B-Side Guys

Sarah Nienaber’s production philosophy embraces malfunction as creative partner. The heavy green upright piano she’s hauled from house to house since 2017 lost its tune during the move from Portland to northwest Wisconsin, forcing practical adjustments that shaped Weather Forever’s character. “Colorado” emerges from this environment of welcomed limitations—thrifted reel-to-reel machines anchoring digital textures, borrowed TC-Helicon pedals warping vocals, 4-track cassette recorders sealed inside claustrophobic garage rooms. The equipment’s imperfections dictated tempo and melody, those machine-tuned takes surviving the final cut because they felt authentic rather than polished.

The track carries lullaby intimacy while maintaining dream pop expansiveness, floating and enveloping qualities that guide listeners through vast oceanic imagery before settling into personal reflection. Nienaber’s exploration of warm electronic vocal treatments represents significant evolution for Blue Tomorrows—her voice processed and layered until it becomes indistinguishable from the music’s texture rather than sitting atop it. This approach aligns with influences like Spacemen 3, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Cocteau Twins, artists who understand how to blur boundaries between human and synthetic sound.

The album’s creation spanned three years across two landscapes, sessions beginning in a tight Portland house during summer 2021 before completing in a Wisconsin sunroom studio surrounded by ancient pines and apple trees. That geographic shift matters because Nienaber treats place as compositional element—the songs found room to breathe in countryside setting that Portland’s density couldn’t provide. Her deliberate method of bouncing digital instruments to tape grounds the record’s ephemeral electronics, the friction between acoustic and artificial creating productive tension.

As sole writer, producer, and performer on Weather Forever (excepting bass and backing vocals from longtime Shady Cove bandmate Sarah Rose), Nienaber maintains complete control over sonic direction. “Colorado” demonstrates her commitment to tape artifacts and quiet spaces as legitimate instruments, the wobble and warmth of analog recording deepening material that could sound sterile in purely digital form. Final mixing at Neil Weir’s Blue Bell Knoll—a renovated 19th-century church near Turtle Lake—and printing to Studer B67 two-track reinforces this analog devotion. Nienaber creates music that acknowledges belonging: to friends, places, seasons, every version of existence that refuses permanence.