The great contemporary folk singer Joan Shelley has announced a new EP, Mood Ring, her first new music since her 2022 LP The Spur. It’s due October 4 via No Quarter (pre-order). The EP comes after Joan gave birth to her daughter and moved from the place she was raised in rural Kentucky. Joan says:
I listened with my daughter on the drive and she wanted ‘I Look After You’ over and over. She asked, ‘Is this to me?’ And I said yes, while also knowing that I wrote it before she was born, and that it’s for lovers too, as well as grieving mothers. I looked at her in the rearview mirror as she mouthed the words in her carseat. When we reached the end of our drive I lost service, so I played the songs again off my phone and rolled the windows down, hearing the lyrics again ‘just seven steps… all you need to know for your journey’ and I wished it were that simple.
Contributing musicians include James Elkington, Nathan Salsburg, Julia Purcell, Lou Krippenstapel, and Jim Marlowe, the last of whom also engineered and mixed it. The first single is the title track, which opens the EP, and which finds Joan’s music sounding as gorgeously timeless as ever.
Joan says the song was inspired by “the idea that heat and time are interlinked. That they tug and warp each other in space. I had read about block universe theory and it bothered me—if it were true, how do we really change anything? The song wove its own little message in response: this sense that all of us, our web of connections and the friction of our relationships, are the fuel that propels us through time… and that inevitably we are consumed by it. But what a spectacular thing to get a chance to ignite this vast, incomprehensible space with our lives. To have gotten an invitation to be here at all.” Listen below.
Joan also has two shows coming up this month, both in New York. She plays day three (9/15) of Stone Ridge, NY’s Meadowlark Festival (located about two hours north of NYC), alongside Blonde Redhead, Slaughter Beach Dog, and others. After that, she and Nathan Salsburg have a duo set at NYC’s Le Poisson Rouge on September 17 with support from Laurel Premo.
Tracklist
1. Mood Ring
2. Singing To You
3. Fire of the Morning
4. Seven Steps
5. I Look After You