Real Warmth by Joan Shelley

"I’ve been waiting for a sound to take me out of my meanness…"

When Joan asked me if I’d be interested in writing a few words about her new full-length record “Real Warmth” (her 6th for Philly’s institutional No Quarter label by my calculations, though an ever-productive stream of EPs and side-releases makes mush of that math), I was simultaneously filled with both prideful eagerness and sunken apprehension. I was honored, of course, by the invitation to puff-up the public-facing framework of a modern songwriting giant whose preceding reputation requires little to no puffing, but... what do I know? No, really, I’m not asking myself that rhetorically. What do I actually know? Like, about anything? On the best of days, I could maybe explain to you the various line-up changes that the Misfits endured from ‘77-‘83, and/or probably recite who skated to what song on Toy Machine’s 1996 “Welcome To Hell” VHS. But what would I ever be able to articulately surmise about things like, I don’t know, Sandy Denny? June Tabor? Hillbilly music, Gaelic reels, Appalachian mining songs, double-drop-D, or – more personally - the early years of motherhood and/or the semi-recent semi-major life upheaval/relocation that Joan and her family embarked on in the calendar months surrounding this record’s release?

There’s a lot to contextualize here, and there’s more authentic folk-cred in the contents (or lack thereof) of Nathan Salsburg’s Nalgene than there is in the entirety of my mortal luggage. But, in my defense, I am a listener – a much better one than I am a writer or a talker. And while I couldn’t tell you what exactly it is about the songs on this record that feel so heavy, so special, so... now, I similarly couldn’t tell you why I can essentially snore through 9 out of 10 deep-house or techno records I come across yet for whatever reason the tenth will make me want to throw a brick through a window (in a good way, with excitement). I don’t have the words for these things, but something within me does deeply understand them, and not only understands them but also processes their nutrients and responds to them on a core emotional level. I respond to “Real Warmth” because I respond to real warmth. Real people. Real nature. Real chemistry. Real alchemy, even.

Speaking of alchemy, and getting back to the task at hand... As a now decade-long victim of the various spells that Joan’s songs cast on those who behold them, the toad that they so often turn me into felt at once ill-equipped to wax intellectually upon jamming no more than the first minute of this album’s opening tune – an instant top-five Joanie all-timer by the name of “Here in the High and Low.” I mean… ouch. The inherent dread of my called upon duty only deepens with hearing the actual music therein. There’s a certain richness to the soil of the songcraft – and you can almost feel the soil of these songs in a paraphysical way while listening – as the album moves along, eventually ending only to, of course, start again, and again. I feel increasingly in tune with and charged up by the Unreal Warmth emanating from my speakers by third listen, and thirteenth, now thirtieth…

Risking the disservice of summary, I ultimately responded “Look… I’ll try.” But I’m not going to sit here and pretend to have all the headily deep reference points that an album like “Real Warmth” really warrants. There’s a whole network of roots in the groundwork of this thing that someone more educated and perceptive than myself could quickly trace into the farthest reaches of primitive-to-progressive, spiritual-to-secular, British revival and American rural balladry, etc. if one were so inclined. But even to me, in my own limited grasp of such channels, it’s fairly obvious that Joan and her singularly empathetic coven of collaborators on “Real Warmth” are an inextinguishable bunch; one of gatherers, custodians, students, co-educators, conduits, witnesses, whisperers, and all-around lifers of traditional musics, having here established a language with which they make even the arrangements themselves feel conversational and/or subject to breeze.

There is a sense of fellowship, an unforced gentleness with which truly classic-feeling song (ie ‘On The Gold’) after truly classic-feeling song (ie ‘Everybody’) organically unfold and bloom into one another’s shared space throughout the sequence at a consistently low-boil. It’s both subjectively and objectively beautiful. But don’t get it twisted, people. This isn’t “Sunday afternoon at the ole towne fair” folk fodder for the cosplaying masses, and these certainly aren’t such sunshine-and-softball times. Sure, it’s summer now (as I write this) and I see a small child playing gleefully with her father and dog two yards over from the kitchen table at which I currently sit. But governments across her world are policy-making/erasing her Earth’s biology into self-extinction (as I write this). Children are exploding (as I write this). This very music is not NOT about that…

"But who belongs to rock and farm When bombing fast and loose
You hear the ground below resound The cracking land abused
The scene is sad Too sad to bear But of this world I sing
The happy tune is spun around A world of fantasy..."

And even at its most worn, weary, and real, Joan’s musical world is ultimately one of, if not fantasy, at least some sweetly enchanted version of what we know, who we are, where we’re from. I mentioned earlier that one can virtually feel the soil from which these songs are sprouting, as if the ground of them is running through my fingers as I lie on the floor in front of my stereo. And I know Joan no longer lives in Kentucky, and I know this album wasn’t recorded in Kentucky, and I know most of the contributors are not only not from Kentucky but are also not, in fact, American at all, but even still I’ll project; there’s something so profoundly of this place in the DNA of every note. If you squint your ears you can almost hear distant cicadas calling in the wet summer night-air, but this is surely not the only phantom sound swaying freely in the fields of “Real Warmth.” Doug Paisley’s kind and perfectly measured vocals arrive roughly halfway through the record on ‘New Anthem’ and stick around for one more on ‘Heaven Knows’ before he has to get going, as if Doug’s presence was just a visit from the ghost of an old friend. Canadian percussionist Philippe Melanson’s drums sound so effortlessly cool and uniquely “other” on these recordings that every now and then – again, if you squint your ears just right – they almost sound like a subtly mixed/idiosyncratically programmed drum machine (Papa M’s “Live from a Shark Cage” or John Martyn’s “One World” both come to mind, for some reason), more phantoms. Real phantoms. Real people. More warmth...

As listener (toad), I catch myself fluctuating between two states: 1) feeling acutely in awe of the band and their ability to so sturdily yet colorfully hold Joan’s vocals aloft like a magic carpet delivering the words from song to song, and 2) feeling so mesmerized by (and later guilty about) said effect that I no longer notice they’re there at all; Here’s an easy love… Here’s any easy love, the words drift upward with an imagined quietness for only just a moment before falling softly back into their compositional cloth… But even by the album’s spellbinding ender “The Hum,” when the band really has all but left the room in Real Time, one doesn’t get the feeling that they’re any farther than a holler through the thicket away. Nor are whatever summoned forces that have so kindly guided us to and through this quite simply illuminating collection of contemporary songwork to begin with.

To, for, and with them we (toads, phantoms, friends, humans), taken collectively out of our meannesses,

"Hum
So that the spirits hear us come
So they are always near us
Always"

- Ryan Davis, July 2025

Joan Shelley is a songwriter and singer from Louisville, KY. Often joined by guitarist Nathan Salsburg, she has shared shows with the likes of Jake Xerxes Fussell, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Richard Thompson, Wilco, Marisa Anderson, Daniel Martin Moore, the Other Years, & Michael Hurley.

joanshelley.net