Before the body kept score, the mood ring promised to illuminate the interior. There was never any science behind these dime-store trinkets, yet their charm lives on. Sure, the shifts in color are just a thermochromic reaction to body temperature, but what if their rainbow reactions happened to exactly reflect how you were feeling at that moment—or cast a tiny opaline window into some as-yet unrealized emotion? The hope of being seen, the magic of it, even, is potent and irresistible—and it’s something that Joan Shelley is especially gifted at.
On the Mood Ring EP, the Kentucky folk songwriter’s first release in two years, she is deeply attuned to the unnamed people around her and how to best meet their needs. She intuits someone’s “swirling purple tint” on the title track and invites them to a party. “Singing to you has never worked,” she hymns warmly on “Singing to You,” presumably of her young daughter’s nursery-rhyme preferences, recognizing instead that it’s “better just to row the boat/To a hum/No words at all/To keep you from you.” The closing song is called “I Look After You.”
Care has long radiated through this still-underrated musician’s work. Shelley has the kind of bright and clear voice that brims with tenderness and patience, which also means that any forces that threaten to unsettle those traits immediately register within it. She and her husband, Nathan Salsburg, share a collaborative sensibility, interest in vernacular music, and quality control level similar to those of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. (After they met and found their sound, Shelley has said, “I was like, we are Joan Shelley, and he was like, I’m cool with that.”) Musician James Elkington often rounds out their partnership, the three of them sharing a comfortingly intuitive bond and creating places you may want to stay a while.
Elkington produced Shelley’s 2022 album The Spur, her most ambitious and wide-ranging record to date. But Mood Ring has no named producer and is a far simpler affair, with a small and subtly arranged ensemble used to striking effect. Understated doesn’t mean lacking in complexity. “Singing to You” is essentially a devotional to a child, but the minor-chord weave of shuffling percussion, pealing fiddle, and gentle invigoration is no simple balm. There are what initially seem like moments of pure sweetness in the lilting, loving pendulum swing of “Mood Ring” and “I Look After You,” with its kalimba lullaby plink. But the former, inspired by Shelley’s reading about block universe theory—in which past, present, and future exist simultaneously—ends with her singing, with a shrug, “Relationships die/That’s how we move through time.” The latter seems as much an offering to the living as to something lost, “Your scent/Telling you once lived/In my sun.”
