Throughout the year, Atwood Magazine invites members of the music industry to participate in a series of essays reflecting on art, identity, culture, inclusion, and more.
•• •• •• ••
Today, Salt Lake City-based singer/songwriter Josaleigh Pollett talks us through their eerie and emotional Poltergeist-inspired new single “Radio Player.”
In 2023, Josaleigh Pollett’s gorgeous ‘In the Garden, By the Weeds,’ a collaboration with Jordan Watko (Crowd Shy), was one of Atwood Magazine’s favorite albums of 2023. It was an impressively atmospheric, emotive, and layered LP, which touched on Pop, Electronic, and Indie Rock.
In the time since, much has changed, with Jordan, Josaleigh’s long-time musical partner, relocating to Japan. “Radio Player” is their first collaboration since, and it’s a testament to creativity, determination, and friendship, with the pair overcoming distance and time-zones to create something special.
Their first release via Audio Antihero (Frog / Avery Friedman / Tiberius / CIAO MALZ / Magana), “Radio Player” feels like a true evolution from the previous album, with its aching slow burn and controlled explosions of stunning pop melody. Inspired by the film ‘Poltergeist,’ the single is brooding, eerie and perfect for the season, and Atwood Magazine is excited to have Josaleigh talk us through its creation.
•• ••
PROTECTION, MEMORY, & THE PINK GLOW OF “RADIO PLAYER”
by Josaleigh Pollett
It’s going to be tricky to explain what “Radio Player” is written about and how we made it without a deep dive into decades of family history and over-sharing, but I am going to do my best!
In December of 2023, I was not feeling great. I was outside of my brain and my body for several months. Someone I love very much was suffering through a relapse after several years clean, one of my closest friends at the time had recently checked herself into rehab for alcoholism, and the anticipatory grief of my best friend moving to a new country the following spring was kicking my ass. I wasn’t handling the stress well. I wasn’t sleeping and anxiety followed me from room to room and day to day. Things I had been worried about happening for the entirety of the year were bubbling up in stressful ways. My years-long flirtation with giving up drinking was starting to feel like something I was going to have to deal with soon simply from a stress management perspective.
In this stressful haze, I started writing “Radio Player.” I was thinking about safe places in my childhood. I was thinking about how music and the adults around me who made it were comforts to me in difficult times. I was also thinking about how young people and especially musicians and creatives are so susceptible to addiction and depression. How a lot of the memories I had of safety and comfort as a child were also tinged with this glistening pink stickiness of spilled beer and cigarette butts, of late nights and easily sparked emotions – specifically of fear and of sadness. I wanted to explore how any addiction – from substances to sadness – can feel like safety and comfort depending on the time and the room and company you keep, but can so easily keep you from knowing yourself and what could truly comfort you.
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. After quite a few iterations of the lyrics, I started to see how the song was existing at this intersection of memory of things that had actually happened, things that were from movies I watched at impressionable ages, and different perspectives from other people who were present in my childhood.
The movie Poltergeist is such a beautiful film about how parents love their children – it’s one of my absolute favorites and I saw it really young. The parents in the film are flawed but love each other and are trying, and would literally climb through ectoplasm covered goo and face monstrous horrors to save their children from danger. I think “Radio Player” is a song about protection and memory and addiction and the routes we take to protect ourselves and find comfort, and how we clean up the mess afterwards.
Jordan Watko (Crowd Shy) and I have now been close friends and collaborators since early 2019. Like most of our collaborations, “Radio Player” began as something I had written on my acoustic guitar. Once the song felt somewhat complete structurally/lyrically, I shared it with Jordan. It was Christmas of 2023 and he was still living in Salt Lake before his move to Japan. 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 the song. I didn’t quite see the vision yet, but when Jordan says he’s feeling something for a song, I always trust him.
We didn’t pick “Radio Player” back up in any real way until about a year later. Jordan moved to Japan with his partner in the spring of 2024, and we really put music on the backburner for a while. We spoke regularly, but our check-ins were more about our friendship – navigating the grief and excitement and confusion of change, of settling into an entirely new place, of heartbreak and love. Once Jordan had settled a bit into his new home, our regular facetimes started to lean back into tinkering on songs again. We could only stay away for so long. Since “Radio Player” had some structure already, it felt natural to dig into it more seriously.
By the time the first demo of it came together in early 2025, we’d changed the outro several times before landing on the lyrics that it has now. It took a while to find the right emotional place to take it to, but once I really leaned into the TV light imagery and the Poltergeist-y feeling, we both knew we were there with the words. We were both happy with the demo, and if we were going to approach new songs the same way we approached our last album together, then we would have moved into mixing at that point and released it this last spring. For a while, that was our plan, but 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, By the Weeds.
We took an incredibly isolated approach on In The Garden, By the Weeds, 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 music the same way we had before because everything else in our lives had drastically changed since then.
We decided to hold off on releasing “Radio Player” in the spring because we both knew it could be better than it was. It was good, but it just wasn’t quite yet blowing us away like we knew it had the potential to. I had recently jumped at the opportunity to enroll my friend and incredible musician, songwriter, and audio engineer Andrew Goldring into my band for our live performance at Kilby Block Party in May of this year. That experience of the live band was so incredible. Though he’d only been gone for a year, Jordan decided to come back for a month to be a part of the band along with Andrew, Ken Vallejos on drums, and Julie Boswell on bass. Putting “Radio Player” into the set felt important to me because I wanted at least one new song to be part of that event, and I’m so glad it was.
“Radio Player” really got its legs under it with the band this spring, and that influenced the direction of the final production, which Andrew and Jordan collaborated on together. Knowing who to bring in on production was feeling tricky before that experience, because Jordan and I have such an intense friendship that strongly influences the way we work together. But once we played 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 the song 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.
Once I realized that “Radio Player” would be done close to October, I really couldn’t believe that I’d ever considered releasing it at any other time. It’s so clearly a song meant for the season of scary movies, of death and change, of hazy memories and nostalgia. It’s had quite the life up until this point, and I’m so excited to be moving it into its next iteration of meaning something entirely different to the people who now get to hear it. – Josaleigh Pollett
•• ••
:: connect with Josaleigh Pollett here ::
•• •• •• ••
Connect to Josaleigh Pollett on
Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, Facebook
Discover new music on Atwood Magazine
📸 © PJ Guinto
Stream Josaleigh Pollett
