#Joan Shelley

[bandcampsnoop]

11/8/23.

I've been a fan of Sophomore Lounge for years. From Bill Direen to Huevos, Ryan Davis' label (originally in Louisville, now in Jeffersonville, Indiana) has been releasing diverse sounds for going on 20 years.

It seems appropriate that the label's breakout release would feature Davis (also in State Champion) himself under the name Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band. Pitchfork reviewed it on November 3rd and gave it an impressive 7.9. This LP brings to mind Wilco, The Jayhawks, Son Volt and The Silos. One of the fans who bought this wrote, "David Berman was right when he called Ryan our [Louisville's] best living lyricist."

Joan Shelley is a guest vocalist. Check out her split single with Myriam Gendron on No Quarter.

#Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band #Jeffersonville #Indiana #Louisville #Sophomore Lounge #State Champion #Bill Direen #Huevos #Wilco #Son Volt #The Silos #The Jayhawks #Joan Shelley #Myriam Gendron #David Berman #Bandcamp

[lacyflowers]

#Joan shelley #aesthetic #cottagecore #cottage #garden #music #beautiful #soft #academia #folk #Spotify

[indiestreet]

Our Favorite Records Of 2022

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom - Reset (Domino)

Shilpa Ray - Portrait Of A Lady (Northern Spy)

The Mountain Goats - Bleed Out (Merge)

Joan Shelley - The Spur (No Quarter)

Osees - A Foul Form (Castle Face)

Bill Callahan - Reality (Drag City)

Mary Lattimore & Growing - Gainer (Silver Current)

Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin - Ghosted (Drag City)

Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, Oren Ambarchi - Caught In The Dilemma Of Being Made To Choose (Black Truffle)

#Panda Bear #Sonic Boom #Shilpa Ray #The Mountain Goats #Joan Shelley #Osees #Bill Callahan #Mary Lattimore #Growing #Oren Ambarchi #Jim O'Rourke #Keiji Haino

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Joan Shelley - The Colony, Woodstock, New York, September 23, 2022

Joan Shelley went on a quick east coast tour last month — and thankfully, Eric from NYC Taper was on hand to record the opening night up in Woodstock. It is stardust, it is golden. Thank you, Eric! And thank you to Joan and her ace band, featuring Nathan Salsburg, Nick Macri and James Elkington. They sound great, of course, with a setlist full of favorites old and new. The Spur, Shelley's latest LP, is another masterpiece — if you haven't checked it out yet, you must. And if you're anywhere near Louisville, you'll definitely want to attend the Spur album release show in a couple of weeks.

#joan shelley

[turtleriffic]

#joan shelley #the fading #Spotify

[jukbox]

Joan Shelley, Amberlit morning, The spur, 2022

#Joan Shelley #folk #kentucky #the spur #louisville #Amberlit morning #usa #indie folk #guitar

[dustedmagazine]

Joan Shelley — The Spur (No Quarter)

Joan Shelley recorded her sixth full-length record in the late stages of pregnancy in rural Kentucky during the COVID-19 lockdown. It’s the kind of situation that focuses a person on essentials, on home and family and clean, uncluttered music. Even so, while this latest collection of songs is earthy and grounded, it is far from sparse. These are lovely, gracefully-shaped tunes, embellished, as needed, with guitar, strings, keyboards, acoustic bass and percussion. They have a wonderful clarity to them, but not a hint of austerity.

Many artists struggled to make music during the lockdown months, grappling with anxiety and isolation that made creativity difficult. Shelley found a workaround, enlarging her world without straying far from the patch of land she and her husband, Nathan Salsburg, inhabit. She joined a weekly songwriters’ group and tested many of these songs with other musicians. She reached out to collaborators, like Bill Callahan and the author Max Porter, to shake up her lyric-writing process. She brought in James Elkington to help with production and arrangement, and he, in turn, enlisted a slew of Chicago-based artists to play on the songs: Nick Macri on bass, Lia Kohl on cello and Spencer Tweedy on drums. Living amid goats and chickens but connected to a wide-flung community of artists, Shelley found an equilibrium between the space and solitude she needed to concentrate and the ongoing conversation with the world that artists require to keep the ideas flowing. 

Thus, there is both warmth and quiet in this collection of songs, which range from country folk to blues to rowdy, twanging rock. On the subdued side, the Bill Callahan-assisted “Amberlit Morning” is a clear highlight, its regular lattice-like picking underlined by blues-y bends on electric. Callahan shadows Shelley’s water-pure soprano, as the rattle of hand drums builds space and urgency between verses. “Breath for the Boy,” written with Max Porter, is piano-based and more modern sounding, Shelley finding a cool, breathy timbre that’s nearer jazz than country. The title track sidles and slides in a blues-y way; Shelley takes on a gutsy, twangy tone. 

All these are subtle, surpassingly pretty songs, but you really get a sense for Shelley as a songwriter in “Like the Thunder.” It’s the disc’s rocking-est tune, a muted rollick in its twining country guitars. Its call and response swells, and as it goes on, you can imagine it interpreted by other artists—louder, more distorted rock bands, contemplative singer songwriters, brassy soul bands, even. It is such a good song that it almost immediately suggests other possibilities, which take nothing away from the way it’s presented here. If Shelley wanted to write for country stars, she could. She’s as at good at making songs as she is at interpreting them, and that’s pretty good. 

Jennifer Kelly

#dusted magazine #album review #jennifer kelly #joan shelley #the spur #no quarter #rock #country music #bill callahan #james elkington

[imogen-fae]

Joan Shelley - Siren

Thanks #Woodsong for the introduction to this beautiful Siren...

#Joan Shelley #folk music #woodsong #bluesy folky #music #Youtube

[audiomoods]

In a while, flee with me, please, to the woods Hibernation envy you suffer, my sweet You stare at the sky and I'll stare at my feet This hedge, this sheet, your seamless resistance I am the river to give you assistance

Bed In The River - Joan Shelley

#joan shelley #music #song of the day #sotd #Youtube

[nofoodjustwax]

Joan Shelley - Over and Even

Joan Shelley – Over and Even

View On WordPress

#2015 #Acoustic #Americana #Banjo #Bittersweet #Bonnie &039;Prince&039; Billy #Contemplative #Fingerstyle #Folk #Folk-Pop #Gentle #James Elkington #Joan Shelley #Kentucky #Louisville #Love #Lush #Mellow #Melodic #Morning #Nathan Salsburg #No Quarter #Piano #Polished #Reflective #Soft #Soothing #Sparse #Vocal Harmonies #Warm

[musiconspotify]

Joan Shelley

The Spur (2022) … a steadying experience …

#JoanShelley

#spotify #joan shelley #the spur #musiconspotify

[ksbeditor]

Quick Picks #2 Joan Shelley, Alan Williams, and Bella White

Quick Picks #2 Joan Shelley, Alan Williams, and Bella White

Joan Shelley “The Spur” Photo by Amber Thieneman Joan Shelley hails from Kentucky and there’s something very rural and very real about her sound. Her musical influences range from the traditional music of the United Kingdom to the familiar names from the world of country music like Tom T. Hall, Dolly Parton, and Roger Miller. My own personal take: Joan Shelley is Gillian Welch meets Sandy…

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#Alan Wlliams #Allan Holdsworth #Appalachian music #Bella White #Brian Wilson #Calgary #Dolly Parton #Gillian Welch #Jimmy Johnson #Joan Shelley #Joni Mitchell #Kentucky #King Sunny Ade #Led Zeppelin #Nashville #Neil Finn #Paul Jackson Jr. #Pink Floyd #Roger Miller #Roxy Music #Sandy Denny #Steely Dan #The Cars #Tom T. Hall

[luuurien]

Joan Shelley - The Spur

(Contemporary Folk, Singer/Songwriter, Americana)

With sensitive textures and raw nerves exposed, Joan Shelley's latest album is her most personal and skeletal listen yet. Desolate and desperate, yet hopeful in her quest for solace for both her current, past and future selves. The Spur's strikingly profound songwriting supports Shelley's emotional storytelling like it never has before, and James Elkington's delicate string arrangements add earthy textures to these wistful folk songs.

☆☆☆☆

Joan Shelley braids Southern soul richness into the laid-back intimacy of a West Coast singer/songwriter better than anyone else out there, her music equal parts Townes Van Zandt and Joni Mitchell, and that quality is what's always given her music such a timeless feel. Her songs can often feel like echoes of the past, stories found in a dusty attic diary that you could keep reading for hours and hours on end, the kind of singer/songwriter whose work will feel as fresh fifty years in the future as it does now. Fittingly, her latest album The Spur orbits similar eternal, cyclical feelings, Shelley turning inward as she wrote these songs during her pregnancy and examined her life in full, worried of "...hurting a new human, of perpetuating the pain inflicted on me,", the album exploring her loneliness as a child and difficult times as both a daughter and a sister and the impact that still has on her today, how the political stress of today intertwines with the anxiety she felt as a child and how the struggles that came with growing up on the outskirts of Kentucky contributed to the person she is today. It's a quiet kind of heartache, the feelings that bubble up on a midnight walk and sit silently in your mind, The Spur a softhearted, graceful exploration of hurt and hope through Shelley's eyes. Bolstered by producer James Elkington's heavenly string and bass arrangements, there's an elegant and delicate beauty to The Spur that allows its slow-moving singer/songwriter style to still feel engaging and present. Shelley's guitar and piano playing might be the beating hard of it all, but without Lia Kohl's rustic cello backings on When the Light Is Dying or Nick Macri's thick upright bass tones, The Spur wouldn't feel so alive and organic, the woodsy feel of these songs evoking the vast Kentucky fields Shelley grew up around as she sings of loneliness and stardust and desire. The vocal arrangements also give extra weight to Shelley's words as others contribute to harmonies, Bill Callahan's crackling tenor sitting below her glowing contralto on dreamy highlight Amberlit Morning, while Meg Baird's sensitive croons on the melancholy opener Forever Blues and the barebones Between Rock and Sky are elusive with how they softly blend into Shelley's own voice. All the pastoral touches of The Spur act are more than just a cozy, wintry look for Shelley's music, her wistful arrangements a way to bring the simplicity and bliss of childhood to the music while giving enough textural depth to it all for her mature and perceptive songwriting to take shape. What's most special about The Spur is how well it's able to engage and immerse you in Shelley's music despite how minimal a project it is. Rarely is there more than her voice, a guitar, piano and some strings on these tracks, save for the occasional rollicking Americana tune like the title track or Like the Thunder, and the fact that a run of tracks like the one from Home to Breath for the Boy can be so engrossing with just a few instrumental elements is impressive in its own right, not even adding Shelley's heartbreaking songwriting and husky vocal presence to the mix. She runs through these songs at a slow pace, leaving you waiting for her next word as she plaintively moves from chord to chord through Breath for the Boy's resigned mourning or details the importance of stability over pensive guitar strums on Home, The Spur one of those albums you can lay back to on a muggy summer evening and feel like Shelley's singing right there next to you. There's a breadth to her music that integrates into Shelley's homegrown storytelling perfectly here, the restlessness in Completely woven deep into its sound as a light 3/4 groove implies a romance that her writing is reckoning with at the same time, the yearning desperation as she sings "Can't you admit that you're lonely?" a painful heartache you can feel in yourself the moment she lets those words out. The Spur's strongest weapon is its ability to make you easily empathize with Shelley's emotions throughout it, dealing with the same internal struggles as the rest of the world but able to give it a voice through her music. Natural life dots the edges of every one of Shelley's songs: ridgelines, rivers and leaves decorating her stories with an openness and vulnerability particular to the farm life she grew up knowing. She safeguards her emotions internally rather than pushing them onto others, the melancholy in her voice as she wonders "Am I safe in my skin?" on Fawn a short but powerful remark on how much we can sink into ourselves and the urge to flee the world when the pressure starts to build, but through that The Spur reveals something incredible about Shelley's music: that it never feels like it's trying to do anything in particular. Her songwriting is lightweight and floaty, drifting with the tide when it goes out and coming back to land with every new wave that crashes on the shore, her emotions present but never overwhelming the music by trying to force them in somewhere. The Spur's most potent moments of love, heartbreak and loss come naturally and sometimes unexpectedly, the same way they do in the real world, without warning and hitting you however they do, whenever that flash of a moment occurs. With Shelley's music as the conduit for it, these surprise turns in life are never something to fear - instead, The Spur offers to treat those changes as something to take in stride, letting those experiences soak into your skin and develop your mind and heart along the way. It takes time to get comfortable with, but Shelley's unadorned music makes it easy to follow in her footsteps.

#joan shelley #the spur #no quarter #americana #chamber folk #contemporary folk #folk #indie folk #rock #singer/songwriter #2022 #8/10 #album review #2022 albums

[thisaintascenereviews]

Joan Shelley - The Spur In my review of Caamp’s new album, Lavender Days, I talked about how I’ve got a complicated relationship with folk music, but I didn’t really go into my feelings on why, other than that I have a very specific taste when it comes to stuff like this, but there are a couple of other reasons, too, and one of the big ones is just how sparse it is. Not that the intimacy provided by these artists can be a bad thing, because it’s not. but my thing with most folk artists is that just having their voice and an acoustic guitar (sometimes there are strings, pianos, and other things like that, too) just isn’t enough when the artist isn’t that great of a singer or lyricist. The instrumentation is also so barebones, there’s not much to latch onto, so you really have to sell the vocals and/or lyrics. If one or both of those isn’t good, or is up to par with the quality that people want, it won’t end well for you. Because of that, I’ve just never latched onto many folk musicians, but I’m slowly coming around. I’ve been listening to a lot, whether it’s newer artists or older ones, and I’ve been discovering a lot of cool stuff. The new Caamp album was one of those, which coincidentally came out last week, but another new album that came out last week is the new Joan Shelley LP, The Spur. She is a Kentucky-based artist, who’s also from the Bluegrass State, and I guess she’s been kicking for awhile, but I’ve never heard of her until now. She’s a folk artist that’s been making music for awhile with her now-husband, and thanks to the pandemic, she was held up on her farm in KY while they wrote The Spur, ultimately getting outside help from some other local musicians and using the Internet to get some production work from a producer in Chicago, I believe. This album was definitely born from the pandemic, as many albums released in the last year (or will be released for the rest of this year, probably) have been. Normally I’d say I was interested in the album, or that I was excited about the album, but I hadn’t heard of her until I found this record, so I was really interested in diving into it, ultimately seeing and hearing what I’d get. Well, the reason that I brought up my issues with folk music, despite getting into lately, is that this is the kind of album that demonstrates exactly what I was talking about, just not to a strong degree. The Spur is a really good album, but it doesn’t do a whole lot to truly win me over. Maybe it’s because it’s a bit of a slow burn, and I’m not a fan of a folk albums that are slow-moving and somber in tone. This album isn’t necessarily somber, as it deals with the simple things in life and celebrating those things (even if there darkness around the corner that seems to be hinted at throughout the album), but it’s not a particularly energetic one. That might just account to my own personal preferences, where I’m not a fan of slower tempos, or songs that take awhile to build, and this album has a lot of songs that aren’t extremely catchy or energetic, but in their defense, Shelley is a great singer, and her lyrics are very good, too. I’m not over the moon for either one, per se, but she is a very good singer and she uses her voice well, and the lyrics of this album remind me a lot of what Caamp was doing on their new record, Lavender Days, where they’re much more simplistic in terms of their presentation, but there’s a lot to unpack when you really think about them, and there is an overall message to the mundane, so I don’t know, I appreciate the album for what it is, and what it’s trying to do. I guess it’s just that I’m not crazy about how slow the album can be, even though it’s only 41 minutes. It’s not a long album at all, it just takes its time, and that’s not a bad thing, but just not what I’m looking for. I’m glad that I heard this album, though, because it was nice to spend a few listens with it. It’s a solid little record, especially if you want a quiet folk album that does its job. That’s the best way to put it, really -- it’s a folk album that does its job in a very good way. Not the best album of the year, at least for me, but it might hit someone a lot harder, especially if you’re into this kind of music, because it’s perfect for fans of folk and acoustic music.

#joan shelley #the spur #folk #acoustic #no quarter #folk music #folk rock #caamp #lavender days

[therarefied]

Joan Shelley’s “Home”

#Joan Shelley #home

[imogen-fae]

Joan Shelley - Siren

Thank you #Woodsong for this beautiful introduction.

#woodsong #music #folk music #bluesy folky #Joan Shelley #Youtube