Blue Tomorrows - Weather Forever (2025) Hi-Res

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.

The first recording sessions for Weather Forever 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.

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.