Michael Nau – Popfly (Opaque Mint Green Vinyl)

By the time Michael Nau completed Popfly, the songs felt less like compositions than companions. Arriving as fragments, notebook lines and fleeting observations, these pieces kept him company for years before taking their final form. The result is one of Nau’s most open-hearted and expansive records: homespun and otherworldly at once, with radiant folk melodies, tape-warped textures and flashes of everyday wonder held in careful balance.

Nau has never been a songwriter who forces songs into existence. Instead, he follows them, trusting intuition over agenda and allowing each song to reveal itself gradually. Writing and recording often blur together, with melodies evolving before the lyrics are finished and stray recordings becoming the foundations of new pieces. Popfly embraces these creative detours, turning thoughtful folk songs, sonic experiments and accidental beauty into fully realised compositions.

Many of the songs began at home and grew in meaning over time. By the time Nau entered the Vermont studio Little Jamaica with longtime friend and collaborator Benny Yurco, several had already lived multiple lives. “Studio recording feels like covering my own songs,” Nau says. That idea runs through the album: the performances feel lived-in and effortless, as though the record were assembling itself.

The title track carries a flicker of wonder in its simple observations, while “New Slack” moves with the loose confidence of a song content to follow its own path. On “Lost Station Hideaway”, soft static and fading signals become strangely comforting, as if the song were being broadcast from somewhere just beyond reach. Family and friendship are woven throughout the record. Nau’s children contribute vocals, bringing warmth and spontaneity to its communal spirit, while his wife and longtime collaborator Whitney McGraw lends her serene voice. The drifting harmonies reinforce the album’s central impulse: people gathering to make something beautiful.

Across Popfly, loose-limbed folk mingles with homespun psych-pop, porchside country-folk, dreamlike atmospherics and quietly profound observations. The record moves with the ease of conversation among old friends, finding beauty in tiny revelations, strange coincidences and everyday mysteries. These transmissions from different moments in Nau’s life are stitched together by instinct, affection and time, forming a portrait of a life spent paying close attention to the world and its small miracles.

For fans of: Kevin Morby, Andy Shauf, Cass McCombs.