After nearly a decade of making music, Salt Lake City singer-songwriter Josaleigh Pollett is still finding new ways to tell deeply personal stories.
Their latest album, “If I Let It Quiet,” explores change and the multifaceted nature of distance. It’s a project that also caught the attention of NPR Music, which recently highlighted it as one of last week’s notable albums.
Pollett will bring those songs to Chico Monday performing at Naked Lounge with fellow Salt Lake City band Strog, along with Chico bands Lish Bills and Astronaut Ice Cream.
The album grew out of a long-distance friendship and creative partnership between Pollett and longtime collaborator Jordan Watko, who records under the name Crowd Shy.
"It was initiated as a labor of love and friendship," Pollett said.
The pair wrote and produced the record over two years after Watko moved 8,000 miles away to Japan, transforming the distance between them into the album's central theme.
“When he moved away, we knew we wanted to continue making music together, but we also had this big challenge of learning how to do it from completely different sides of the world,” Pollett said.
Rather than avoid those obstacles, they became the foundation of the album itself.
“It feels like very meta to me because it's not only about navigating this big distance between the two of us and the way that it affects our songwriting creation in general,” Pollett said. “It was also the act of processing it and the act of getting through this change and this grief and this wildly new way of being creative together.”
While distance serves as the album's central theme, the songs branch into other deeply personal experiences. "Second Guesser" reflects on a disorienting summer spent battling an E. coli infection, while "The Witness" explores the search for validation through friendships, romance and social media.
“Just trying to really articulate what love was,” Pollett said.
Looking back on nearly 10 years of performing, Pollett says they still admire the fearlessness that launched their career.
“I started playing shows when I was really young. I would reach out to bands that I liked on Myspace if they were coming through Salt Lake and just be like, if you need a local opener, I've got a guitar and eight songs that I just wrote,” Pollett said.
Those early experiences taught Pollett to take chances and create opportunities rather than wait for them.
“I think I needed that experience and that ability to prove to myself that I could do it really young to lay the groundwork for everything else,” Pollett said.
