"Low redwood clouds, awake all night / Crying again, you were by my side / Oh, Santa Cruz / Memory blues..."
The glacial heaviness that gives way to a bouncy phantasmal groove of "Santa Cruz" (Memory Blues) by Luck, Wisconsin's Blue Tomorrows (aka songwriter / producer Sarah Nienaber), and from her upcoming 3rd album "Weather Forever", stirs you up in a moody chill sort of inebriation without the benefit of anything recreational. I am loving Nienaber's vocal inclinations here that feels as chill as they do artful and sagely. Like a steely eyed sort of whisper, and framed against propulsive dreamy synths, her voice feels incredibly cool, maybe aloof and ultimately hypnotic. There is a sense that her state of mind will get her through the worst of times. The twangy Western noir guitar lead, surfy and country punk adjacent is like the cherry on Nienaber's vocal ice cream.
It is funny / interesting because this soundscape feels organic but also very spacey, surreal, and futuristic in tone (if you squint your eyes just a wee bit).
I love this.
LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed):
[On a cosmic scale, acoustic and electric melt into each other in the music of Sarah Nienaber's Blue Tomorrows project: gentle, babbling electronics, synth hugs, opaque guitars, and massive reverb cumuli live in blissful harmony with acoustic guitar, upright piano, and the human voice. Additionally, Nienaber explores a palette of warm electronic vocal treatments, and her voice becomes one with the nature of her music.]
[On her current album Weather Forever out via self-release -- recorded in Portland OR and in the outskirts of Wisconsin -- she gathers sonic experiments made over several years and two landscapes. Today, Nienaber shares the third single, "Santa Cruz (Memory Blues)." It offers a nostalgic, psychedelic glimpse at the record, all tilted vocals, bright strums, and deep synths.]
LYRICS
Low redwood clouds, awake all night
Crying again, you were by my side
Oh, Santa Cruz
Memory blues
Now there’s nothing to do, or talk about
Only one way through, and no way out
If you had the chance
Would you start over again?
Boundless roads wound through the years
Took me where I’ve been, don’t know why I’m here
Lean into the wind
To feel that empty feeling again
Not long ago I had so many friends
And my one true one went everywhere I went
Could you see me now
If you could see me again?
High redwood clouds, awake all night
Laughing again, I said I don’t mind
Oh, Santa Cruz
Memory blues
-Robb Donker Curtius
[On her current album Weather Forever out via self-release -- recorded in Portland OR and in the outskirts of Wisconsin -- she gathers sonic experiments made over several years and two landscapes. Today, Nienaber shares the third single, "Santa Cruz (Memory Blues)." It offers a nostalgic, psychedelic glimpse at the record, all tilted vocals, bright strums, and deep synths.]
LYRICS
Low redwood clouds, awake all night
Crying again, you were by my side
Oh, Santa Cruz
Memory blues
Now there’s nothing to do, or talk about
Only one way through, and no way out
If you had the chance
Would you start over again?
Boundless roads wound through the years
Took me where I’ve been, don’t know why I’m here
Lean into the wind
To feel that empty feeling again
Not long ago I had so many friends
And my one true one went everywhere I went
Could you see me now
If you could see me again?
High redwood clouds, awake all night
Laughing again, I said I don’t mind
Oh, Santa Cruz
Memory blues
-Robb Donker Curtius
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
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, "Santa Cruz" (Memory Blues),
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, "Santa Cruz" (Memory Blues),
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