Josaleigh Pollett: Confronting The Static
Roll the dial on your old radio, between the stations, you’re always much closer to static than you think. How easy it is to dip out of reality and fall headfirst into the static. And what about the TV channels you never had as a kid? The white noise is almost blinding in the dark, and if you look long enough, you could swear shapes were moving there…
Listen to the new single ‘Radio Player’ by Josaleigh Pollett – but don’t look into the light.
Image Credit: PJ Guinto.
In December 2024, we spoke to Salt Lake City artist Josaleigh Pollett, who was visiting the UK for the very first time to play their first international gig in Brighton. Prior to her set, we spoke about all four of her records, including 2020’s ‘No Woman Is The Sea’ and their last album ‘In The Garden, By The Weeds’, of which songs from both made up their solo set at The Hope and Ruin.
All through January this year, Josaleigh wrote and demoed a track every day based on prompts from internet friends, releasing this as a collection called ‘bro’s bad january’. In May, Pollett put a band together to open the Mountain Stage at Kilby Block Party, a festival in Salt Lake City headlined this year by New Order, Beach House, Weezer and Justice. The same band recorded a three-song set for Archive Recordings during their time together in May, released in August. Always immersed in new music, Josaleigh has also kept up their playlist ‘weekly brosaleigh’, with a rotation of new songs every Monday.
Behind the scenes, Josaleigh has continued working with his songwriting and production partner Jordan Watko who has been teamed up with Pollett since ‘No Woman Is The Sea’. At the end of our conversation in December, Josaleigh said of their next album together:
“It’s still in its very early stages. I would say I’ve spent this whole year writing a ton, and this is like the fun part where Jordan and I kind of put all of the acoustic demos and song ideas that I’ve put together and see what speaks to Jordan. And he gets to listen through and say like, ‘Ooo ok, I like this! I can do something with this!’ So it’s kind of just this dissecting and interrogating different ideas in a phase.”
‘Radio Player’ is the first music from the duo’s forthcoming new album. And in the week of Halloween, what could be more frightening than seeing what lurks in the white noise?
‘Radio Player, I fell asleep…’
‘Radio Player’ begins in the throes of falling into the static. Opening your eyes, you’re in a world you barely recognise, early musical memories flash by. ‘Drums in the basement, turn up the TV.’ My drums lived in my bedroom for the first two years - I had to stop playing by 7pm. The thought of Josaleigh Pollett singing in their sleep is a palpable one. This is a musician that has lived and breathed the art for so long, through parental osmosis and the community they’ve built around them, of course she sang in her sleep.
‘Radio Player, do you listen to me?’
The static dream continues to a childhood home. Like their previous album, Jordan Watko imbues the track with a mechanical and whirring electronica. Multiple rhythms cleverly existing at once as if to conjure the environment over the track like a sound effect in a 1980’s film. A loose inspiration to ‘Radio Player’ is the 1982 horror ‘Poltergeist’, brought to the fore by Pollett and photographer PJ Guinto for this single’s artwork.
The drones beneath Pollett’s vocal embody the buried dread in their lyric, ‘If the guy next door was the kid from before, now he’s big and we better run quick.’ Like smells, the feeling of dread is pervasive in memory. A brief reprieve arrives in an acoustic interlude, a glimpse of this track’s genesis – most Josaleigh Pollett songs begin acoustically.
On their previous records, this is when Pollett would pass the song to Jordan Watko. But for ‘Radio Player’, the pair introduced Andrew Goldring to their sound, who previously mastered ‘No Woman Is The Sea’ and ‘In The Garden, By The Weeds’. For this single, Andrew brings in additional guitar and live drum parts, the latter especially a complement to Watko’s programming, integrated into the production by Jordan as you hear them here.
Image Credit: PJ Guinto.
‘Memory is a fickle thing when you cope with the damage like us.’ Memory is a torment, Josaleigh’s voice breathes ‘Radio, radio,’ like a haunt calling out from the void. And when your defences are down, and the house is dark, the only light comes from the static emanating from the wooden furniture in the corner of the room. The TV, too far away to turn off, becomes a focal draw.
‘When I fell asleep it was dark, now a light is coming from the TV…’
The drums pick up like a hunter searching for prey, going from room to room, stalking down the hallway, ‘The clock stopped blinkin’ at four, and a wonderful light tries to open the door.’ Vulnerability might’ve caught out this songwriter in years past, and while good memories are sweet, bad memories are detrimental. Radio’s final verse is the most telling of all, because what’s worse than a bad memory is a bad memory trying to pass itself off as something loving and vital, yet this songwriter is wiser now:
‘But I put my back into it, and a heart inside is gleaming, and I hear it say it loves me, but it wants me to stay dreaming.’ The trio’s music grows more intense as the door shakes from its hinges, until-
‘Radio Player’ ends jolting up from the sofa in a cold sweat. Looking around, the room is as it was, unchanged. And the TV? Switched off, unplugged, and rolled on its castors outside. Safe for now, until the sequel.
Continue reading for our Q&A with Josaleigh Pollett. We talk about the writing of ‘Radio Player’, adjusting to new songwriting parameters with Jordan Watko and introducing Andrew Goldring into the process. We also talk about ‘Poltergeist’, performing at Kilby Block Party and knowing when they’ve got the perfect vocal take. All this and more below!
Image Credit: PJ Guinto.
1. 'Radio Player' is your first new music since releasing your last album in 2023. Did this song begin collaboratively or was it a sole idea in the beginning?
Like most of my collaborations with Jordan, the initial idea for Radio Player began as something I was noodling on with my acoustic guitar and a simple melody. The line “Radio Player, I fell asleep,” was all I had for a few weeks and I just kept working at it until I had a few verses. Once it had some additional structure, I shared it with Jordan. It was Christmas of 2023 and he was still living in Salt Lake. I’d shown him the idea and 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 Radio Player. I didn’t quite see the vision yet, but that loop has stayed integral to every iteration of this song we’ve been building slowly over the last year and a half. It comes in at 1:00 into the track.
2. You had to tweak your process of songwriting with your creative partner Jordan Watko - how did you adjust to the distance between you both when writing this new material?
When Jordan moved in early 2024, I was an absolute wreck. So much of my sense of self was tangled into the music we create together, and I couldn’t separate my process from our process anymore. There was a lot of grief over the change and I was NOT handling it well. I was afraid that we wouldn’t be able to find our rhythm in the distance. Throughout the move, we had so many conversations around not holding anything too tightly. That the most painful part would come from expecting things to stay the same. All we could do was nurture ourselves as individuals, and hopefully be able to lean into the difficulty of writing together from two very different parts of the world with 14 hours between us.
It wasn’t necessarily an intentional step back from music, but we did not rush anything after he moved. I spent time focusing on my solo live set and took it on my first lil’ tour last summer, and he focused on getting settled in a new country with his partner. We prioritized “hanging out” once a week on facetime, but music was never the priority - just our friendship. Just talking through change and grief and adjusting. There were snippets of things we worked on, but never with any sort of intention behind them for a new project. The reason I think our writing process has always worked so well together is because Jordan and I are friends first before we are bandmates. Music brought us our friendship, but the relationship always takes priority over creating anything. And the magic of having an intentional friendship between two creative people that can’t help but always be working on new music is that music tends to naturally come into the conversation. Before I knew it, we were in a groove of working on new songs again in a new way.
Image Credit: PJ Guinto.
3. Like you, I'd seen Poltergeist far too young. What sparked the idea for using that experience to help inspire this song?
When I started writing Radio Player, it didn’t have any references to the TV light/static for several months. Jordan and I had some really cool ideas for it, but it continued to feel unfinished for about a year. It had a lot of different lyrical outros for a while, but every time I thought I had it, it just wasn’t right. Early this year, I noticed that every time I sat down to work on the song, it felt like I was seeing the memories it was about through this pink, glowing, gooey light. I realized the song was existing at this intersection of memory of things that had actually happened, things that were from this and other movies, and different perspectives from other people who were present in my childhood. I think Poltergeist is such a beautiful film about how parents love their children. How parents are flawed but trying, and would literally climb through ectoplasm covered goo and face monstrous horrors to save their children. Radio Player is a song about protection and memory and addiction and the routes we take to protect ourselves, especially when we’re children, and since I started writing it, it always just felt like it was of that pink and gooey world.
4. As well as yourself and Jordan, 'Radio Player' also features Andrew Goldring. What was his role in this track? How did you first meet him?
Andrew Goldring is an incredibly talented musician, songwriter, and sound engineer. Though he’s currently based in Nashville, Andrew and I are both from Salt Lake City. We’ve run in similar musical circles for most of our lives, but I think our first meeting was in 2019 when I opened for his Fluorescent Memories album release show. I was so impressed by his songwriting immediately, and just became a huge fan. I had the opportunity to work with him in a professional sense when he mastered our 2020 album, No Woman is The Sea, then had him master ITG, BTW as well. In late 2024, he temporarily moved back to SLC and I jumped at the opportunity to enrol him in the project for our live performance at Kilby Block Party. I just admired him so much and had always wanted to work with him in different ways. That experience of the live band was so incredible that when Jordan and I hit our ceiling with what we thought we could do on Radio Player, we decided to bring Andrew on just to get his perspective.
Since Jordan and I started working on this current project, it’s been a priority for us to not approach it the same way as In The Garden. We took an incredibly isolated approach on ITG, BTW, and while we really loved making that record, it was a TON of work to expect from just Jordan to be the audio engineer, the producer, the mixing engineer, etc. We wanted to grow our sound organically and bring someone in who could help Jordan improve his production. I am lucky that my partnership with Jordan grows and challenges me as a songwriter - he can provide feedback and direction that I learn so much from with every project. But on his side of things, I’m not a technical audio engineer and there are only so many ways I can provide him with the same sort of feedback and challenge that helps him grow. We decided almost immediately when we started getting into our groove again that we wanted someone else to work with us on this next project - to stretch us in the right ways and bring new perspective in. We didn’t want to make the same album again. We’re both people that always want to be outdoing ourselves, and once we played our songs 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. He brought Radio Player over the finish line with additional guitar parts, recording live drums that Jordan could then distort and change in his own way, and then focus on the mix and master to bring it all to life and let it really shine. It allowed Jordan to do what Jordan does best as a producer, and it brought a new dynamic to our work together that’s been such a delight. It’s just felt right from the beginning and it has so much to do with who Andrew is as a person first, and then as a musician and engineer.
Image Credit: PJ Guinto.
5. Another fantastic vocal performance from you. How do you know when you've got 'the take', is there an art to walking away from a performance and saying, 'this is the best one'?
Aw thank you! I’m very proud of that one. We actually did multiple “final vocal” sessions on this song and it was starting to make us feel a little crazy. Getting the emotion right on the outro felt like this back and forth almost all of this year where the production would shift and then the old vocal wouldn’t work, and then we’d do a new vocal that would need to uplevel the production in ways, and on and on. Recording vocals was actually what I had the most fear around with Jordan’s move. It was always my favorite thing we did together when we could be in the same room, and I just didn’t know how I’d manage without him. But recently, I’ve built a PVC-pipe-and-moving-blanket vocal booth in my home office. We do vocal sessions in my evenings right as Jordan is rolling out of bed the next morning in Japan. He remotes in on my computer and runs Ableton for me while I wiggle in the booth in my headphones, and it feels SO GOOD! It allows me to focus on the performance and I get realtime feedback from him.
Sometimes it’s so easy to know when we got the take, and other times we’ll be sure we got the take and then when we put it into the next iteration of the production, we’ll realize it’s still not right. There has been a lot of that on this song and other songs we’re currently working on. It’s been a lot of mashing and hitting our heads into the wall because I think we’re working on music we’re really, really proud of and excited about right now, and both Jordan and I can be perfectionists when we know we’re onto something. I always know when the click stops in my headphones and I’m grinning in the booth (where Jordan can’t see me), and Jordan says “fuuuuuck you, dude,” that we’re on the same page about having nailed it. So much of it is a feeling and a confidence that we can both feel when it’s there, and also DEFINITELY feel when it’s not there. It’s an emotional and sometimes draining process but it’s still a favorite part of it for me.
6. I love the artwork for this single. Whose TV is that? Why a TV and not a radio?
Thank you! Me too! My friend PJ Guinto is an SLC-based photographer with great taste in music that I work with fairly often. Back in February when the song was in its first demo version, I had high hopes of releasing it in May to align with our Kilby Block Party performance, and texted PJ if he was down to do a “Poltergeist inspired shoot”. He was jazzed and even already had an old TV in his studio that he’d used as a prop before, so it felt correct. And it’s funny because the Radio Player imagery was already present in the lyrics well before I turned the song into anything connected to the Poltergeist. In my brain, memories I have flicker in and out of the song as if they are picked up as small snippets coming in through someone changing the channel on the radio. Static, parts of songs, ads, proselytizing, soft voices from another room. The titular Radio Player is sometimes a parent and sometimes a sibling and sometimes me - I think it changes through the song. I picture the TV playing the visuals of the memories and the radio picking up what’s not seen. The feelings. The misinterpretation. The inconsistency of memory needing multiple sources of validation. Something like that.
7. Earlier this year you compiled a series of demos you made in January from online prompts called 'bro's bad january'. How do you keep creativity flowing like that every day? Could any of these appear in a more complete form at some point?
Bro’s bad january was such a fun intentional way to TRY to make the creativity flow consistently. I try to allow creativity to exist in the cycles that it needs to, when it feels natural. Taking breaks from writing when I need to focus on other things or immersing myself in writing when it feels free-flowing. But in January of this year, I was stuck at home and not sleeping well for weeks after my big, old, dog Townes had ACL surgery. I was navigating a big breakup and a new kind of loneliness and stillness in the middle of winter. I needed something to look forward to and bring some brevity into the heaviness I was feeling. I’d felt so serious about songwriting and performing and making important and meaningful shit for the last several years, so I just wanted to see what would happen when I was just writing and singing just for the sake of it, and for fun. At first I didn’t want any of it to exist outside of the days I wrote them, but I was loving it so much and am such an archivist of my life that I couldn’t help but put them out.
I was a bit surprised that I didn’t want to keep hashing out any of those songs into something Jordan and I work on - except for one. The prompt “Destroy Your Favorite Thing” felt so connected to other themes I’d been exploring in other songs more intended for Jordan and I to work on, so I would say you haven’t seen the last of January 16th’s track . . .
8. Kilby Block Party was a big part of your artistic year, what was that experience like?
That whole experience was the joyful engine that powered my whole year, to be honest. I loved playing the show and felt so, so, proud of the band. Andrew Goldring on lead guitar, Ken Vallejos on drums, Julie Boswell on bass, and Jordan on keys and synth. The most fulfilling part was just getting to spend time with Jordan and with this band. When I booked the festival last fall, I had no expectation of Jordan coming back to play it with me. It wasn’t even on my mind because he’d only been gone for 6 months at that point and flights to and from Japan are outrageously expensive. But within a few months and some pep talks from his incredibly supportive spouse, Jordan decided he was going to come spend the month of April out here spending time with family, friends, and most of all the band. I’d been eyeing Julie and Ken as part of our local scene for years, and was absolutely thrilled that they were on board. The rest of my life fell away when Jordan arrived in April of this year. I remember him being jet-lagged on my couch while I laid on the floor and we listened to an Ursula K. Leguin short story. We watched hours-long youtube videos on wrestling and Palestine and cooked Mabo Tofu and curries and dug into the writing of new songs. It was just so much intentional friend time that my heart had missed so much. I felt so deeply loved and the rest of my responsibilities fell away. Seeing Jenny Lewis fly by on a golf cart and shaking Will Toledo’s hand were of course magical experiences on the day of the show, but more than anything, getting to spend a month with Jordan after time away and getting to know Andrew, Ken, and Julie in the context of band practice was one of the most joyful months of my life and I’m honestly still riding that high.
Image Credit: PJ Guinto.
9. We caught up last year when you played your first UK gig in Brighton, any plans to come back?
I HOPE SO! My dad is still on his tea kick from that trip, it was such a delight being there. I hope to be sharing big glasses of water with you chatting in a noisy bar again in the future! It was such a delight to have my first international trip also be my first international show. Also a great joy of my life and I can’t wait to come back.
10. I know you've been busy over the past year writing and recording, can we have a hint of what's coming next?
I will say that Radio Player is a piece of a much bigger world! Jordan and I have never been so connected in our writing and intention for our music, which is so fascinating to be coming from a time when we’ve never been more physically distant from each other. We’re mashing through a lot of work right now that I’m so, so, proud of, and am hopeful to be able to share more soon. Because Radio Player has been in the works for such a long time with so many starts and stops, it felt important to us to exorcise it from our bodies and hearts so we could dig into other things, but it plays an important role in what’s to come.
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Purchase the music of Josaleigh Pollett, including their new single ‘Radio Player’ on their Bandcamp page.
Get yourself some regular bro, music recommendations on weekly brosaleigh via Apple Music.
For information on gigs, merch and other links, visit Josaleigh’s Linktree.
Follow Josaleigh Pollett on Instagram @brosaleigh, on Facebook @josaleighpollett and on Bluesky @brosaleigh.bsky.social.
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