Skylight, Ky. — Week 2 of November 2016: Donald Trump becomes president-elect and Leonard Cohen dies. Songwriter Joan Sherry and guitarist Nathan Salsburg (mostly her collaborators for 10 years and mostly boyfriends for a year) were the opening acts of the tour that suddenly seemed meaningless. They repeatedly heard Cohen’s ghost farewell, “You Want It Darker,” and argued over the news.
“It was very masochistic.’Start over and feel scary,'” Sherry, now 36, sighs in one of several interviews on a phone call from Kentucky. I remembered recently with a laugh. “Talk about bad reverb. terrible Echo box. “
However, Sherry marveled at the contours of the houses scattered on the horizon as the sun set to the west of the couple along the Indiana Plain during their 2016 drive. They seemed to resist the inevitable pull of darkness. “It’s been a really beautiful point. Despite all, there was hope that someone would build a house here …” she said. “It was lonely, but resilient. Everything became part of the sunset.”
Three years later, Sherry stood in the bungalow’s kitchen and played Salsburg’s latest song, “When the Light Dies.” This is a snapshot of that dark scene, a portrait of hope by sharing patience. “Oh, I felt empty,” recalled 43-year-old Salsburg in a telephone interview. “It was a desperate and desolate moment, but she turned it into a very beautiful one. It’s the whole cocktail of being human.”
The quiet redemption of the graceful song is the highlight of Shelly’s sixth solo album, The Spur, to be released on Friday. The twelve songs, written primarily during a pandemic when Sherry was pregnant with her daughter Talia, dealt with her difficulties as a daughter and sister, rather than expectations of motherhood, a lifelong home and her As a careful observer of the cycle around worry, both politically and environmentally, about the future of the place. Death and renewal, romance and retreat, self-doubt and social hope, all with graceful restraints on the alto by her fireplace.
“I had to get rid of this junk I was dragging,” Sherry said on another interview day. “I didn’t want to be a mom, but that made it possible. I was afraid to hurt new people and perpetuate the pain I was inflicted on. . “
Sherry and Salsburg live in a 40-acre former acrested garden 30 minutes northeast of Louisville, hiding on the edge of a long driveway in the Skylight community. She grew up on a farm near her mother for a saddlebred horse that is a different world from Louisville and “the punk kids who looked so hard.”
Her parents split when she was three years old. After her mother remarried, Sherry was quiet and pensive, struggling for space among her other four children. She began to imitate the heartache song from her radio, using the words of romance borrowed to explore her adolescent anxiety. She won her songwriting contest at 9 o’clock, joined the choir she found, and rehearsed to offer a trip to the big city. When high school began, she learned chords on a guitar recovered from the attic.
“The family had no voice, but I found one through music,” she said. “That’s 100% of the reason I’m singing right now. I was the only person in the family to make this expression, so I made a quiet corner in this very isolated family in a noisy world. rice field.”
Sherry headed south to the University of Georgia, hoping that the legendary music scene in Athens would motivate her when no coursework took place. She majored in anthropology and dreamed of archaeological excavations in exotic locations.But after her graduation, she returned to Louisville and she fell into a small traditional music crew and began her old trio. Maiden Radio With two music therapists, Cheyenne Marie Mize and Julia Purcell.
“I didn’t want to play as a Kentucky Appalachia band all over the world because it wasn’t us,” said Mize, who met Sherry during the camp at Red River Gorge in the state and continued to sing until dawn. Told. “Joan wrote about her old days as her practice. She began to find her own style.”
Sherry has steadily refined that style — a braid of folk immediacy and poetic insights, like the writing of fellow Kentucky Wendell Berry — for 12 years. The tree sanctuary becomes another quiet corner, where she “returns to loneliness” to raise chickens and goats, raise collards and kale, bake sourdough bread, and write songs alone at the kitchen table. I can. (Salsburg came in for a treat, but he disappeared when he found her with her guitar. She only sang to him when her song was over. increase.)
Birds, rivers, leaves and ridges enliven her writing. Images wrestled from her surroundings provide an unexpected lens for self-reflection. “There is no convenient façade here,” Sherry said of her life on her farm. “This privacy is a way to let go of what you say and try to say something else.”
But to write “The Spur,” Sherry started her normal airtight process. She joined a new group of local songwriters who meet weekly to share the response to her prompts. Due to time constraints, she became content with her work, once considered unfinished, like “Fawn,” a playful but candid ode to protect privacy. “I was worried from the beginning,” she sang and clinched in a gentle tone. “Is my skin safe?”
And when she got stuck with a song that reflected all the births, lives and deaths she saw as a country kid, she emailed the sketch to Bill Callahan, a singer-songwriter she has long admired. Sent. In recent years, they have become penpals by meeting only once. “She is writing a song that doesn’t feel like they’re trying conduct “What?” Callahan said on the phone from Austin. “I’m not sure if the tide is full or out.”
Knowing the situation in her countryside, he provided images of cows killed for the skins and crops planted for harvest in “Amberlit Morning”. “When I was a kid, I didn’t see the tragedy of a foal dying.” The snake ate a duck. “-That’s exactly what happened,” Sherry said. “Only later I learned to cry about loss, ugliness and violence.”
Sherry and Salsburg talk about leaving farms and Kentucky as new parents who got married a year ago to find places where elected officials reflect their values. “We have this rich community of really great people, but is it enough to isolate Talia from the insidious?” Salsburg squints in the sunlight outside the barn, Alan Lomax. I asked him to work in a remote location as a curator at Max Archive. “For this child, we could use another place, another road.”
Shelly, however, waffles in the seasons. Her new song “Why Not Live Here” confronts the problem of going home in difficult places. Taking a walk towards Harrods Creek on the afternoon of her face-to-face interview, she pointed out Culvert reading and stood on the corpse of Possums as her undulating trousers shook towards the thick grass. ..
“As soon as all the trees were gone, I was like this: Stay foreverShe talked about the recent beginnings of spring and sang the last few words on the soprano vibrato. “But it’s still hard to imagine planting a child in this.”
So far, the songwriter and composer who inspired much of “The Spur” Marigold collectiveAn emerging group that organizes a lettering campaign to conservative politicians in Kentucky and, as Sherry said, a parade along the old Bison Trail to “celebrate an endangered life.” She said these actions were small, like writing a new song to deal with an old wound. But perhaps they find it more meaningful than submitting to the darkness.
“Music made me a perfect human being, which allowed my soft parts to survive,” she said on a FaceTime phone, walking in the garden with birds singing. “It’s a way to get stuck on everything.”
