Joan Shelley has been making albums for a decade and a half, yet she always makes each one feel like a new, easy embrace. “I want the anthem that feels like first love/ I want the chorus that warms like fire/ I want the tune that swells like a full moon/ Knows your deepest desire,” she sings about halfway through her easygoing, endlessly hummable 10th LP, Real Warmth, which was recorded in Toronto with producer Ben Whiteley and features contributions from her partner, Nathan Salsburg, as well as The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman and a tight-knit community of Toronto-based musicians, including Philippe Melanson, Karen Ng, Doug Paisley, Tamara Lindeman, Matt Kelley, and Ken Whiteley. Singing with quietly blazing conviction, Shelley often writes through a fantastical lens, but the language they gather in is musical, conversational, nature-loving and totally human. She enlisted another great modern songwriter, Ryan Davis, to write the bio, and he notes “a certain richness to the soil of the songcraft – and you can almost feel the soil of these songs in a paraphysical way while listening – as the album moves along, eventually ending only to, of course, start again, and again.” And every time feels a little warmer, a little more like the first.
1. Here in the High and Low
Real Warmth begins with a pulse check, a deep, rumbling synth letting each musician make their tentative entrance. Shelley reads the room and really gives weight to every word that rhymes: the drum, feet, mountain, sea. It’s a gentle unburdening that makes space for the meditations that follow: “All that came before has to go.”
2. On the Gold and Silver
Karen Ng’s saxophone lifts like morning dew as Shelley’s voice glides over it, before she and Ben Whiteley thread in acoustic guitars. Tamara Lindeman makes her first appearance on the album as a backing vocalist, and though there are similarities in their lyrical interests, Shelley’s poetry withdraws in the midst of the same beauty that the Weather Station tends to expand. “In the roses hide again/ Find perfection’s damaging/ The sensual resides within/ Rest here you’ll find the answer,” she sings. While they don’t communicate the waiting by stretching the song, it shines through.
3. Field Guide to Wild Life
Shelley begins by playfully relaying the simple pleasures of parenthood – “She’s easy/ To catch when hungry” – before being totally awe-struck by her child’s emotional range. “A raging ocean/ A meteor shower/ Blinded by the fire in her,” she sings. Nathan Salsburg joins in with a catchy guitar riff any kid could sing along to, anything to get them all spinning.
4. Wooden Boat
Building off of the previous track, the song conveys the voyage of that “one boat for the whole family.” Evoking the natural elements dancing in view, the interplay between Matt Kelley’s pedal steel and Karen Ng’s woodwinds is particularly lovely.
5. For When You Can’t Sleep
Her voice hushed and reassuring, Shelley offers a remedy for late-night numbness, continuing the nautical metaphor: “Here’s an easy love/ You be the diver/ I’ll be the canopy/ The white sail/ The saving knot/ The clearing among the rocks.” What sounds like harmony vocals is just Shelley’s own, rising like comforting breath in a shared bed.
6. Everybody
On the surface, ‘Everybody’ is as becalming as the rest of the album, ending with another invitation to commune. But it finds Shelley switching positions somewhat, revealing her own vulnerability (“I’ve been waiting for a sound to take me out of my meanness”) before adhering back to the role of protector: “There’s no armor you can wear to guard the soft, open body/ There’s no serum they can sell/ To soothe the rugburn of time/ But god, if I could guard you/ Take your fire, then burn me now/ Is it allowed?” She can’t do it alone, she realizes. But if she has to sacrifice some amount of freedom for the sound to reverberate, it’s worth the price.
7. New Anthem
Perhaps it’s more than a sound; perhaps it’s a whole anthem. ‘New Anthem’ is an ode to the creative partnership that breathes life into Shelley’s songwriting; it’s Doug Paisley providing harmonies, but Salsburg is right there, swaying nimbly on guitar. “I am the rhythm that carries/ You have the hands/ The touch and the tone/ My false rhyming/ My crooked timing/ You gave it all a home.” At times, Salsburg’s contributions are so subtle you have to lean in to appreciate them. In Shelley’s ears, they couldn’t be bigger.
8. Heaven Knows
Extending the gratitude of ‘New Anthem’, ‘Heaven Knows’ is a full-on duet, and a wonderful one at that. Certain qualities recur – the silent grief, the silver dance – but shine here in their mutuality. As they sing of the world expanding and exploding, no more than supple bass and mellotron are needed to demonstrate the impact. Shelley’s words are weighty, but the song’s steady resolvee says a lot more.
9. Ever Entwine
Like ‘Wooden Boat’, the song is most enchanting for its rumbling rhythm; though it adds little thematically to the album, the fluidly intertwining guitars create a rich environment.
10. Give It Up, It’s Too Much
The song begins as a heartbreaking plea before unwinding at the hurrying sound of Philippe Melanson’s drums. “Can’t you see that you’re wide open?” she sings towards the end, giving way to unaccompanied birdsong. It’s a curious song made urgent through Shelley’s little animal kingdom.
11. The Orchard
Shelley puts her figurative language to its most political use on ‘The Orchard’, a patient, despairing tune whose longer runtime makes space for a hopeful ending. “They say the stars will pull apart/ And gravity will lose/ Into this storm I launch my love,” she declares, adding, “It cannot be that entropy should claim us for the gloom.” It’s perhaps the only song where the words are so potent they overshadow the arrangement, and for good reason.
12. Who Do You Want Checking in on You
“This one will be in a minor key,” Shelley sings at the outset, preparing for the only song that seems to veer out of gentleness. Rather than hearing of simmering anger, you hear it; the sensitivity of Lindeman’s piano is matched by Melanson’s drums, which is really transformed here as more than a rhythm instrument.
13. The Hum
It’s strange just how close the word hum hews to home; in Shelley’s voice, it sounds like a sharper, softer compression. Real Warmth may lack truly anthemic choruses, but it’s got no shortage of hummable tunes. As the shortest, simplest song on the album, the power of its closer is in everything it doesn’t say; the losses it doesn’t name, the passage of time. Those things are inevitable, but if the song endures, Shelley suggests, maybe also irrelevant. So keep it going.
