Joan Shelley

The stunning, self-titled fourth album from the Kentucky singer, songwriter, and guitarist Joan Shelley began, surprisingly, with a fiddle.

In the summer of 2014, Shelley fell for “Hog of the Forsaken,” a bowed rollick at the end of Michael Hurley’s wayward folk circus, Long Journey, then nearly forty years old.

Hurley’s voice, it seemed to Shelley, clung to the fiddle’s melody, dipping where it dipped and climbing where it climbed.

This was a small, significant revelation, prompting the guitarist to trade temporarily six strings for four and, as she puts it, “try to play like Michael.” That is, she wanted to sing what she played, to play what she sang.

She tried it, for a spell, with the fiddle. “Turns out, I wasn’t very good at fiddle,” remembers Shelley, chuckling. “But I took that idea back to the guitar and tried that same method. I did it as a game to make these songs, a way to find another access point.” But that wasn’t the end of the trials.

After collaborating and touring with ace guitarist Nathan Salsburg for so many years, Shelley decided to put her entire guitar approach to the test, too.

Each day, she would twist and turn into a different tuning, letting her fingers fumble along the strings until the start of a tune began to emerge... more credits released May 5, 2017

JOAN SHELLEY / guitars, vocals, dobro, baritone ukulele
NATHAN SALSBURG / acoustic and electric guitars
JAMES ELKINGTON / piano, Dobro, organ
JEFF TWEEDY / bass, Theravox, electric guitar
SPENCER TWEEDY / drums and percussion
Produced by Jeff Tweedy.
Engineered and mixed by Tom Schick at The Loft in Chicago December 2016.
Design Lacey Guthrie.

Cover photo by Ebru Yildiz. Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound.

Songs © joan shelley (BMI). No Quarter 2017 NOQ053