JOAN SHELLEY
The Kentucky voice heads to icy northern latitudes for her new album. Cue studio talk of Lee Hazlewood, Wurlitzers and strange lights in the sky.
“WE JOKED that this was the Cowgirl In Iceland record,” says Joan Shelley of her next album, referencing Lee Hazlewood’s bold 1970 opus Cowboy In Sweden. “It’s still minimal – the arrangements essentially have to sit behind a woman whispering, or singing some lullaby to herself – but the big instrumentation and dramatic sound was something I loved, and wanted to try once in my life.” To capture this, she spent a week in Reykjavik’s Greenhouse Studios in late
August, with regular sideman/guitarist Nathan Salsburg and co-producer/multiinstrumentalist James Elkington. The studio, where Shelley favourite The Letting Go by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy was recorded, is well-lit with huge, acoustically-sensitive windows. “A lot of studios don’t even have windows and light really affects me, so it was a great space to record,” says Shelley, “a kind of empty-feeling space to bring something into.” This void was filled with a wider variety of instrumentation than last year’s acclaimed, minimal Joan Shelley. “Jim [Elkington] was kind of our Swiss army knife,” she says. “He went from keys to percussion, dobro, and some guitar too. Strings are sparingly used, there’s Wurlitzer and piano, harmonium… and we found out, they don’t have a banjo in Iceland! Well we couldn’t find one, so Jim had to search the instruments they had and find something that felt the same. Depriving yourself of your habits was uncomfortable but it was the goal, to get the juices flowing.” There was also a different approach to crafting the songs, which were mostly written at home between tours for her last record, with a few pieces left from before that. “For all the records before, I’ve made a really rough demo, didn’t let anyone hear it and only taught Nathan how it went a few times before we went in, before it got too arranged,” she says. “But this time I sent the demos to Jim, and he made arrangements and really thought about the songs, and composed them, in a way I’ve never felt comfortable doing before. I had to let go of that to see what would happen.” One song which particularly benefited from the process was Teal, which dates from immediately before their Icelandic trip and which Shelley calls her “crown jewel”. “I wasn’t sure if it was really a song at first,” she says. “There’s so many parts, and the harmonies are very strange, and you wonder if it’s going to be annoying for a listener, when you get that far away from a form. But when it all comes together and the whole band gets behind it, these parts that seemed inscrutable suddenly feel delightful. It still feels like a song that didn’t get thought about very much. That’s an achievement to me.”
“We found out, they don’t have a banjo in Iceland!” JOAN SHELLEY