Joan Shelley // Real Warmth LP

アメリカ・ケンタッキーのカントリー作家Joan Shelleyが、2025年9月に同国フォークレーベルNo Quarterからリリースしたレコードです。

オルタナ・カントリー13曲を収録。

レーベルその他作品はこちら /// Click here to see more No Quarter releases available at Tobira.

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RELEASE DATE: 19th September 2025

12" black vinyl.

Tracklist:

1. Here in the High and Low
2. On the Silver and Gold
3. Field Guide to Wild Life
4. Wooden Boat
5. For When You Can't Sleep
6. Everybody 03:32
7. New Anthem
8. Heaven Knows
9. Ever Entwine
10. Give It Up, It's Too Much
11. The Orchard 04:12
12. Who Do You Want Checking in on You
13. The Hum

Text excerpt by Ryan Davis, July 2025 (via the label):

"[...]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..."..."

Artist : Joan Shelley

Label : No Quarter

cat no : NOQ102lp