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Thursday, July 07, 2022

PLAYLIST: What are we Listening to? :: JOAN SHELLEY | The Spur



 https://joanshelley.bandcamp.com/album/the-spur


I want to explain these songs / I want to leave them unexplained. 

We’ve all been working with a lot of silence. 

I was tired from touring, remembering the long drives across the midwestern plains at dusk, against the pale yellow sky seeing the black outline of the horizon with the occasional silhouette of a little farmstead, a corn crib or windmill, beyond, a breaking society, beyond, the aches of a world in pain. 

A powerful tugging between apparently opposite things, hopelessness and resilience, isolation and togetherness, all at once. 

A deep connection to our homeplace, to staying, a complex reckoning with family, with the past, with the rubble, with the wind taken out of everyone’s sails, with new life and constant death. 

We returned to the feral tree farm. 

Raising goats, chickens, listening to birds, watching the river, growing a child. 

A deep clean spring. 

So I started reaching out. Bringing in. 

I wanted these people I admire to be close to me in the game, in the tangle of my emotions, in my unaddressed fears, I wanted them woven into my tapestries, which are songs, because I am...  more

credits

released June 24, 2022 

Produced by James Ekington. Recorded and mixed by Zak Riles at Earthwave Studio, Shelbyville, Kentucky. 

All songs by Joan Shelley with additional lyric contributions from Bill Callahan ("Amberlit Morning"), Katie Peabody ("The Spur"), Max Porter ("Breath For The Boy") 

Joan Shelley - vocals, acoustic and resonator guitars, piano 
Nathan Salsburg - acoustic and electric guitars 
James Elkington - drums, keyboards, dobro, mandola, bass, recorder, percussions 
Meg Baird - vocals (1, 11) 
Bill Callahan - vocals (4) 
Anna Jacobson - brass (5, 6, 10) 
Sean Johnson - drums (12) 
Lia Kohl - cello (1, 6) 
Nick Macri - upright bass (1, 7, 12) 
Spencer Tweedy - drums (5, 10)

license

all rights reserved


Transmissions :: Joan Shelley

On Joan Shelley’s fantastic new album The Spur, the singer/songwriter reaches out from a place of solitude, seeking connection. Rooted in Britfolk aesthetics, it’s an album that feels intimate but spacious too, all finger picked acoustic guitars, Richard Thompson inspired electrics, and sparse percussion.



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