Joan Shelley - Joan Shelley

Pitchfork 76

When self-titled albums fall later in an artist’s catalogue, they’re usually perceived as statements of intent. Joan Shelley’s comes five solo records into her career at a fairly big moment for the Louisville traditionalist. Following 2014’s Electric Ursa and 2015’s Over and Even, she’s become a songwriter of some renown, yoking country’s lilt and primitive picking to her wise, elegant vocal delivery. Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy enthusiastically accepted her invitation to produce Joan Shelley, her first time working outside of her usual cohort of guitarist and Lomax archivist Nathan Salsburg, and English guitarist James Elkington. They’re both present here, joined by Tweedy’s son, Spencer, on drums. Yet despite banner names all over, Shelley has explained her self-titling as “trying to get away with less… an exercise in understatement.”

Above all, Joan Shelley is intimate. Jeff Tweedy’s production barely makes itself heard—it’s all in the close-mic’d recording, unfussed takes, and dusky atmosphere. Elkington’s arrangements are similarly minimal. Each of these 11 songs starts from acoustic fingerpicking and Shelley’s clear, mature voice, and builds from there, layers of guitar stacked for depth, not impact. The feathery tangle of “We’d Be Home” and the chiming “Even Though” are Joan Shelley at its purest, songs that might breeze by unnoticed if not for her striking vocals and nimble melodies. Across the record, she seems to reckon with a non-committal lover, and the simple backing forces her insistence on her own strength to stand alone. “Yes, I can bear you,” she repeats, “Yes, I can bear it all.” She could just as easily be saying “bury it all,” in a sly allusion to her suppressing her own emotional needs.

The more intriguing parts of Joan Shelley are more keyed into the album’s bittersweet mood, evocative of Fairport Convention and Linda Thompson’s somber turns. The light dims on “If the Storms Never Came,” and Shelley sings at a flinty remove as she appraises someone who’s drawn from domesticity to the darkness. “How could you stand it, how could you stand it,” she asks, pushing into the question as if testing the gait of an old rocking chair. “How could you stand it if the storms never came?” The uneasy tone persists as she reproaches herself for pinning her colors to this person’s unstable mast. The rueful “I Didn’t Know” reaches a pique where it could start kicking up dust, but stays steady and restrained. “Didn’t know I needed him/To twirl me and to watch me spin/I didn’t know/I didn’t know,” she sings, sounding like the much-missed Nina Nastasia.

Shelley repeatedly comes back to these rhetorical flourishes—an approach that clearly feels safer than firm statements, as she clarifies when she asks, “Don’t make me say what this is/Where have we to go once we’ve described it?” on “The Push and Pull.” Yet her questions never obscure her intentions. “I Got What I Wanted” has a skittish outlaw darkness, and a muted electric guitar line that tugs like a clenched jaw. “I got what I wanted/Didn’t I?” she asks again and again, almost trilling the harsh consonants. “I got a good mother/Didn’t I?/And I got a real good father/Didn’t I?” Although she pleads with her lover to recognize her needs, the effect is devastating—as if questioning how she could dare ask for more given what she already has, or deriding her own naivety.

Despite the subtle betrayal at the heart of Joan Shelley, its sweeter moments might hit harder than the obvious darkness. “Isn’t That Enough” is a close duet between Shelley and Salsburg’s guitar that demonstrates the affection of their neighborly porch sessions, and the only song on the record that approaches concrete detail, contrasting images of carefree innocence (“I’ve watched the foal/Roll in clover and steam in cold”) with endless futility: “Oh, when all the red/Could be the wine/We never win the wars/Just see the fights.” But the only moment where Shelley indicts the other party is on “Wild Indifference,” a strange, swooping song that groans and bows like sheet metal in the wind, a low, forlorn accompaniment to her unyielding bemusement. This time-waster isn’t a romantic wanderer, but a self-absorbed myopic. “Ain’t it lonely?” she asks repeatedly, and her curiosity turns to pity.

She presses further: “Can you even see me? Am I coming through?” As far as Joan Shelley goes, the answer is definitively yes. While it’s a quieter record than its predecessors, and her ceaseless questions and lacerating self-doubt would seem like the opposite of asserting an artistic identity, Shelley’s absence of imposition only emphasizes her enviable patience and burgeoning tenderness.