Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville, Ohio hosts A Backstage Evening with Joan Shelley on Thursday, November 7 at 8 p.m. and tickets are on sale now! This show is general admission and audience members will sit on the Stuart’s stage with the performer! Ticket buyers will enter through the breezeway at our East Washington Street entrance. Jake Xerxes Fussell will open the show!

She’s not so much a confessional songwriter, although Like the River… gets closest to such subjectively emotional impressions as perhaps any album to date, and she sings less of her life and more of her place: of landscapes and watercourses; of flora and fauna; of seasons changing and years departing and the ineluctable attempt of humans to make some small sense of all—or, at best, some—of it. Her perspective and performances both have been described, apparently positively, as “pure,” but there’s no trace of the Pollyanna and there’s little of the pastoral, either: her work instead wrestles with the possibility of reconciling, if only for a moment, the perceived “natural” world with its reflection—sometimes, relatively speaking, clear; other times hopelessly distorted—in the human heart, mind, and footprint.

Since the 2015 release of her album Over and Even, Shelley has crossed the country and toured Europe several times as a headlining artist, sharing shows with the likes of Jake Xerxes Fussell, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Doug Paisley, Daniel Martin Moore, the Other Years, and Michael Hurley. She has opened for Wilco, Chris Smither, Andrew Bird, and Richard Thompson. Jeff Tweedy produced her previous record at The Loft in Chicago. She’ll be familiar to readers of guitar-centric magazines for having appeared, in the same season, on the covers of Fretboard Journal and Acoustic Guitar. She’ll be doubtless more familiar to more listeners in the wake of Like the River Loves the Sea.

General admission tickets are $22.50 in advance or $27.50 at the door. For more information call (740) 753-1924 or visit our website at www.stuartsoperahouse.org.