JOAN SHELLEY - THE SPUR

ROUTES & BRANCHES

featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music

July 12, 2022

Scott Foley, purveyor of dust

I've written quite a bit about home over the past fifteen years, how we spend so much time leaving home or returning home, or how we spend a lifetime looking for home. Maybe know our home like the back of our hand. For some, the memory of a home without love stands between us and the possibility of ever really settling down. On a wider scale, we can see home as a community where we find belonging, or with a group of friends to whom we belong. When it seems the world is falling in around us, home can mean everything - sanctuary, peace, security, order. Home. 

Kentucky songwriter Joan Shelley has passed the pandemic largely on the rural land she shares with husband and collaborator Nathan Salsburg. There they welcomed their first child, and Shelley took advantage of the pandemic pause to gather the ideas and sounds which serve as the basis for The Spur. 

While her website states in black-and-white, she's not a folksinger, Shelley's first handful of projects have garnered her that reputation with their often stark arrangements and pastoral themes. On her 2018 covers EP, Rivers & Vessels, she placed herself in the company of Nick Drake, JJ Cale and June Tabor, like-minded "folk" artists who navigated the line between genres. Those five initial projects found Shelley collaborating with musicians like Salsburg, James Elkington, and Will Oldham, most of whom rejoin her for The Spur, with Elkington in the producer's seat. 

The arrangements on these new sessions tend to present Joan Shelley's songs in a fuller light, even as directness remains the baseline. "Home" weaves together a filigree of acoustic strings with simple drums, the singer returning to haunt an overgrown house that was once familiar: Who's in the window / And who lives there now. Shelley's resonator suggests a dark undercurrent to the title cut, until the chorus lifts the song above the cloudline. Even The Spur's most pastoral moment, the stirring duet with Bill Callahan, "Amberlit Morning" warms the mix with keys and pocking percussion: No place for us to cling to / Save each other. 

It takes so much to be human, she sings. These aren't lovesongs, but often speak to companionship and moments of meeting. With its blushing strings and low brass, the steady subtle march of "When the Light is Dying" movingly portrays one such episode through a car windshield, soundtracked to the music of Leonard Cohen: You and I drove for hours / Through the endless Kansas plains / I trace the black outline / Of every stubborn human thing / Alone on the horizon / You want it darker Leonard sings. The California country-rock of "Like the Thunder" is possibly as laidback a song as Shelley has recorded, like a midtempo Christine McVie number, the singer inviting, Let the new world come around.

There is a constancy to Joan Shelley's accompaniment over the span of her six records, these companions of home and road. While Salsburg, Elkington and co are sonically more present during this first half of The Spur, the songs which make up the second half weave an intimate spell with shorter and more intricate arrangements. There is a hesitant vulnerability to "Fawn", with the band's instruments laying a careful nest for the singer's warm contralto: I hide from the world / Because I don't know where I end / I've been worried since the beginning / Am I safe in my skin. Shelley builds a couple of these pieces on her piano, with the striking "Bolt" adding little else until those strings and horns arise like a field of fog. An increasingly affecting vocalist, she needs little accompaniment to strike an emotional chord: Broken stems / Dried vines / Heaven sent honey / End of summer / Sap settling into the roots again / To redesign / Realign. 

These are little symphonies, secular hymns that explore the depth elements of life and living. Perhaps it's appropriate that The Spur comes to a close with Shelley's relatively carefree "Completely", a song that gives reign to good old sentiment. Reclining into a languid swing, the singer casts her lure: It's gonna take some time / Til the ache unwinds / To know every fire within your spine / Completely. While there are pastoral elements in the Kentucky songwriter's music, they are interrupted regularly by reminders that the world is always with us, even when we're home. Joan Shelley stated it perfectly on an earlier album: Here on the mountain, I'm thinking of you / The birds are all singing, screaming of youth. 

So is Joan Shelley a folksinger? Sure, but don't let that get in the way of your appreciation for The Spur. Shelley shapes the form, rather than allowing the genre to show her where the lines are drawn. She is a folksinger in the same way Richard Thompson, Gillian Welch or Nick Drake is a folksinger. These new sessions remind us of the range inherent in the genre, of the wide reach that is possible and too often unappreciated. Not the trad, not the primitive. Not sacred. Not precious.