Album Review: Joan Shelley, Joan Shelley

Sometimes the best thing a producer can do is nothing. Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy understands that the spaces between the notes can be as powerful as the chords themselves. “He was protecting the songs,” explains Joan Shelley of Tweedy’s role in the studio during the recording of her fourth album, “stopping us before we went too far.”
Tweedy’s production is immaculate, allowing these 11 songs to breathe on their own spindly legs. The band too are pitch perfect, from Nathan Salsburg’s guitar to James Elkington’s piano. Tweedy himself contributes some forthright bass, while his son Spencer added brushed percussion.
The result is a gorgeous album, equal parts Aimee Mann and Gillian Welch, with a dollop of Eliza Carthy thrown in. Shelley’s voice has a folky lilt that sometimes sounds like it could have been reared on the moors of Yorkshire rather than the bluegrass of her native Louisville, Kentucky. There’s a simple beauty to ‘We’d Be Home’ and ‘Even Though’, the latter managing to profess love, fidelity and strength through a few simple phrases.
The singer paints vivid images with a handful of words, her deft brush strokes cutting through the chaff and grasping the kernel of the initial shock of lust on the old school country of ‘Where I’ll Find You’: “I blamed the wind when my legs shook/ But your eyes, that hungry look/ It shot through me/ Didn’t you see?” ‘I Didn’t Know’ could be a spiritual sibling to Mick Hanley’s ‘Past The Point Of Rescue’, a slowly shuffling fugue that’s an honest rumination on the reality of falling in love. ‘Go Wild’, meanwhile, is the warmest of waltzes, Shelley’s voice soaring as she debates the vagaries of flying the nest or staying put.
‘The Push And Pull’ recounts the point in a relationship where at least one of you starts to feel you have to classify it and the fear that engenders: what if, once you name it, it slips away like sand? It’s easy to lose yourself in the swells and eddies of the plaintive ‘Pull Me Up One More Time’, while the haunting ‘Wild Indifference’ is beautifully understated.
With 11 songs in just 34 minutes, this is an album that doesn’t outstay its welcome but it’s time enough for Shelley to cast her subtle but enrapturing spell.