Joan Shelley – Real Warmth (No Quarter) (13th Floor Album Review)
Joan Shelley writes songs that feel like places you can step inside: quiet rooms, wooded trails, a friend’s porch at dusk. With Real Warmth she invites us into the most welcoming space she’s built yet. It’s an album of home, connection, and slow-burning growth, recorded live in the dead of a cold Toronto winter yet filled with the heat of summer light.
Shelley’s arc has been steady and sure. From the Appalachian hush of Electric Ursa and the Celtic-tinged Like the River Loves the Sea to the meditative grace of The Spur, she has refined a modern folk language of clarity and presence. Here she draws that language into deep conversation with her closest companions: guitarist and life partner Nathan Salsburg, with whom she recently welcomed their first child, and producer/bassist Ben Whiteley. Whiteley brought in a community of Toronto players who became an extended family across these sessions. Clarinetist, flutist, and saxophonist Karen Ng, percussionist Philippe Melanson, pedal-steel and Wurlitzer stylist Matt Kelley, and singer-songwriters Doug Paisley and Tamara Lindeman (The Weather Station) add textures to the close and communal arrangements, further evolving her sound.
Recorded mostly live, Shelley’s vocals were captured as the band played, giving each track the hush and spontaneity of musicians leaning toward one another in the same room. You hear it immediately in Here in the High and Low: echoing acoustic guitars and gently brushed drums set a slow sway before Shelley’s voice slides in, gliding up and down like a quiet tide. On the Gold and Silver follows with tentative rattles and pastoral woodwinds, bass notes grounding a song that ends as softly as it begins.
At the heart of Real Warmth lies its patient dynamics. Field Guide to Wild Life moves from mysterious crackle to bell-like chimes, and then the music and Shelley’s singing swell and dissolve together. Wooden Boat stops and starts, as if it really is “breaking through icy fog,” while in For When You Can’t Sleep, her voice barely rises above a breath, with instruments hovering and then following it.
Throughout, Shelley’s lyrics speak of endurance and connection. In Everybody she wonders about the loss of innocence “Now we’re living by the road, far from our little Eden” before the chorus gathers like friends around a fire: “Everybody joining… we hear what we wanna hear.” Heaven Knows echoes classic country duets, a circling bass answering the refrain “I was born…”; The Orchard carries a whiff of Fairport Convention, Shelley’s lyrics evoke her child and angels while the music rests on a slow, luminous strum. On Ever Entwine guitars meld over an almost electronic beat, playful yet rumbling beneath. Give It Up, It’s Too Much builds urgency as drums quicken and Shelley’s voice rises, before birdsong leads us out.
The closing pair, Who Do You Want Checking in on You and The Hum are meditative farewells; the former framing resilience and personal care, the latter a two-minute benediction where her voice is at its most expressive and gentle, each phrase held, shaped, and released.
Shelley has been compared to the British folk revivalists Sandy Denny and Anne Briggs, as well as American contemporaries like Gillian Welch. Real Warmth draws from those same sources, and carves out an intimate communal space. Across its thirteen tracks, it feels as if she and the band could be playing just for you and a few close friends. In an era of noise and distance, Shelley offers an album that draws us nearer through its quietness, so we can listen, share, and keep one another warm.
John Bradbury
Real Warmth is due out Friday, September 19th on No Quarter Records
