Michael Nau

“We did some full band stuff live in Burlington, Vermont, some of it was done in Connecticut, another song was tracked on a back porch in Nashville, others in Maryland,” says Michael Nau when asked about piecing together the material for his debut album, Mowing. “I was just recording songs. I wasn’t sure about really doing a record.” Nau’s casual attitude towards songwriting certainly suits the warm bucolic vibe of Mowing, but his nonchalant approach belies his tireless work ethic and formidable artistry. For the past eight years, Nau has written songs with his wife Whitney McGraw under the name Cotton Jones. Along with their rotating cast of auxiliary members, Nau and McGraw kept a busy schedule of releasing records, rehearsing, and touring. Along the way, Nau would track song ideas. There was a stockpile of these recordings—little sonic experiments, layering exercises, the occasional fully-formed song—nestled away in the Cotton Jones compound in the tiny Appalachian city of Cumberland, Maryland, waiting to be pulled from the shelf and ushered into the sunlight.

It was a long road to arrive at Mowing. Given his collaborative nature, it’s almost a fluke that Michael Nau wound up releasing a record under his own name. He started his musical career by culling from both the American singer-songwriter tradition and the literary melancholia of the contemporary pop underground with the indie outfit Page France. Despite the egalitarian nature of the band, Nau fell into the spotlight for his idiosyncratic religious lyrical motifs, which made the staunchly secular indie community uneasy while simultaneously offending the contingent of Christians who owned Death Cab For Cutie records. After four years and three full-lengths, Nau branched off with bandmate and then-girlfriend Whitney McGraw to write songs under the moniker Cotton Jones. Together they shed the more modern inflections of Page France and summoned the bygone sounds of AM radio—golden oldies, antiquated Nashville country, ‘70s chamber pop, dusty folk songs.

“Cotton Jones has always, for me, been most enjoyable as a live thing,” says Nau. “We’ve always been able to keep it pretty fresh. There’s never been much of a pattern to the whole thing.” But things changed as the couple decided to start a family. It’s a common issue for musicians who outgrow the wild abandon of their twenties—the desire to create and perform has to grapple with adult responsibilities. “It’s just a bit more challenging for Whitney and I to both be on tour. And, if I try to do Cotton Jones without Whitney, there’s a hole—a bunch of songs can’t be performed. Cotton Jones has always been a ‘band’ to me. I’d rather it not become a ‘character’. I love playing music, so branching off is a way to do it more. And, if we do more Cotton Jones in the future, that’s great too. I don’t want to think about it too much.”

So with the help of a few musician friends, Nau sifted through those lost recordings. Given the sporadic formation of the songs off of Mowing, there is a surprising continuity in timbre and mood. It’s hard to believe that a song like album opener “While You Stand” wasn’t immediately absorbed into the Cotton Jones repertoire. With little more than a delicate acoustic guitar line and a modestly hummed chorus, the song creates the inviting aura of sunlight coming through the kitchen window on an early Saturday morning. Like so many classics in the Cotton Jones canon, songs like “Your Jewel”, “So, So Long”, and “Unwound” conjure the sounds that linger on lonely stretches of the radio dial, where Cat Stevens, Harry Chapin, and Randy Vanwarmer crackle on with their infinite humble appeal. Elsewhere on Mowing, you can hear Nau’s beguiling experiments—the bossa nova cadence of “Smooth Aisles”, the woozy chaise lounge instrumental “Mow”, the baroque pop of “Winter Beat.”

Even though Mowing is a collection of old songs, they sound like they could belong in any era of Nau’s musical career. “They’re little doodles of a few days. It was all a vehicle to get on to the next thing. Even though releasing an album under my own name is a new development, I think it only feels like a starting point because there’s a record finished.” Suicide Squeeze Records is proud to release the unearthed gems of Mowing in February 2016. And while there are still some lost songs from his past that he looks forward to sharing with the public, Nau is also excited about moving forward as a singer-songwriter. “It should be pretty wide open from here,” he says about his future creative endeavors. “I’m excited about that.”