MOJO PRESENTS
Amongst the vines and coyote dens of north Kentucky, JOAN SHELLEY’s graceful, folk-adjacent songs take shape, but think twice before imagining her a pedlar of winsome pastoralia. Seven albums in, her feel for life’s nuance is fuller than ever. “I don’t want to be fooled by the romance,” she tells JOHN MULVEY.
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Photography by MICKIE WINTERS
HE THIRD SONG ON JOAN SHELLEY’S NEW ALBUM IS CALLED HOME AND THERE, more or less, is where she’s been for the last two years. Her place is a sprawling plot outside Louisville, Kentucky, off roads uncharted by Google Maps, about six miles from where she grew
could maybe try to speak for a place, but then I realised that was problematic as well. But I think about the trees here, and the plants, and there’s no place like it.” Will Oldham, who records as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and lives down the road from Shelley, knows what she means. “I’ve put a lot of energy into understanding what a commitment to place can mean,” he says. “Kentucky is wellstocked with incredible people. It’s also a challenged place. It’s relatively easy to afford to live here, but there are costs related to education, healthcare, air and water toxicity and, unfortunately, political culture. To be as human as we possibly can be, we stay instead of leave and, in staying, grow to understand how the depth of connection makes something irreplaceable of our experience and our relationships.” This, in essence, is what Shelley did as she prepared the songs for her seventh solo album, The Spur. She joined a local songwriters’ group to woodshed ideas, and focused on being less of what the agrarian poet Wendell Berry, another Kentucky local, calls an “urban nomad”. With her partner and collaborator, Nathan Salsburg, she made choices ahead of the ones that a pandemic would render non-negotiable. She locked down at home, wrote songs, raised goats and chickens, got married to Salsburg, recorded the songs with Salsburg in a nearby studio, gave birth totally new radical life seems obvious now,” she explains. “But at the time it’s like, Everything’s chaos!” 50 MOJO
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Mickie Winters
“a jungle of weeds and vines and coyote dens.” Towards the end of 2019, Shelley was wearying of life on the road. The time had come, as she expresses in a tour van song called When The Light Is Dying, to beat the retreat. Her songs, while not exactly folk music, had always reverberated with a sense of location and tradition, but now putting down roots – however unstable the ground might be – became more of an urgent narrative.
