"hey baby / where'd you go without your friends? / does the sun hit harder out there alone? / I would lie next to you / in the tallest grass / just to see / you smile at me..."
The forest sanctified, rainbow colored dreaminess of "Owl Creek Blues" by Luck, Wisconsin's Blue Tomorrows (aka songwriter / producer Sarah Nienaber), from her upcoming 3rd album "Weather Forever" dropping on December 12th, is a beautiful vast daydream or meditation that can put you in a wonderful state of mind if you allow it to. While some songs command your attention, this one beckons you to discover it like butterflies dancing at your window. Graced with what feels like field recordings of nature and pushed by pretty piano pulses, what feels like lo-fi casio beats, swelling synths, acoustic guitar and a truly alluring bass line performed by Sarah Rose (who also provided backing vocals), Nienaber's hushed vocal countenance that at times feels like a mother comforting her child absolutely lulls you into a peaceful place.
As I let "Owl Creek Blues" absorb into my psyche, I for whatever reason thought of John Lennon, Natalie Mering aka Weyes Blood, The Carpenters and Harry Nilsson or maybe some crazy kind of amalgam of all of them and a sprinkling of faerie dust.
LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed):
[Blue Tomorrows is the recording name of songwriter and producer Sarah Nienaber. Her third album, Weather Forever, gathers sonic experiments made over several years and two landscapes. On a cosmic scale, acoustic and electric melt into each other: gentle, babbling electronics, synth hugs, opaque guitars, and massive reverb cumuli live in blissful harmony with acoustic guitar, upright piano, and the human voice. But here, in a big change, Nienaber explores a palette of warm electronic vocal treatments, and her voice becomes one with the nature of her music. The album is out December 12th, 2025.
The first sessions took place in a tight Portland house, in the summer of 2021, with a heavy green upright piano that has traveled (however inconveniently) with Nienaber from house to house since 2017. Tracking was unhurried. Songs began as simple sketches-to-tape and accrued layers during downtime between tours with her other band, Shady Cove. The songs were gradually assembled through a handful of found machines: a thrifted 1/4” reel-to-reel used to anchor digital textures, a borrowed TC-Helicon pedal that warped vocals, and a 4-track cassette recorder kept inside a claustrophobic, sound-sealed garage room known as “The Hole.” The piano’s temper, the tape machine’s wobble, and the pedal’s odd harmonics dictated melody, set tempo, and forced creative choices that became the album’s signature moments. Some of those rough, machine tuned takes survived the album’s final cut, because they felt true. The practice of bouncing digital instruments to tape became a deliberate method for grounding the record’s more ephemeral electronics.]
MORE artist / project details below the Official Video-
Hey baby, where’d you go without your friends?
Does the sun hit harder out there alone?
I would lie next to you in the tallest grass
Just to see you smile at me
Now lately, I’m feeling older with every breath
Fog won’t lift, the curtains are always closed
You would lie and wait with me for the time to pass
I used to be, and you’d be with me
Hey baby, don’t forget about the life we had
Or when you said you’d never leave me alone
Never lied, never dreamt it could never last
I still dream that you’re here with me
And when I sing, you sing with me
And I smile, and you smile at me
And I dream, and you dream…
The Chicken Wheel will take you to the AP Go Fund Me- and any amount is so appreciated!
https://bluetomorrows.bandcamp.com/album/weather-forever
https://www.instagram.com/bluetmrws
https://linktr.ee/bluetmrws
-Robb Donker Curtius
LYRICS
Hey baby, where’d you go without your friends?
Does the sun hit harder out there alone?
I would lie next to you in the tallest grass
Just to see you smile at me
Now lately, I’m feeling older with every breath
Fog won’t lift, the curtains are always closed
You would lie and wait with me for the time to pass
I used to be, and you’d be with me
Hey baby, don’t forget about the life we had
Or when you said you’d never leave me alone
Never lied, never dreamt it could never last
I still dream that you’re here with me
And when I sing, you sing with me
And I smile, and you smile at me
And I dream, and you dream…
The Chicken Wheel will take you to the AP Go Fund Me- and any amount is so appreciated!
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://bluetomorrows.bandcamp.com/album/weather-forever
https://www.instagram.com/bluetmrws
https://linktr.ee/bluetmrws
https://soundcloud.com/bluetmrws
Blue Tomorrows is the recording name of songwriter and producer Sarah Nienaber. Her third album, Weather Forever, gathers sonic experiments made over several years and two landscapes. On a cosmic scale, acoustic and electric melt into each other: gentle, babbling electronics, synth hugs, opaque guitars, and massive reverb cumuli live in blissful harmony with acoustic guitar, upright piano, and the human voice. But here, in a big change, Nienaber explores a palette of warm electronic vocal treatments, and her voice becomes one with the nature of her music. The album is out December 12th, 2025.
The first sessions took place in a tight Portland house, in the summer of 2021, with a heavy green upright piano that has traveled (however inconveniently) with Nienaber from house to house since 2017. Tracking was unhurried. Songs began as simple sketches-to-tape and accrued layers during downtime between tours with her other band, Shady Cove. The songs were gradually assembled through a handful of found machines: a thrifted 1/4” reel-to-reel used to anchor digital textures, a borrowed TC-Helicon pedal that warped vocals, and a 4-track cassette recorder kept inside a claustrophobic, sound-sealed garage room known as “The Hole.” The piano’s temper, the tape machine’s wobble, and the pedal’s odd harmonics dictated melody, set tempo, and forced creative choices that became the album’s signature moments. Some of those rough, machine tuned takes survived the album’s final cut, because they felt true. The practice of bouncing digital instruments to tape became a deliberate method for grounding the record’s more ephemeral electronics.
The project moved cross-country in October 2024. Much of the album had been tracked over three years in Portland; the rest came together in the six months after relocating to northwest Wisconsin, in a sunroom studio with floor-to-ceiling wood paneling, tall windows framed by ancient pines, and sightlines to apple trees and an old barn. The songs found room to breathe and resolve in the countryside, even as the piano itself lost its tune in the move. It was a small setback that led to a practical, place-keeping choice: the piano for “Owl Creek Blues” was re-tracked at Neil Weir’s Blue Bell Knoll, a studio housed in a renovated 19th-century one-room church near Turtle Lake, Wisconsin. In the final phase, Nienaber and Weir mixed the album there and printed the finished mixes to a Studer B67 two-track, a choice that doubled down on tape texture and deepened the record’s analog warmth.
Nienaber has self-recorded since the project’s inception and serves as the sole writer, producer, and performer on Weather Forever, with the exception of bass and backing vocals contributed by Sarah Rose, a longtime collaborator and bandmate in Shady Cove. The album’s first single, “Colorado,” carries the intimacy of a lullaby. Floating and enveloping, it guides the listener through visions of vast, crashing waves that ultimately carry you into reflections on the past. Midway through the record, “Owl Creek Blues” arrives like a hypnotic love letter to a dear friend, ending with the haunting harmonies of someone you used to know.
Old instruments, tape artifacts, and quiet spaces: weathered, worn, inhabitable. Amid deliberate frictions between the acoustic and the artificial, at the heart of Weather Forever is a songwriter making room—in a dark garage, in a sunroom, and in the music itself—for welcomed limitations and their subsequent discoveries. Blue Tomorrows holds fast to what is known and felt, guided by an overarching sense that there is always a reason to belong—to friends, to the places you love, to the seasons, and to every version of existence.
For fans of: Spacemen 3, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Cocteau Twins, Ashra, sun, ice, wind, grass.
Blue Tomorrows, singer-songwriter / producer Sarah Nienaber, 3rd new album "Weather Forever", folk, indie pop, indie rock, dream pop, intimate sounds, beautiful hushed vocals, "Owl Creek Blues" (Official Video),
Blue Tomorrows is the recording name of songwriter and producer Sarah Nienaber. Her third album, Weather Forever, gathers sonic experiments made over several years and two landscapes. On a cosmic scale, acoustic and electric melt into each other: gentle, babbling electronics, synth hugs, opaque guitars, and massive reverb cumuli live in blissful harmony with acoustic guitar, upright piano, and the human voice. But here, in a big change, Nienaber explores a palette of warm electronic vocal treatments, and her voice becomes one with the nature of her music. The album is out December 12th, 2025.
The first sessions took place in a tight Portland house, in the summer of 2021, with a heavy green upright piano that has traveled (however inconveniently) with Nienaber from house to house since 2017. Tracking was unhurried. Songs began as simple sketches-to-tape and accrued layers during downtime between tours with her other band, Shady Cove. The songs were gradually assembled through a handful of found machines: a thrifted 1/4” reel-to-reel used to anchor digital textures, a borrowed TC-Helicon pedal that warped vocals, and a 4-track cassette recorder kept inside a claustrophobic, sound-sealed garage room known as “The Hole.” The piano’s temper, the tape machine’s wobble, and the pedal’s odd harmonics dictated melody, set tempo, and forced creative choices that became the album’s signature moments. Some of those rough, machine tuned takes survived the album’s final cut, because they felt true. The practice of bouncing digital instruments to tape became a deliberate method for grounding the record’s more ephemeral electronics.
The project moved cross-country in October 2024. Much of the album had been tracked over three years in Portland; the rest came together in the six months after relocating to northwest Wisconsin, in a sunroom studio with floor-to-ceiling wood paneling, tall windows framed by ancient pines, and sightlines to apple trees and an old barn. The songs found room to breathe and resolve in the countryside, even as the piano itself lost its tune in the move. It was a small setback that led to a practical, place-keeping choice: the piano for “Owl Creek Blues” was re-tracked at Neil Weir’s Blue Bell Knoll, a studio housed in a renovated 19th-century one-room church near Turtle Lake, Wisconsin. In the final phase, Nienaber and Weir mixed the album there and printed the finished mixes to a Studer B67 two-track, a choice that doubled down on tape texture and deepened the record’s analog warmth.
Nienaber has self-recorded since the project’s inception and serves as the sole writer, producer, and performer on Weather Forever, with the exception of bass and backing vocals contributed by Sarah Rose, a longtime collaborator and bandmate in Shady Cove. The album’s first single, “Colorado,” carries the intimacy of a lullaby. Floating and enveloping, it guides the listener through visions of vast, crashing waves that ultimately carry you into reflections on the past. Midway through the record, “Owl Creek Blues” arrives like a hypnotic love letter to a dear friend, ending with the haunting harmonies of someone you used to know.
Old instruments, tape artifacts, and quiet spaces: weathered, worn, inhabitable. Amid deliberate frictions between the acoustic and the artificial, at the heart of Weather Forever is a songwriter making room—in a dark garage, in a sunroom, and in the music itself—for welcomed limitations and their subsequent discoveries. Blue Tomorrows holds fast to what is known and felt, guided by an overarching sense that there is always a reason to belong—to friends, to the places you love, to the seasons, and to every version of existence.
For fans of: Spacemen 3, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Cocteau Twins, Ashra, sun, ice, wind, grass.
Blue Tomorrows, singer-songwriter / producer Sarah Nienaber, 3rd new album "Weather Forever", folk, indie pop, indie rock, dream pop, intimate sounds, beautiful hushed vocals, "Owl Creek Blues" (Official Video),
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