Tag Archive: Joan Shelley


…includes eight previously unheard demo recordings captured solo by Shelley on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in late 2014 before the formal album sessions.
The third solo outing from the spell-casting Kentucky songstress, Over and Even is a breezy, lyrically bold, sonically beautiful soft barrage of bucolic country-folk that evokes Linda Thompson, Joni Mitchell, Vashti Bunyan, and Hem. It would be easy to peg Joan Shelley and crafty six-string co-conspirator Nathan Salsburg as the Bluegrass State’s answer to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, but they lack that duos’ trad-folk stridency and penchant for dust bowl pageantry, and their particular brand of mountain music feels much more rooted in the immigrant-rich…

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Joan Shelley follows her acclaimed 2022 album The Spur with Real Warmth, her seventh full-length release. Recorded in Toronto with producer Ben Whiteley and features contributions from the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman, Doug Paisley, Nathan Salsburg, Matt Kelley, Ken Whiteley, drummer Philippe Melanson, and saxophonist Karen Ng.
“Every emotion in one small hour,” sings Joan Shelley, observing her young daughter Talya on ‘Field Guide to Wild Life’. “A raging ocean, a meteor shower.” The folk-adjacent auteur’s ninth studio LP is alive, Natalie Merchant-style, to the marvels of creation, but also the vulnerability that comes with suddenly having a physical stake in the future of humanity.

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