Why Joan Shelley is ‘focusing in on the detail of our weirdnesses’

Joan Shelley is about to head to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a happy heart. "It's a lovely spring, we're opening for Richard Thompson, so it's like a vacation."

The "we" in question is Shelley and her guitarist Nathan Salsburg. The two have performed together for some time and, although only her name appears on the bill, Salsburg's intricate playing seems perfectly in tune with her hauntingly beautiful voice and richly evocative songs.

On her new album, produced by Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy, the two create music of quiet, poetic intensity. Shelley is effusive in her praise of Salsburg who has a number of other "hats", not least a solo career and a day job as curator of the Alan Lomax Archive, the late musicologist's fascinating collection of American and world music. It is a "treasure trove", says Shelley of the archive which is housed at culturalequity.com.

Salsburg is likewise smitten. He recently tweeted with unabashed admiration: "I wish you could all hear @JoanShelley rehearsing A Heart Needs A Home with Richard Thompson in a basement in New Hampshire right now."

The idea of Shelley (31) singing with Thompson is apt. She has been compared to the great Sandy Denny, who played with Thompson in Fairport Convention's heyday. But Shelley has an orphic quality all her own, a pristine, bucolic cool, that lights up her songs of harmonious reflection.

Natural singer

Her own assessment is more prosaic. "I hope I'm a fairly natural, unadorned singer, that's what I'm trying to get at, and songwriter too." She says that her musical friends in her home town of Louisville, Kentucky, such as Cheyenne Mize and Julia Purcell, her bandmates in traditional music project Maiden Radio, have had a huge influence on how she would write and perform songs. So have the likes of Bonnie Prince Billy aka Will Oldham and Daniel Martin Moore, the singer and a key figure in the revival of Kentucky old time music.

Joan Shelley, her fifth album, reveals a singer and songwriter increasingly accomplished and assured. She says the self-title is an in-joke about how understated she is but might there be some symbolic meaning? "Nope," she says laughing. "Jeff [Tweedy] said to me, 'Is there something you want to do with this, some new thing?' No, just going to make it the same. Of course it is never the same because you are always changing, trying to be continually true to the songs and to yourself so it would evolve. But nothing like 'oh this time we're doing horns'. Nothing like that." Perish the thought.

Nevertheless, Tweedy has a reputation for doing things his way. How did it work out in the studio? “I think the people you bring into the room are incredibly important to every album. I’m pretty sensitive to feedback. I don’t know anything for sure until I do something out loud and hear it reflected back from other people. So everybody is a mirror in that way and I’m sensitive to the mirrors around me. Then that feeds back into what we are doing. But Jeff turned out to be a very good presence with a good sense of humour and forward motion; he was a very good guiding force. And that can change everything on an album. You could end up with a wall of sound from a producer or they could say ‘okay, you’ve done enough, don’t worry about it’.”

Time and space

She says there was no particular theme. “I guess the main influence was just the time and space I was in. Mostly I just write a bunch of songs and then stop. This is where the album ends. I don’t exactly know the influences but it’s kind of a time capsule and I can look back on it later and maybe it will reveal itself.”

Later she allows that the songs concern “different reflections on love, my relationships and my relationships with family and friends, just watching people like myself”.

It is no surprise that as a graduate in anthropology she tends to zoom in on the small things in life. “Yeah. Close focus. Focusing in on the detail of our weirdnesses. Yes, the small things are very beautiful and funny to me.”

She clearly cherishes her privacy, her friends, her community and struggles in the nicest way to sound convinced by the conventions of the phone interview, the litany of questions from a face unseen. A nervous laugh punctuates our conversation at regular intervals as if this whole publicity thing is faintly ridiculous; that it is ludicrous to think that a long-distance phone call could afford any real familiarity. Yet she recognises the contradiction that she is a private person who gets on a public stage each time to sing about her private feelings.

“I had terrible stage fright as a child, but I still wanted to perform; I’ve no idea why. But you hear that from a lot of different performers. At some point I got over it. I think I like that energy, the riskiness. And while I thought I’d cleared stage fright, it just manifests in different ways. I threw my back five years ago before a tour. The nerves were just physical; I didn’t have a mental awareness of it any more. But, yes, I am private and it is hard over time to get on a stage night after night.”

Strangely enough it was in Ireland that she discovered performing finally made some sort of sense. "The first time I visited was with Daniel Martin Moore and we played the bars and went all over the place, stayed with some friends in Macroom in Cork: that was the first time I thought that performing music was worthwhile. I always wanted to do something useful but for some reason it was only over there that I realised that this [performing] was legitimate. So I love going back there."

We should consider ourselves very lucky.

‘Joan Shelley’ will be released on No Quarter Records on May 5th. Shelley performs at the Greyhound, Kilkee, Co Clare on Wednesday and Whelan’s, Dublin on Thursday.