"You and I (on the other side of the world)"

I have A LOT of updates around shows and new music but unfortunately you are going to have to read me waxing poetic about a musician I love for a few paragraphs first. I guess you could just skip to the bottom but that wouldn’t be very fun now would it.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how the album “Ignorance” from Tamara Lindeman aka The Weather Station was released in February of 2021 and absolutely knocked me on my ass and nursed me back to health in a really fraught time. In 2021, I was technically living with an ex a few months after we had broken up. Things were understandably fraught between us in the midst of the pandemic changing the world and our ending relationship changing us, and I was able to get away from my situation for a bit by house-sitting for some friends for the entire month of February. At the time, I still had three pets - my good dog Townes, my perfect little angel dog Ripley, and my deepest love of a cat, Rudo (Ripley and Rudo have since moved on from this realm and I miss the shit out of them). Ripley stayed with my ex, and Rudo went for an extended sleepover with my ex-husband, and I brought Townes with me to house-sit. It was the first time I was really alone in a very long time. No partner, no friend time due to the virus, and just my one dog. We walked the streets of South Salt Lake for hours every day. I had just started anti-depressants and I was grappling with the damage that had been done by the stress and isolation of the previous year. This song on a little demos compilation I put out that year perfectly captures where I was at in that moment. “Ignorance” was on constant repeat on my walks and while learning to care for myself in a new way. I felt incredibly present in my own life for maybe the first time ever.

This month in 2025, The Weather Station has released a new album called “Humanhood” and I’ve been equally devastated and nurtured by it, similar to before. This album feels like a maturation in such incredibly beautiful ways. The embrace of chaotic improvisation turning into beautifully orchestrated and intentional songs, filled to the brim with expressions of grief and devastation at the world around us that I have yet to see anyone else capture in this way. I have always admired the way that Tamara fits climate activism and global awareness into her songs. It never feels heavy handed or cliche - just always true. Just so simply “of course this is at the core of my art because it is at the core of everything.”

I have been experiencing a very present self these days. Something I keep journaling about as feeling “arrived.” A great joy and comfort in being alone and nurturing my true priorities and values. A version of me that I feel like really started to come into themselves in February of 2021. It’s taken a few years to feel confident in this space, but I really feel like it kicked off that month in that year.

And I was thinking about this and then I started thinking even deeper, and I found that in many very specific and intense times in my life, there was also a new Weather Station album to keep me company through it.

I learned of Tamara’s music in 2012 or 2023, after her 2011 album “All Of It Was Mine” had been released. I was obsessed with Daniel Romano’s “Sleep Beneath The Willow” at the time, and was scouring his label’s other releases when I stumbled upon it. An instant classic that feels rich and ancient and applicable all at once. I was living by myself for the first time in an apartment on Fowler Avenue in Ogden, UT. I didn’t know how to accept solitude without loneliness yet, but I felt the pull of independence and the peace that comes with it.

A few years later and I had moved back to Utah after living in Seattle for a bit. I had just started a new job in Salt Lake, and was living with my parents for a short time while looking for a house to buy with my partner and our gaggle of pets that we could simply not keep renting with - two pit bulls and three cats. This was 2015, and I remember listening to a podcast called Strangers hosted by Lea Thau in my car on one of my nightmare commutes from South Salt Lake back to Ogden. This particular episode was a real story about a woman who fell in love with a man who tragically passed away from eating a poisonous plant just as they were falling in love. I was crying in my car at the story when the host introduced Tamara as the subject and talked about her newest album as The Weather Station, “Loyalty”. I immediately picked it up and let it wash over me on these drives regularly.

The next time I needed it, a new album self-titled album from the Weather Station appeared in 2017, just as I was learning about my queerness and emotional needs and the ways these things were no longer fitting within the bounds of my marriage. The song “You and I (On The Other Side of the World)” still makes me cry. It felt like it was plucked directly out of my heart and could have been about my own marriage, and I wouldn’t have made it through 2018 in the same way without it.

Oh, it was always a marriage
From the moment that you stepped into my hallway
Shy as anyone I'd ever known
Curious and alone

The song “Thirty” from that album also absolutely slays me, and is so close to my heart. I remember singing along with an ex-partner - the one I was living with through the pandemic - when I got to see The Weather Station live in 2022. The line “that was the year I was thirty - that was the year you were thirty-one.” We were both in the crowd and I WAS thirty and he WAS thirty-one and we’d just been through hell together and to sing and laugh and dance together felt like the shaking-off of last years’ dead fur.

*Side note - while researching dates for this newsletter, I found that Tamara Lindeman played the TITULAR STEPSISTER in the Disney Channel Original Movie “Step-sister From Planet Weird” which I quote every single time it’s windy outside by whispering “I fear the wind,” quietly to myself. I really cannot believe I didn’t somehow know this already, I was OBSESSED with that movie.

So imagine the feeling of comfort and complexity and para-social ridiculousness I’m feeling this month when in the cursed year of our lord 2025, The Weather Station is here with an album about being present and grieving the earth and ourselves and feeling it all in your body - even what hurts so much - right when I and the rest of the world need those things to be sung to us so deeply.

The Weather Station’s new album Humanhood is here and you should listen to it. It feels harder every day to find moments to be present, among the news of the rights of immigrants and trans folks and unhoused folks being decimated by the hour. I also think it’s more important now than ever before to look for ways to be present. To know that whatever our fucking president says, people exist in a million different beautiful ways and we will not go out without a fight. And to be able to fight, I think we must be able to up our practice of presence and resilience in any way that we can. This last decade has been exhausting and the next decade will be, too. I wish it would not have happened in my time yaddah yaddah well it DID. HERE WE ARE. And we deserve to feel joy wherever we can find it. A way that I stay in my body and in the world and able to show up for the people I love is finding joy through music, and if you’re here, that’s probably at least a little bit true for you, too.

Okay that’s enough of that here are some more concrete updates on Josaleigh Pollett as a musician.

SHOWS!!

2/10 show with Good Looks at Kilby Court - this is a solo gig that I think is going to be really special. My first show of 2025 and I couldn’t be more excited to be sharing the stage with these Austin legends.

JUST ANNOUNCED: 3/30 FULL BAND SHOW (!!!!) with Star 99 (San Jose) and Sunday Cruise (Chicago) at the Parker Theater! I have assembled an all-start crew of my favorite local musicians and somehow convinced them to be in my band for both this show and Kilby Block Party in May. Those incredible folks are Andrew Goldring (go check out his new songs!!), Ken Vallejos (of Sunsleeper fame!), and Julie Boswell (of my favorite SLC band these days, Body Horror). This show is put on by Hypha Productions - a must-follow for anyone interested in live music in Salt Lake City. The person behind this boutique production company is also the effortlessly talented Hal Jean of SLC’s Hoofless.

BRO’S BAD JANUARY: In December, I decided that I was going to write a song every day in January to help keep some of the winter blues away, and maybe also make the songwriting process start feeling a little less precious to me. It's such a core part of my routine and my life, but sometimes it can cause me more stress than act as an outlet. So I wanted to keep things really simple for the challenge so that I could put fun and creativity back at the center of writing. I asked my internet friends to suggest the prompts, and I wrote them all down on paper, folded them up, and put them in a little metal tin. Every day I picked out a prompt and had to write a song about it. I certainly don't like all of them - some I think are outright lazy trash and some I really love - but I thoroughly enjoyed doing it every day. It gave me a to do that was just for me, and just for fun. I put these voice memo’s together on my bandcamp in all their raw glory, and even made a cover out of construction paper for them. I’m selling the comp for just $10 and will be donating all proceeds to a local org that is close to my hear - Salt Lake Community Mutual Aid. They do weekly outreach support for our unhoused community and manage multiple community fridges in the SLC community.

OKAY ONE LAST THING . . .

When I was in the UK in December I got to sit down with my wonderful internet friend Teri for an interview on their blog Moths and Giraffes. Teri is a delight and an exceptional writer, and we talk about sobriety and AI and literally all of my albums. Check it out!

I am going to be putting more information on what I’m up to in these newsletters moving forward as I spend less time on meta sites/encouraging others to be on meta sites, so I appreciate you being here!

Okay also one more thing - I will have some new merch for KBP and Helvetica Blanc has designed some incredible new things including the thumbnail at the top of this newsletter with my name and the worms WOW I’m so excited for that - keep an eye out 🙂