7 minute read
JOAN SHELLEY
from M_07_22_acisuM
by aquiaqui33
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
THE 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 “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. 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!” ➢
Mickie Winters
Joan Shelley
JEFF TWEEDY, WHO EFFTWEEDYWHO produced Shelley’s eponymous 2017 album, is another who adi th h d mires her distinct sense of place: “I’ve never heard her sing a single note that sounded like she was unsure of exactly how far from home she is.” But for all the preoccupation with roots, the bucolic retreat, it would be a mistake to see Shelley as a pastoral romantic. Like Linda Thompson and Gillian Welch, two great singers she in some ways resembles, there’s a clarity and toughness to her vision: Amberlit Morning, a duet with Bill Callahan on The Spur, finds her confronting rural reality. “It takes so much to be human,” she sings, “and watch the bull die.” think it makes me see things clearly,” she says, sat in the bedroom of her patched-together home romantic I was, the more there was in between us, and then I would get something wrong. Horribly wrong. As you grow up, you see that everywhere. To try to be a better writer, it’s about acknowledging and accepting and integrating the cruelties and the rough edges of a place. lute pain, and I want to be in the middle of it all. I don’t want to be ruled by the doubt, and I don’t want to be fooled by the romance.”
“Joan has a steeliness about her that I think comes across in her songs,” says Nathan Salsburg, a week later. Salsburg tells a story of how, a few months back, their chickens were having tail feathers
Home is where the art is: Shelley takes in the view, Louisville, Kentucky, March 10, 2022; (opposite, clockwise from top left) hanging out with her chickens and cat; on-stage with Richard Thompson, 2017; with husband Nathan Salsburg, 2022; kicking back with Maiden Radio (Cheyenne Mize, left, Julia Purcell, centre) in 2015.
pulled out while still in their pen. One morning, they found a decapitated chicken; a possum or raccoon had been reaching through a hole and trying to yank the birds out. “Joan,” continues Salsburg, “put on her gloves and pulled this headless chicken’s body out of the side of the pen and went and buried it in a hole. She’s really no-nonsense around where we live. She does not shy away from death.”
JOAN SHELLEY GREW UP ON A SMALL horse farm outside of Louisville. Her father, a painter, was born there, but had lived in New York, married at the time to a model and on the periphery of Andy Warhol’s scene. “He won’t tell me his exact involvement, because he swears he’s never done a drug in his life,” she laughs. Growing up in the 1990s, she found the local punk and post-hardcore scene “scary. I was too young to get that they were kind people who just looked angry.” Eventually she would return and discover that those punks could introduce her to bluegrass and English folk music, to Richard & Linda Thompson and June Tabor and lived in Buenos Aires for a while. “I remember feeling like piles of trash were all around me, my last city experience – I couldn’t handle the waste. I needed to be near a green place again, to come home in a big way.”
Back in Louisville, she fell in and out of bands – enduringly a trio called Maiden Radio, who released three albums of mostly traditional folk songs between 2010 and 2015. She also, beginning in 2010 with the self-released By Dawnlight, embarked on a tentative solo career. Since then, her catalogue has swollen to seven albums that often balance a precise understanding of her home turf with perspec Like The River Loves The Sea found her relocated to a studio in Iceland, while Joan Shelley (2017) was recorded in Chicago with Jeff Tweedy and artists in Tweedy’s orbit (the producer/multi-instrumentalist
l p g p m i n
James Elkington, Tweedy’s drumming son Spen Over And Even, in contrast, was written in that other Athens, Greece, after a Leonard Cohen-like venture to write on a Greek
“I was supposed to go over there with someone who told me they helped people write songs – like, ‘Come to Greece, you’re gonna see this amazing island, write these songs and do all this tiny room with no light, and eventually realised
SThe Spur, worked on through lockdowns and false springs, at one remove from the world, is perhaps the most local songwriters that she joined in early 2020 continued to meet online, setting each other creative “In the most isolated time in my life,” she won
Gradually, this apparently random lockdown project coales kind of fucked o
ST. JOAN
Joan Shelley, by her accomplished admirers. NATHAN SALSBURG
(Pictured with Shelley, above) “She’s very oriented towards earthy things – having a garden, being in the woods, at the creek, being quiet, being stationary – those things are really vital to her creative process, vital to her human process. She has a very particular sense of nostalgia, a longing for home. It’s not innocence: it’s a deeply felt and experienced state she carries with her, because just as much as it’s a yearning for the past, it’s a kind of vision for the future.”
JEFF TWEEDY
“Old songs have ways into our hearts that are well-worn and true, like how a path through a forest over time can become indelible. Any of us can follow along sure-footed and certain – secure in the knowledge that getting lost is an impossibility. Joan sings her own songs like that – like she’s been tracing her own melodies along the contours of the natural world for centuries. Truly remarkable.” WILL OLDHAM
“She’s an artist who comprehends some of the magic of those who’ve come before us; that it’s magic, along with craft, that makes for strong songs. She’s referential in her song-making while giving alchemy its necessary share of the burden. I love singing Joan’s songs with her. It’s like having the ghost herself hold your hand on a tour of her haunted mansions.”
The Spur and how I’m so thankful for the cover I had, for the space to come out of that little chrysalis and
What has emerged this time, then, is a record the consolations and uncertainties of nesting is there a greater pattern?” playing a gig with her daughter Talya on her distracted from her so arrived, it seems, to step out of the homestead ourselves and not really set ot d M
