B-Side Guys

Sarah Nienaber, aka Blue Tomorrows, records with machines that dictate their own terms. “Owl Creek Blues” carries the fingerprints of equipment that won’t behave perfectly: a heavy green upright piano that lost its tune during the cross-country move, a thrifted 1/4″ reel-to-reel anchoring digital textures, a 4-track cassette recorder working inside a sound-sealed garage called “The Hole.” The second single from her December 12th album Weather Forever arrives as hypnotic love letter to a dear friend, ending with haunting harmonies of someone you used to know—built from welcomed limitations and their subsequent discoveries.

The production embraces friction between acoustic and artificial as organizing principle. Gentle electronics bubble beneath opaque guitars and massive reverb, while acoustic guitar and that temperamental upright piano provide organic counterweight. Nienaber’s voice receives warm electronic treatment, becoming one with the music’s nature rather than sitting atop it. Recorded partly in Portland before finishing in northwest Wisconsin after relocating in October 2024, the track captures the sound of songs finding room to breathe in countryside after years of tight Portland house sessions.

What makes the approach compelling is Nienaber’s commitment to letting machines shape the music. The piano’s temper, tape machine’s wobble, borrowed TC-Helicon pedal’s odd harmonics didn’t just color the sound—they dictated melody, set tempo, forced creative choices that became signature moments. Some rough, machine-tuned takes survived the final cut because they felt true. The practice of bouncing digital instruments to tape became deliberate method for grounding ephemeral electronics, a choice that deepened when Nienaber and Neil Weir mixed the album at his Blue Bell Knoll studio (housed in a renovated 19th-century one-room church near Turtle Lake, Wisconsin) and printed finished mixes to Studer B67 two-track.

When the piano lost its tune during the move, “Owl Creek Blues” got re-tracked at Blue Bell Knoll—a practical, place-keeping choice that fed into the album’s larger philosophy about working with what’s available. Nienaber serves as sole writer, producer, and performer on Weather Forever (aside from bass and backing vocals from Sarah Rose, her longtime Shady Cove bandmate), maintaining full control over every element from inception through her sunroom studio with floor-to-ceiling wood paneling, tall windows framed by ancient pines, sightlines to apple trees and old barn.

For someone citing influences like Spacemen 3, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Cocteau Twins, and Ashra (plus sun, ice, wind, grass), Blue Tomorrows has found her methodology: old instruments, tape artifacts, quiet spaces—weathered, worn, inhabitable. “Owl Creek Blues” demonstrates what happens when you make room in dark garages and sunrooms for equipment that won’t cooperate perfectly, then treat those imperfections as creative partners rather than obstacles. The result sounds both ancient and immediate, like a love letter written in tape hiss and piano wobble, preserved on machines that remember every small flaw.