“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.