Joan Shelley's self-titled follow up to her 2015 LP "Over and Even" was recorded at The Loft in Chicago with Jeff Tweedy producing and again features guitarist Nathan Salsburg, this time with Jeff Tweedy, Spencer Tweedy and James Elkington accompanying Shelley on 11 new songs. It's fitting that the set is self-titled. These are, after all, Shelley's most assured and complete thoughts to date, with lyrics as subtle and sensitive as her peerless voice and a band that offers support through restraint and nuance. In eleven songs, this is the sound of Joan Shelley emerging as one of music's most expressive emotional syndicates. To get there, Shelley had a little more help than usual. In December 2016, she headed a few hours north to Chicago, where she and Salsburg joined Jeff Tweedy in Wilco's Loft studio for five days. Spencer Tweedy, home from college, joined on drums, while James Elkington (a collaborator to both Tweedy and Salsburg) shifted between piano and resonator guitar. Jeff added electric accents and some bass, but mostly, he helped the band stay out of its own way. "He was protecting the songs. He was stopping us before we went too far." she says. Shelley's music has never been experimental, at least in some bleeding- edge sense of the word. And she's comfortable with that, proud of the fact that her simple songs are attempts to express complex emotion and address difficult question about life, love, lust, and existence itself. But in their own personal way, these songs are experimental and risky, built with methods that pushed Shelley out of the comfort zone she's established on a string of records defined by a mesmerizing sort of grace and clarity.
