During the final verse of "Over and Even", Joan Shelley discovers the ceiling of her evocative voice and dares to test it. The title track of the Kentucky singer-songwriter’s beguiling third album, "Over and Even" is a gentle canter. Cymbals splash idly against a steady electric guitar, and a banjo babbles in the distance, as though it soon hopes to join Shelley’s fireside chat. The song itself, though, is an anxious number, where images of domestic bliss disintegrate into feelings of longing. At first, Shelley offers scenes of nesting bliss in her warm contralto—smoldering embers and full cups of coffee, handwritten letters and thoughts of friends. But during every other verse, her voice becomes a thin and nervous soprano, as if she’s barely able to utter her own words. With the song's last words, she admits to an abiding loneliness: "I miss your scent and sight," she sings, her voice about to break. "How can I write this?"
Shelley weaves that feeling of vulnerability throughout the dozen songs of Over and Even, an album that is alternately more confessional and prismatic than her previous output—and better for it. Shelley comes from an American folk background, with a history singing songs endemic to her rural region. She records, for instance, with Maiden Radio, a trio that works through standards with traditional instruments and commingled country voices. While her earliest solo records spoke to that pedigree, last year’s Electric Ursa took bona fide compositional risks. "Something Small", for instance, grew like a post-rock phoenix, while "Remedios" suggested a lullaby bound forever in hypnagogia. She embraced elliptical songwriting, too, webbing together evocative phrases to suggest a story more than share it. If Electric Ursa began with a folk core, it ended with folk in fragments.
On Over and Even, however, Shelley returns to her roots without fully retreating beneath them. Accompanied by fingerstyle guitarist and musical archivist Nathan Salsburg, she favors a refined simplicity. "My Only Trouble" is a duet for strummed-and-picked acoustic guitars and her leaping-and-diving voice, while "Easy Now" is a big-chord ballad, where reassuring piano lines offer support behind lithe, bluegrass-like runs. Even the more fully produced numbers, like the organ-lined and electric "Ariadne’s Gone" or the Will Oldham-backed beauty "Stay on My Shore", seem only to dress up simple structures, to cast them in a full studio glow.
The lyrics follow suit, too, with Shelley letting listeners in as she previously didn’t—hence, the hint of unease that ends "Over and Even". "My Only Trouble", for instance, is sensual but bothered, with confessions of intimacy chased by admissions of worry. Likewise, "Stay on My Shore" betrays a human neediness that Shelley might have once clouded or cloaked. As Oldham chases her through the verses, their musical push-and-pull reinforces the give-and-take of any good relationship or, as they sing with their last shared breath, "the pages of our story." That clear lifetime theme returns during the gentle "Not Over by Half". Meant both as a mournful dirge and an anthem of expectations, the song positions a death as a reminder that everyone else still has the chance to live. "Here on the mountain I’m thinking of you," Shelley sings in one of her most vivid bits of writing yet. "The birds are all singing, screaming of youth." She keeps the listener almost as close as the subject.
This tension between plain old songs and structures and an interest in omitting details and accessorizing sounds enlivens Over and Even from start to finish. Shelley started with folk and then pushed away from it, to Electric Ursa’s spectral and soft version of roots-rock. But now in the middle, where the songs are direct but bent just so, she’s more compelling than she’s ever been.
