Get ready to be overwhelmed by tenderness and beauty: A new Joan Shelley EP is on the way. The Kentucky folk singer-songwriter will release Mood Ring in October, and its opener/title track is as spectacularly pretty as you could hope for. Shelley does not miss.

Here’s her statement on the song:

[“Mood Ring” was inspired by] the idea that heat and time are interlinked. That they tug and warp each other in space. I had read about block universe theory and it bothered me—if it were true, how do we really change anything? The song wove its own little message in response: this sense that all of us, our web of connections and the friction of our relationships, are the fuel that propels us through time… and that inevitably we are consumed by it. But what a spectacular thing to get a chance to ignite this vast, incomprehensible space with our lives. To have gotten an invitation to be here at all.

The songs on Mood Ring encompass the birth of Shelley’s daughter and her recent move away from her rural Kentucky birthplace. She reportedly finished recording Mood Ring at Louisville studio End Of An Ear with the U-Haul parked and waiting, listening to the mixes on her drive home. That context informs this additional artist’s statement:

I listened with my daughter on the drive and she wanted “I Look After You” over and over. She asked, “Is this to me?” And I said yes, while also knowing that I wrote it before she was born, and that it’s for lovers too, as well as grieving mothers. I looked at her in the rearview mirror as she mouthed the words in her carseat. When we reached the end of our drive I lost service, so I played the songs again off my phone and rolled the windows down, hearing the lyrics again “just seven steps… all you need to know for your journey” and I wished it were that simple.

“Relationships die/ That’s how we move through time,” Shelley sings. “The black of the universe ignites/ And we’re the fumes.” Julia Purcell’s harmonium drone adds a lot to an already formidable track. And Nathan Salsburg’s electric guitar work at the end? Goddamn. Don’t skip this one.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Mood Ring”
02 “Singing To You”
03 “Fire Of The Morning”
04 “Seven Steps”
05 “I Look After You”

TOUR DATES:
09/15 – Stone Ridge, NY @ Meadowlark Festival
09/17 – New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge

Mood Ring is out 10/4 via No Quarter. Pre-order it here.