Joan Shelley reveals upcoming album “Real Warmth”, set for release in Autumn 2025.

Singer-songwriter Joan Shelley has announced her new album Real Warmth, set for release on September 19, 2025 via No Quarter. 
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The record follows her 2022 LP The Spur, written while the pandemic kept her close to her home in Kentucky. By late 2024, as Shelley and her family settled into a new home in Michigan, her next collection of songs began to take shape prompting her to search for a place to record in the company of trusted friends.

That search led her to Ben Whiteley, bassist for The Weather Station and Jake Xerxes Fussell, who engineered the winter sessions at Casa Wroxton in Toronto that would become Real Warmth. “We had a few windows in mid-winter,” Whiteley recalls. “It really felt like there was an urgency to capture a moment in time these songs, these performances, these people in the context of the political backdrop. The record feels more like a document than a meticulous construction. Joan’s concept was not only to go to a place but to draw on the community of musicians from that place.”

That Toronto-based community included drummer Philippe Melanson, saxophonist Karen Ng, singer-songwriters Doug Paisley and Tamara Lindeman, Matt Kelley, and Ken Whiteley. Shelley’s partner, guitarist Nathan Salsburg, also contributed. The album’s cover and inner sleeve were designed and painted by Toronto artist Heather Goodchild.

Shelley offers three overlapping interpretations of the album’s title: the warmth of physical closeness, a spiritual and humane warmth, and the literal warmth of the planet—underscoring the urgency of our present moment.

The first single, “Everybody,” embraces the first of these themes and is available to hear now.
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