Tending to a garden is careful work. Trimming, watering, monitoring, feeding (and if you’re lucky, beautifying). As the caretaker, you want the plants to have fruitful lives amidst all the environmental obstacles, all of the other plants growing around them, everything that’s out of the plant’s control — the weeds. Staying alive is the goal, digging in deep to uproot the weeds and find their patterns is the hard part. Salt Lake City songwriter Josaleigh Pollett’s third album In The Garden, By The Weeds is an honest collection of dynamic and distorted pop songs and the first album Pollett considers self-reflective. Recorded over a year in a bedroom with close friend and collaborator Jordan Watko, each song possesses an attention to detail and cinematic atmosphere that could only be created by patience. Pollett digs into their personal garden and delivers candid, wistful, and liberating moments that create a relatable exploration of emotions over Watko’s intricate and metallic soundscapes.

“No, I don’t want anybody to know me” —Pollett repeats on album opener “YKWIM.” Beginning with clicks of static and a minimal beat, the song unfurls into a beaming pop sing-along after sporadic pokes of fuzzed-out guitar and pitch-shifted vocals burst open its elegant foundation. “YKWIM” contains many of the album’s defining qualities as this sincerity and playful production can be found on each song. Watko recalls using Pollett’s lyrical themes of self-discovery and doubt to create sonic atmospheres that felt “organic, yet corrupted.” By just a few minutes into the record, you can feel Pollett trying to eliminate the static and reveal the clarity of their inner self.

Coming from a musical family, Pollett “doesn’t remember a time in their life when music wasn’t the main event.” After playing shows around SLC for the last 15 years, they began collaborating with bandmate Watko in 2019. Following the recording of the 2020 album No Woman Is The Sea over weekends at the studio, the pair were feeling burned out and intentionally resting. But Pollett couldn’t stop writing.

“Cinderblocks,” described now as the crux of the album, was released as a single in 2022 without an album in mind. Its strong visual themes and Pollett’s soul-bearing songwriting style unearthed a charge of inspiration strong enough to fuel the pair’s creation of a full album. The song concludes with “Take this picture - ain't she lovely? In the garden by the weeds.” And so the reflecting and routine home-recording sessions began.

Though the album title is quite earthy, the songs on In The Garden, By The Weeds are anything but. Without the time-crunch at a studio, Pollett and Watko felt free to experiment with sounds they were unfamiliar with. “Little hiccups in frequencies became whole blueprints for some of these songs.” Pollett remembers. Stacks of soulful and inspired vocals are often the grounding force amongst pulsing bass and swirls of reversal. The songs can feel on the verge of collapse with a dreamlike uncertainty, making Pollett’s melodies and the pain they convey all the more compelling.

Much like “Cinderblocks,” album highlights “Bad Dreams” and “The Nothing Answered Back” contain the dark indie pop stylings of Daughter or The XX, while “Empty Things” exudes the warmth of a driving anthem by Sharon Van Etten. On “Empty Things” Pollett explores the exciting ferocity and exasperated lows of relationships (“the kind of intensity / that had me driving through snowstorms.”) “What does that say about me?” they repeat over a toppling midtempo beat and sparkling synths. Winds, bowed banjo, and pump organ complete the track’s grand arrangement, performed by Bly Wallentine, one of a handful of musicians featured on the album, all of who are local to Salt Lake City. “I’ve been blown away by the talent in the SLC scene and want to always be putting energy and love and time back into it. Seeing these younger, mostly queer folks come up in the scene and giving it everything they’ve got gives me so much hope and joy.”

Album closer “July” gives In The Garden, By The Weeds a poignant sensation of closure and freedom. As the song gradually builds upon a bright and danceable beat, Pollett confronts the maintenance of their body, their garden. (I drink enough water. I let myself cry / I'm pulling up weeds and I planted a tree.”) Through a fusion of calculated electronic atmospheres and conversational self-reflection, In The Garden, By The Weeds encompasses the highs and lows of human vulnerability, the bravery of exposing your own roots, and the catharsis that comes with persisting against the elements. “There are weeds in the garden” Pollett declared. “They are just as much a part of the garden as the flowers and vegetables. The messy parts and the hard parts of being alive are part of it.”

(Mallory Hawkins, 4/2023)