Joan Shelley: The Spur — songs of isolation and retreat

The last time we heard from Joan Shelley, lockdowns had just begun and her UK tour of Like the River Loves the Sea had been cancelled. Instead she released Live at The Bomhard, a perfect career-so-far summary, and retreated to her homestead, occasionally posting songs on Instagram. Nearly all the songs on The Spur were written in — and, to some extent, about — the ambivalent experience of lockdown and confinement. They are steeped in the frustrations of not being able to perform music in person and having to write songs on video conference or by exchanging emails.

At the same time, there are the pleasures of retreat into bucolic rural isolation with her husband Nathan Salsburg (the main guitarist here) and soon a baby on the way. Shelley was seven months pregnant by the time she and Salsburg made their way to a recording studio to lay down tracks which were later bolstered remotely by producer James Elkington and fellow musicians in Chicago.

“Am I losing my mind?” she wonders as the record opens. “Do I see you’re there too?” The cure lies in the specific and local, specifically the Kentucky landscape. “High as the clouds/When we named them our mountains/My eyes squint to see them/To trace their ridge lines”, she sings at the middle of that opening track. “Amberlit Morning”, with Bill Callahan guesting, begins with the “sweet smell of clover/Coming in through the window”, even if things later take a more Sophoclean turn. The Gospel-tinged call-and-response choruses of “Like The Thunder” anticipate “these cool nights when the summer has spent/And the burning begins.”

But the eye Shelley turns on rural life is unflinching. “Here come the cows/Vanity and pride”, she sings later on “Amberlit Morning”. Callahan’s voice is like a low buzz underneath hers. “I drank their milk and wore their hide/For it takes so much to be human/And watch the bull die.” Even a song set before Covid, “When the Light Is Dying”, finds her seeing ghosts as she and the band drive through endless Kansas plains listening to Leonard Cohen’s valedictory You Want It Darker.

Comparisons have been drawn with Richard and Linda Thompson’s stark early 1970s albums, given Shelley’s history of touring with Richard and the presence of Anna Jacobson’s brass colouration on the best tracks. But Shelley’s is a more singular vision — even when her lyrical collaborator is Max Porter, on the piano lament “Breath For the Boy”, the song is all High Lonesome, no High Wycombe.

★★★★☆

‘The Spur’ is released by No Quarter