Over the course of four albums, Louisville, Kentucky singer-songwriter Joan Shelley has built up a considerable reputation as a purveyor of fine, heartfelt folk and country. Her fifth is a magnificent addition to the canon. Recorded in Iceland with regular collaborators Nathan Salsburg and James Elkington alongside Icelandic musicians (and Will Oldham on Coming Down for You and The Fading), the 12 songs chart the course of a relationship like the changing seasons. There’s a hint of classic Joni Mitchell to the 34-year-old’s simultaneously pure and world-weathered tones. Recorded close to the microphone, with banjos, guitar, piano, drums and occasional strings never overpowering the beautiful vocals, she sounds personal and intimate. “I’m coming down for you as you always knew I would,” she sings. “All your tender parts exposed.” At times, her poetic imagery is dazzling: the superb Teal sees “the fresh air and wind and waves” get set to “tear apart summer’s stuffy and stale rooms”.
If The Sway is a superlative, sensual, devotional love song, others document the breakup process in devastating increments: the drift from friendship into sensuality, the unexplained late arrivals home and the mournful epitaph of seeing others “so entwined, as you and I used to be”.
And yet, these are timeless songs of renewal, not sadness, underpinned with quiet, steely resolution and the knowledge that emotions and loves arrive like those four seasons, to be savoured while they last.
