Livestream: Joan Shelley & Nathan Salsburg

Joan Shelley is a songwriter and singer who lives near Louisville, KY, not far from where she grew up. Like the River Loves the Sea is her fifth album, released in the late summer of 2019. She draws inspiration from traditional and traditionally-minded performers from her native Kentucky, as well as those from Ireland, Scotland, and England, but she’s not a folksinger. Her disposition aligns more closely with that of, say, Roger Miller, Dolly Parton, or her fellow Kentuckian Tom T. Hall, who once explained — simply, succinctly, in a song — “I Witness Life.”

She’s not so much a confessional songwriter, although Like the River… gets closest to such subjectively emotional impressions as perhaps any album to date, and she sings less of her life and more of her place: of landscapes and watercourses; of flora and fauna; of seasons changing and years departing and the ineluctable attempt of humans to make some small sense of all — or, at best, some — of it. Her perspective and performances both have been described, apparently positively, as “pure,” but there’s no trace of the Pollyanna and there’s little of the pastoral, either: her work instead wrestles with the possibility of reconciling, if only for a moment, the perceived “natural” world with its reflection — sometimes, relatively speaking, clear; other times hopelessly distorted — in the human heart, mind, and footprint.

Since the 2015 release of her album Over and Even, Shelley has crossed the country and toured Europe several times as a headlining artist, sharing shows with the likes of Jake Xerxes Fussell, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Doug Paisley, Daniel Martin Moore, the Other Years, and Michael Hurley. She has opened for Wilco, Chris Smither, Andrew Bird, and Richard Thompson. Jeff Tweedy produced her previous record at The Loft in Chicago. She’ll be familiar to readers of guitar-centric magazines for having appeared, in the same season, on the covers of Fretboard Journal and Acoustic Guitar. She has become doubtless more familiar to listeners in the wake of Like the River Loves the Sea.

Nathan Salsburg is a guitarist, composer, archivist, and writer living in Kentucky. Third, his third solo album, was released by No Quarter in 2019. He is a frequent collaborator of songwriter-singer Joan Shelley, occasional guitar-duo partner of James Elkington, and he has contributed to recordings by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the Weather Station, and Jake Xerxes Fussell, among others. Salsburg is also curator of the digital Alan Lomax Archive.