Porch Weather

Porch Weather is a collaborative concept album chronicling a day’s progression from the porch of an old farm house at Lake Pickett in rural central Florida, surrounded by orange trees, lake water, friends, chickens, dogs, bugs, birds, sun, rain, moonlight, and music. The intention was to create a record that follows the sounds and moods of the weather in a single day, morning to night, and to reflect those parts of the day with the ambient sounds around the farmhouse accompanying each track. The result is a collection of songs engaging equally in ambiance as they are in their varied nature of indie folk milieu.

In 2015, Andrew Kelly (of indie rock band Slumberjack) came to producer/roommate/bandmate Dave Hanson (Dog Island) with the idea for the album. Friend and golden-voiced singer/songwriter Tessa Register was also recruited to be involved. Natural sounds from around the property were recorded to be placed into the album as well - a morning dove, evening crickets, friends in the lake, the crackling campfire. The group then worked together to arrange and produce the tracks from inside the humble farmhouse’s home studio space.

The album begins with the sunrise, (“"First Light”) and winds through the day: the morning’s meditations (“Tallahassee”) a lake party with friends (“Lakeside”), moments of solitary reflection (“Time to Start”), the stillness of the afternoon, an approaching storm, (“Porch Weather”) the shelter sought, the lingering petrichor (“Mud Season”), the slow sunset (“Beautiful Life”), open spaces of dusk, the camaraderie of the stars (“Firefly”), and more scenes of the weather of life from the porch.

For a myriad of reasons, all members got involved in other more pressing projects and the Porch Weather album was shelved for six years until its release in March 2021. This added distance only seems to more perfectly age the photographed memory that this project creates.

This album is dedicated to all the memories made at that moldy house at the end of the dirt road on Lake Pickett. The property has since been demolished and will be the bedrock for suburban expansion. May this record be an homage to the place many people made a home, found inspiration, created friendships, and engaged with the humble majesty of the nature in our backyard.

PRESS:

“This is what songwriting is all about.” - EAR TO THE GROUND (article link)

“Time To Start is a beautiful track, featuring a simple acoustic guitar melody as the main instrumentation alongside Tessa’s vocals. There’s something very haunting about the piece, and the simplistic nature of the song only serves to add to this further. We also really enjoyed the ambient feel of the track, with Porch Weather using things such as wind chimes to add some natural effects to the tune.” - YORK CALLING (link)

“Check out the introspectively vulnerable ‘Tallahassee’ from Porch Weather. Passionate vocal layering cuts through a rich lo-fi world as Kelly sings with clear-cut emotional depth. “Tallahassee” is created within an outdoorsy aroma, a melodic deadpan indie-folk song if there ever was one.” - GLIDE MAGAZINE (link)