by William Wayland
In this Studio to Stage session, we sat down with Anahita Skye (writer, lead vocals, and guitar), John Varn (keyboards and production), and James M. Harman (electric guitar) to talk about the creation of their single, Mountain Man. We talked in January 2025 while the song was still in production. The conversation traces the band’s origins, the instant chemistry they discovered when they first played together, and how the project evolved into its current form. The trio also reflects on why Mountain Man was chosen as their first release and the challenges of capturing the energy and spontaneity of their live sound in the studio.
William Wayland: Let’s start with introductions. Can you say your name and what you do in the band? Maybe what instrument you play?
James M Harman: Sure. I’m James M Harman, guitarist and vocalist in the band.
John Varn: John Varn, piano, arrangement, production, and I do some backup vocals as well.
Anahita Skye: I’m Anahita, acoustic guitar and lead vocals.
WW: Awesome. Thanks. So I think I saw your first performance at the Paper Mill. Was that your actual first performance as a band?
JV: Yeah, the show you saw at the Paper Mill was the first official performance of this current lineup. That was the debut.
WW: Very cool. So how did you three come together?
JV: There’s a bit of a story. James and I have known of each other since high school. He was always on my radar in the Bay Area scene. As for Anahita, we met at a bar, just had a casual conversation about music. It was one of those “cool to meet you” moments and we went our separate ways. A few months later, I was playing a gig in San Francisco with another band and Anahita happened to be there. We reconnected and decided to see what might happen if we tried playing together.
We both really love that old-school country vibe, late ’60s, early ’70s West Coast country, classic Willie and Waylon, and we thought that would be a fun jumping-off point.
AS: Yeah, the timing was kind of amazing. I was still living in LA at the time, scoping out the Bay Area because I was planning to move. That first chat with John was before I even moved up here. Then a few months later, I actually made the move, went to a show, saw John playing, and we were like, “Hey, we met before!” And by then I was seriously looking to start a new project. So we decided to try playing together and see if there was chemistry.
JV: We met up at Laughing Tiger Studio, just the two of us, her with an acoustic guitar, me at the grand piano, and we started messing around with some covers. It just clicked. Her voice and the simple instrumentation. It worked.
AS: I was like, “Okay, this is something. But we need an electric guitar player.” And that’s when John reached out to James.
JV: And I was like, “Ah yeah, James!” He had a great rep as a guitarist. So I sent him a message.
JH: I remember getting that text. It was like, “James, is this still your number?” And I saw it was John Varn. I was stoked. We’d always talked about maybe doing something together, and it finally felt like the right time.
I went down to Laughing Tiger, met Anahita for the first time, and it just felt like a really good vibe, even before we played a note. Warm, easy energy. We ran through some covers, just to see if the chemistry was there, and it definitely was.
WW: That’s a great origin story. It sounds like things clicked right away.
JV: Yeah, it just fell into place. That first session was low-key. We played some Creedence, some Dolly Parton, just to see how it felt. But the energy and blend were there. And once James joined, it was like the last piece fell into place.
WW: Before we talk about Mountain Man, Anahita, you had a prior band in LA. Are you bringing that music into this new band?
AS: I’ve been writing songs since I was 14 and recording since I was 16. In LA, I played with a lot of different musicians. I had a core band, and then some evolutions of that lineup. But when we started this project, all the music we brought into it was from this current chapter of life, this Northern California chapter. I haven’t really brought in any of the older material. It’s all new, from collaborating with John and James, and writing together.
WW: And, together, you’ve gone by a couple of different band names. What’s the name of the band now?
AS: We tried coming up with a band name, like a separate name, and James and I really loved one we came up with. But ultimately, I think it made more sense to keep it “Anahita Skye” or “Anahita Skye Band.”
JS: Yeah, just something simple and to the point. Things shift, things change. It’s nice to have one person’s name. It streamlines everything. You’re obviously the frontwoman and the main songwriter. It makes sense. Anything you do can be linked to past work, but this becomes the new era. And it keeps everything in the same universe.
WW: Cool. Okay. So the track you’ve been working on for the last few sessions is Mountain Man.
AS: Yeah. That’s been the focus recently.
WW: And are there more tracks coming together, too? Or is this part of a bigger project?
JV: Definitely more in the works. Mountain Man has been the centerpiece for the moment, but we’re building around it. There’s an EP forming.
AS: Yeah, there are about four that we’ve started to record so far.
JV: We’ve written more, though.
JH: Yeah, I think we’ve got about four or five solid originals at this point.
WW: Why was “Mountain Man” the first song you decided to finish and release?
AS: Every time we played it live, people would come up to me afterward or text me and say, “That song is stuck in my head,” and they wanted a recording. It happened so many times that we realized, okay, this one is moving people. They’re remembering it. They’re asking about it. So it just made sense to start here.
WW: I’ve heard it a few times now. It’s definitely one of those sticky songs. But is there a real “mountain man” behind it, or was it just a vibe?
AS: It’s definitely a timestamp of what I was going through at that time. Lots of transition. The first line I wrote was just “So long, Wyoming.” There was a lot going on in my life and in my last relationship. I wrote that line in my journal, and then one night I was home alone, and the rest of the song just kind of poured out from there. So yeah, it’s a story. One rooted in real experiences.
WW: Were you actually leaving Wyoming?
AS: No, I wasn’t. But it felt symbolic, like I was leaving a place in my life.
WW: Does your songwriting process usually start with a journal entry, like this one did? Or does it vary?
AS: It totally varies. When it’s just me, yeah, lots of songs have started with me and a notebook or something I scribbled down during the day. But with the three of us, it’s often more collaborative. Sometimes John will play something on piano, or James will start a groove, and I’ll just sit and listen to see if a melody starts to form. Then I’ll take it away, work on it, maybe go walk in the woods. That’s literally what I did for our song Out of the Woods. They were jamming, I recorded it on my iPhone, went for a walk, and started writing from there. Then I brought it back, and we built it out together. So yeah, that shared energy really helps me flow. It’s super inspiring.
JH: Yeah, I remember the first time I heard Mountain Man. It was just me and Anahita having a little practice session. She showed it to me, and I was like, “Wow, this is beautiful.” I started playing vocal harmonies a third above her, then another one above that. And then we brought it to John, and he added his part. There’s a piano solo with this really beautiful motif, and the guitar solo I play is almost note-for-note every time now. I don’t even remember how that happened exactly. It just kind of settled that way while recording.
AS: It’s very Pink Floyd-esque, that solo. Really powerful. And that’s the thing I love about this band: everyone brings something so unique and powerful to the table.
WW: And this was the first song you guys recorded as this band?
AS: Yeah, it was.
WW: I remember photographing you at Red House, and I was looking back the other day thinking it felt like last summer. But that was actually February of 2024. And then I saw you again at Laughing Tiger. So it’s been almost a year, and you’re still working on the song. Can you talk a little about that process? Because I expected it would be out by now.
AS: Yeah, I’m gonna let John take this one, but I’ll start it with there’s something that happens when the three of us are in a room together at the Red House, and it is absolute magic. And so that was the whole thing that we’ve been trying to capture. So we’d record our rehearsals live on the iPhone and we’d listen back and be like, “How come it doesn’t sound like this? This is what we want. This is us.”
JV: Yeah, trying to capture the magic of a live performance with three musicians that all just have an organic way of working with each other.
Without going too in-depth with technicalities, sometimes you record to a click track where everything’s locked onto a grid, and it’s harder to get a raw live performance. Because when you’re playing live, you’re wavering a little bit. Tempos are moving up and down, and that’s natural, and that’s good. That’s some of the sort of potency of why those things work so well.
But then if you want to make corrections or edits or overdubs, having something locked in on a grid in a computer program makes it a lot easier. So just kind of experimenting. And then just sonically, maybe something wasn’t quite right, or a microphone or vocal wasn’t getting the desired effect, or, you know, too much bleed.
So certain things, you can kind of try one style and be like, “Okay, part of that worked. Maybe we captured the live essence, but sonically it’s feeling a little bit not up to par.” And then maybe, when we went into Laughing Tiger, we got everything done to a click, everything very precise and captured, but maybe now it’s starting to lose a little bit of the natural, live essence that we really, really value. And it’s kind of been, like, the core of what inspires us.
So you just have to keep going back and forth. And also, obviously, it’s just the three of us. So there’s no bass, there’s no drums. There’s not a lot to hide behind. So what’s there really needs to kind of shine, each individual thing.
And also, you know, we did some overdubbing. There’s some organ parts, there’s some guitar overdubs, some vocal overdubs. But it’s still pretty raw. So that stuff has to really sit the right way for it to be kind of believable, which is seemingly pretty easy to achieve when we’re in a room in a rehearsal, because you’re not under as much of a microscope, you’re not thinking as much about it. The amps are loud. Everything’s resonating for the show too. And it can be hard, harder than it might seem, to capture that on a recording.
So it’s just been a lot of back and forth and not rushing something. Because, obviously, we’re independent artists and there’s no deadlines or whatever. So we want this to be the right thing. And we’d rather try different styles or, you know, not force ourselves to release something we’re not really feeling like captured the right thing.
AS: Yeah, there’s no deadline. There’s nothing driving a specific release date.
JS: Yeah, you can start to lose inspiration in a song if it goes on too long. You start to be like, “Well, now I’ve sort of lost the initial inspiration of why we dug this song in the first place.” And when you’re playing something live, the audience then is like, you pass the baton to them, and they’re kind of like, “We’re gonna make this song have life.”
But if it’s just the three of us playing the same song in the studio over and over again, yeah, it can get a little bit monotonous. So you start to lose a little bit of the juice.
I think that the main thing, the takeaway is we want it to sound like and capture the soul and essence of who we are. And it’s a lot harder to capture that live. It’s sometimes intangible. So we just—we wanted to get it right and be like, “This is us.”
WW: So is that a lesson for future recordings? We went through this, and here’s what we experienced, and we know we want more of a live sound, and so we’re going to approach it a little bit differently?
John: Absolutely. yeah. A hundred percent. Anytime you do anything in the studio—or live—but especially recording techniques or flow and how you approach stuff, you’re always learning and improving.
And again, it could be something more specific with equipment, like which microphones sound good on a vocal, what amps, and the way it’s mic’d. You know, do you use an upright piano versus an acoustic piano? That’s more equipment-based stuff. And then there’s: Do you record it to a click? Do we need to get better at blocking out the studio environment and really just putting ourselves in the moment? Or do we need to just say, “Hey, we have to find a way to use a click track and still get the kind of live performance aspect out of it as much as we can.” Constantly learning. Yeah. Totally.
WW: And I think you’re finishing at the Red House. Did I get that right? Or is that totally done?
AS: So, we have this version of Mountain Man that we recorded at Laughing Tiger Studios that we’re going to release. It’s almost done being mixed. And then we went to the Red House and recorded four songs with that sort of live element. We tracked a lot of the instruments live to capture that feel that we were talking about. And there’s the Mountain Man version in that batch as well. So there’s going to be essentially two versions.
WW: So you’re working on finishing “Mountain Man,” but then you’ve got these other tracks. Are you going to turn them into an EP?
JS: Anything is possible. I think when you have a body of work that clearly was recorded in the same era, the same studio, pretty much within the same day, all that stuff, for the most part, it’s nice to kind of package it as a complete work. But we’re not opposed to releasing things.
I think that kind of, “Is it an album? Is it an EP? Is it a single?” matters less in this kind of modern world.
WW: Yeah, I agree with you.
JS: People like what they like. They’ll discover what they discover. They’ll stick it in their own playlist, in whatever order they want. They’ll just say, “I only like this song,” and that’s the only thing they listen to. And then some people appreciate it as a whole complete piece, and anything in between, right? So I think the pressure of how to decide how to release it is a little less. But yeah, it’s nice to package it as one thing because they are very much of the same zone, same studio, same day kind of thing.
AS: It is nice to, like you said, package it up and turn it into something that you can talk to people about and say, “You know, we have this EP that you can buy.”
JS: Again, people are gonna decide how they like to interpret it or listen to it or enjoy it regardless.
AS: So you might as well give them the option to say, “Hey, if you are one of those kinds of people, like I am, that likes to listen to albums and get the whole scope of it, you have that option.” And then if you just want to—I only like this song out of the four—then who cares?
JS: And I think for us, just having those four together, it tells a story of this chapter of our lives. And we want it to feel that way. So I think what we will maybe end up doing is releasing some singles, and then the whole body of work as one.
WW: So you’re not totally decided on whether there will be an EP. But have you thought about releasing it as vinyl, or a disc, or something like—if you do go down that road?
AS: I think so. I think it would be great to have a vinyl.
JS: Oh yeah.
AS: We’re still figuring that out together as we go.
JS: Could be a small two-side, right? Two songs per side.
AS: Yeah, seven inches.
JS: I think sometimes too, maybe once you get a little further toward the mixing process and the whole, which I’m just about to embark on, because I’m going to take a crack at doing some mixes on these four live songs myself. Once it starts to materialize, then it seems a lot easier to kind of judge, “Yeah, these do all go together,” or “This is what the art might look like,” or “These are the images that are starting to arise as I’m kind of seeing the whole thing kind of come together.” That phase is just about to start.
WW: Even though I 100% agree that people experience music now the way they want to experience it. And it’s so easy to say, I only like Mountain Man, that’s the only track I like, and that’s the only one I’m gonna listen to. There’s something great about having that artifact. Something about holding it that I love. I still love having the 7-inch or the 12-inch or whatever it is, so I hope you do that.
JS: Indeed. Same.
WW: Okay, I think we’ll end it there. Thank you for being on the Studio to Stage show.
Going into the studio? If you’d like to be considered for a future Studio to Stage feature, reach out to William Wayland.
Leave a reply