Jordan Watko – HighClouds https://highclouds.org HighClouds - A Music Blog Tue, 19 May 2026 06:12:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.8 https://highclouds.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/favicon.ico Jordan Watko – HighClouds https://highclouds.org 32 32 110112611 Josaleigh Pollett unveils “The Witness”, a glowing new preview of If I Let It Quiet. https://highclouds.org/josaleigh-pollett-the-witness/ Tue, 19 May 2026 06:07:20 +0000 https://highclouds.org/?p=65628 Based in Salt Lake City, Josaleigh Pollett makes music with a rare mix of intimacy, curiosity, and emotional nerve. Their warm, folk leaning debut Strangers first opened the door, before their long running creative partnership with producer Jordan Watko deepened on No Woman Is the Sea. With 2023’s In the Garden, By the Weeds, the pair expanded that world even further, with more electronic textures added along the way. Since then, Pollett has kept moving, collaborating with Ekko Astral, writing at a restless pace, and pushing their songs into stranger, more expansive shapes. Now, they are back with If I Let It Quiet, their fourth full length album. Created mostly at home between Pollett’s makeshift studio in Salt Lake City and Watko’s apartment in Japan, the record turns distance into a creative force rather than an obstacle. As Pollett explains, “This album 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.”

Following lead single “Radio Player”, new single “The Witness” feels like a door swinging open at full speed. Built around a driving beat and a bright, restless surge of sound, the song wrestles with the ache of wanting to be known, and the equally vulnerable work of knowing someone else in return. It is big and airborne, but never impersonal. Pollett sings from inside the mess of recognition, where love, identity, memory, and self doubt all blur together. The lyrics move like thoughts catching up with the heart, asking for reassurance, honesty, and a witness to transformation. “The Witness is a song about knowing that to be seen and held and understood, you must first see and hold and understand,” Pollett says. “It’s about love, beyond limits and gender, across multiple universes. It’s also a little bit about deleting my Twitter account.” That last line is funny, but it also cuts to something very human: the desire to step away from performance and find a truer kind of presence.

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