re writing a song, what comes up for you first, whether it’s the images of the songs, the sounds, or even the emotions?
JP: I think that for songs that Jordan and I write together, because we approach them kind of piece by piece and then a little bit together … I would imagine he would have a very different answer to this than I would … because the way we’ve talked about some of our music sometimes is, like, I create the furniture and the people that are in a room, and Jordan is creating the room that they’re in, and he’s painting the walls, and he’s kind of creating that atmospheric piece. It’s sometimes really hard for me to think about the atmosphere when I’m first starting to write a song. I’ll know what the feeling is like emotionally that I’m trying to convey; I feel, like, it’s usually pretty straightforward, where I can identify what that feeling is, or at least a glimmer of it, and try and pull that through into the lyrics and the melody that I’m working on. Then there’s so much trust with Jordan to just be able to say, “I know you’re going to be able to pull through so much of this atmosphere,” and the longer we work together, the more I think we’re able to kind of understand what the other was going for, in a lot of senses. I think when we first started recording music together, it would just be, like, “Huh? I envisioned something totally different for that song. But I love what you’ve done.” And now it’s very much like we speak the same language about stuff, where it’s, like, you totally understood what I was thinking of when I was feeling whatever this song would be. And you built this atmosphere around it.
So I would say that atmosphere is usually something that is a little bit in the back of my mind, but I’m a little bit more focused on, like, the heart of a song when I’m starting to build it. And then Jordan and I are kind of building the muscles and the tendons, and he’s putting, like, all of the rest of the little details on it together.
Is there a song that you felt changed the most from the way you first interpreted it, but then you loved the most how it came out when working together?
JP: Everything on the new record felt very aligned from the get-go. I will say that when we started writing the last song on the record, it was called “Tacit.” It was a very quiet, meek acoustic guitar. I was just, like, “This will be the most DIY-sounding phone recording thing. I’m not really sure what else this could need.” It felt very complete in a way, but also very incomplete. When I brought it to Jordan, I was just, like, “I don’t know what this is, but I also don’t want to write a chorus for it. I don’t want to write a bridge. I feel like I said what I needed to in this part of the song.” And then through his part of writing that song, he created this big, huge explosion of noise and sound. There’s so much happening, and it’s chaotic and beautiful and so energetic. I never would have imagined something like that for a song like that. And we had kind of started tinkering with it when he was visiting the States early last spring, and we were sitting on the couch together and he was, like, “I think this is kind of what I’m feeling for this” … It just immediately clicked for me where I was just, like, “Oh, of course, I wouldn’t have thought that this needed this sort of outro, but now that I hear it I can’t imagine it another way.” And it feels so perfect. It feels like this really lovely balance between what I bring to a song and what Jordan brings to a song, which I just think is so beautiful, especially at the end of an album that feels so close to both of us as people. When we first listened to the mix of “Tacit,” both of us were crying, and we’re both just, like, “This just feels so much like both of us.”
I think before when we would listen to our songs back, it’d be, like, “Oh yeah, you can hear so clearly this is this Josie song, and this is how Jordan married his stuff to it.” It doesn’t feel disjointed, but it does definitely feel like two separate things. And there were so many more moments on this album where we’re, like, “Oh, this is just both of us together.” This feels so good to be able to point to it and just be, like, “This is what it sounds like when we’re making music out of both of us and not totally separately.” It’s this whole new thing, which I just love.
“Radio Player” blends together electronic textures with deeply organic moments. And kind of in a similar vein, I was wondering how you balance these two sonic elements that can be completely different, yet work together so well.
JP: Yeah, that’s kind of been a feature of a lot of the music Jordan and I have made together. Jordan is really inspired by so much electronic music, but also has a deep reverence and respect for organic acoustic sounds. I remember one of our first times in any studio together; I think we’d only been hanging out for, like, a couple of months. He was, like, finding interesting sounds that he could then just record, digitize, and fuck up to make really cool. And it was, like, everything in his world of electronic music still had this basis of living in the organic world. It felt really important to him to be able to say this beat still originated from a real instrument and something dependent on the room that we were in. That’s really felt so integral as far as all of our processes have gone.
Even when we’re doing something that’s full-blown AutoTune, we’re trying to do it in this way that feels really human and really connected to sounds actual people could make, utilizing the tools that we have for it through Ableton and through all of our different synthesizers and things … But making sure we’re leaning into the uniqueness that comes with human sound. On the track “Like A River,” there’s percussion in the song that comes from me bonking my head on the microphone before I was doing a vocal take, and Jordan just sampled that and created bongo noise out of it, basically … I like to put myself in the listener’s shoes with a lot of that stuff where if I were to hear it, I would just be, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s got to be a marimba or just some digital drum thing.” And nope, that is a very odd, physical, organic sound that happened in the room. Or there are lots of leaves crunching; Jordan got a little field recorder for a lot of the sounds on this record. So there’s so much environmental noise and sound, especially him moving to a big city in Japan. He’s surrounded by so many more new noises than he had been before. So being able to take part of his environment and then turn it into his art and our art together was really important to us from the get-go.
I know you talked about how one of the songs was about you going back to your childhood home and it being kind of destroyed in a way, or changed. I feel like a lot of your music is rooted in memory, and I was wondering how reliable you feel memory is as a storytelling tool when you’re writing your music.
JP: I feel like memory is something that’s so fascinating to me, not even as an artist but just as a person, because I feel like the older I get, especially, the more I feel like everyone’s memory is so unreliable. Everyone has such a different experience of anything. You could have one factual event that happens and then thousands of different accounts of how that experience happened to the people in the room. It’s so dependent on feeling and emotion and the temperature in the room. So many things can drastically change how you remember something, and the way that we hold memory is such an intensely weird biological, and also emotional, experience too. Even just the other week I was walking in Chicago with a friend, and I’d never been to the city before. I turned around a corner, and I was hit by this scent in the air that transported me back to being 17 in this very specific memory that I hadn’t thought about since, like, 10 years prior. I just think that that’s such an amazing place, and, like, it’s so ripe with creative inspiration to me, because I think you can take the same event that happens in your life or the same circumstance and look at it through so many different perspectives. And for “Radio Player,” specifically, I was thinking about other people’s memories that were in my family at the time, or people on the outskirts of that, and thinking about, like, oh, well, this was my experience, but imagine how different it was for this person, or from this view in this different room, or this different age, or anything like that. And I just think it feels like a place you could explore forever and just never run out of perspectives. If you’re digging through memory, it’s just a treasure trove of creative inspiration to me.
I’ve always really loved having a first-person narrative in songs, but I also think that that can really reduce a lot of the relatability to music. And I think the more perspectives you explore as a songwriter, the more I just feel like it gives you so many opportunities to explore things within yourself, but also so much more for a listener to grab on to as well. It’s not so limited to the truth or facts. Anything can happen in a song … I can make anything happen in this world. I have total control over this. I think it’s so important to explore those sorts of things, because our own experience of a situation or our own understanding of how something went down can be so limiting. I think it’s a really beautiful and helpful place to explore other perspectives, and it helps with creating empathy and creating just a whole new way to look at things.
How do you approach performing a song live, and how does that differ from when you’re building it out for that live environment?
JP: It has changed a lot over the last few years. For a lot of my music career, it was just me and an acoustic guitar. Then through a few different iterations of the band, I got an electric guitar, and I’ve been, like, slowly dabbling with pedals, and when Jordan was still here and we were just playing as a duo a lot is when I first started; the two of us were building out our live set and trying to play around with, like, “OK, a lot of what the music that we create relies on is electronic drums and electronic bass. So how do we present that in a live setting where it doesn’t feel boring or repetitive, and how do we create this in a way that feels really fun for an audience to engage with?” And not that there’s anything wrong with getting on stage and pressing play on a laptop, but that’s not what we wanted to do. We wanted to create this world that felt very engaging, with us being able to perform these songs in a new way. So a lot of the music we made, especially from our last album, IN THE GARDEN BY THE WEEDS, when we were writing it, was during the pandemic, so we were years away from thinking about how we would perform these songs, because live shows weren’t even on the table. So it was, like, the sky is the limit on what we’re putting into these digital worlds because we could do whatever we want, and it doesn’t matter how we perform them live. And then when we started performing them live, we basically had to rewrite everything for a live setting where it was just, like, “OK, this is going to be very different. We’re going to drop this part. We’re going to approach it this way or throw out a bunch of stuff and just do this piece acoustically.” So it was a lot of reimagining that work.
I think for this new album, we knew we wanted to tour it. We knew we wanted to play. We played Kilby Block Party last summer with a full band, and we had so much fun with that. And we were, like, the first time we’d done that in a lot of years. So as we dig into writing this new record, let’s bring in more live drums. Let’s really think about how we could translate this to a live show a little bit better. I still am a little intimidated by it. We’ll see how Jordan is kind of tinkering away at our live set now, and I think it’ll be really fun to see how we’re able to pull it together. I think it’ll still be a really unique experience. And even right after he moved away, I was feeling like I’d been spoiled by playing with Jordan for a while because I was, like, “You just bring all these rich, atmospheric pieces to the work.” I felt like I couldn’t perform by myself anymore. It’s not the same. It’s not enough.
I started playing around with pedals and things like that and trying to create these, like, looping atmospheres and cool sonic textures to where it’s, like, not me and an acoustic guitar, really raw or dry. And it’s not me and Jordan, but something in between there. I think that’s been a really fun way to approach live shows with both of us … To be able to say, “We did some weird shit on the album; we’re not going to be able to recreate that perfectly, but how can we do this in a way that’s fun to see and fun to play?” And also not impossible.
I know you’ve performed alongside artists like St. Vincent, and I was wondering how those live experiences shaped your own performance identity as you kind of grew into your own voice as an artist, separate from opening for artists?
JP: It’s funny, because I feel like this is something that kind of grows and changes with every album, especially playing alongside artists like St. Vincent or Deep Sea Diver, who are these incredibly confident, badass women that just like to get up on stage and shred and bring this whole incredible persona to their live performance. I’m so inspired by that. And I also am not that.
I feel like building out my confidence and figuring out who I am on a stage feels like it’s kind of a lifelong project, but I do feel like it changes a little bit every time we work on a new album. So even right now, thinking about how I’m preparing for tour, I’m, like, “OK, I don’t want to dress the way that I did when we were playing shows on the last tour or the last album, and I want it to feel connected to the theme,” but it almost feels easier to give it this character and kind of persona a little bit. I think that sometimes that can be a little bit of an escape or a mask in a way where I can be a little bit more confident if I’m a little bit somebody else on the stage. Performing this thing and having those artists to look up to has been such a huge inspiration in those things of just, like, this is not just, like, me as a person presenting my music in a live setting. This is part of the art. This is why the performance itself is so important … How you deliver it and how, as somebody that goes to a lot of shows, when somebody is considering how they’re performing it, to be part of the album itself and part of that experience and that world that they’re building, it’s so fun and it makes it so memorable as an audience member to be a part of that and to experience that. I’m kind of always building, trying to build confidence towards that. I’ve been watching so many videos of Hayley Williams on her new tour, and I think she’s one of the greatest performers. Her stage presence is so impressive to me. I’m just, like, “How can I try and channel a little bit more of this in my own stage presence?” … It’s so drastically different. But I’m, like, “I think I could maybe dance and yell a little bit better.”
What has it been like being a part of an independent label, and how do you feel that’s kind of shaped your artistic freedom or the direction that you take with releasing your music?
JP: Before this last album cycle and before “Radio Player,” when I started working with Audio Antihero before that, I had only worked with my friend’s record store, and they were kind of like a label, but not really. They helped me put the record out on vinyl. But as far as creative decisions or anything like that, they just trusted me and were just, like, “You do your thing,” and it was, like, a pretty low-support, low-touch kind of a thing. I was very much in my own little world, like, I do all of this myself, and, like, I send every promo email, and I do everything on my own. Then to start working with Audio Antihero and Jamie, specifically, it’s been amazing. It’s funny, because I think that they think that it’s, like, a super low-touch, super-DIY thing. But for me, going from, like, nothing to this, I’m just, like, “Are you kidding?” This is the luxury queen treatment. Having somebody else to pay attention to these things and be prioritizing them and caring about them. I do feel like it’s really given me a level of pride and confidence. I was already so proud of the music that Jordan and I made together, but hearing from somebody else that this is good and it’s worth trying to, like, get out there and try to make people listen has been a really welcome little ego boost almost in a way of just, like, what we’re doing is special and important and other people should hear it, not just us. I’ve been so delighted with it, too, just because Jamie is just one of my favorite people and has been via the internet for several years. To be able to just feel really value-aligned with somebody I’m working with from a label perspective, and also just somebody so attentive and funny and caring about their artists … I know Jamie just cares about the artists that they support more than anything in the world. It feels really special to be a part of.
If you could describe your upcoming album in one image or one scene, what do you think the album looks like?
JP: A good question and a really hard one. I think an image that came up a lot through writing it and through the production of it was always just a map of something, especially with navigating a lot of the distance between Jordan and me with the physical distance and emotional distance that comes with transition and change. It kept feeling like we were wishing we had some sort of map for things and wishing there was just some easy way to get there. You go this way, and you take a left, and it’s normal, and it’ll all be fine when you get there. So much of this process has just been, like, we don’t know anything actually. And we won’t know until we just show up and try. It’s so hard to say one thing, but it’s the map and also no map.
Looking ahead, what do you feel the most excited about, either with this music that’s coming out or with what you want to make next?
JP: I am so filled to the brim with excitement; we’ve been working on this record for the last couple years. It’s been done for three or four months now. So just to be able to start the process of putting it out into the world and letting other people hear it, I’m so excited. I think I’m most excited for touring, because being so physically far away from Jordan and from my best friend for so long is just a wild experience. So to go from that to you’re going to be trapped in a van with me for two weeks, it’s so good. I think part of what we’re learning about this long-distance friendship is, like, OK, when we do see each other, it has to be highly concentrated to, like, make up for how much time we spend apart now. When he was here last year, it was, like, you were here in my house for a month and we were cooking dinner every night, and we were watching YouTube videos every day, like, we were together. So I’m really excited for that, because last year was such a delightful experience to have him back here visiting. So to be able to go on this tour and build out the tour with him, because I’ve done very little touring especially, I’ve only toured solo. So getting to do this with the band will just be this whole new experience, and getting to share that experience with my best friend … I can’t even believe it. So it’s all very exciting to me.
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