LET’S MAKE ONE thing clear: Shelley Short knows how to spell
the word “canoe.” But you might not assume as much from the title of
the Portland native’s new album, A Cave, A Canoo. The typo is
deliberate, Short explains: “It’s not a reference. I just liked the way
it looked, visually. I liked the way it looked on a page,
written—black words on white paper, and when I wrote that out I
just thought it looked really cool. So it’s just kind of
aesthetic.”
Sonically, the album’s aesthetic matches its title; a familiar,
functional craft (in this case, folk music as opposed to a canoe) is
turned just slightly off-kilter to create something strange and
enveloping. Short’s songs are models of restraint, sketched by plain
acoustic guitar and sparingly colored, but something about her voice
and delivery—not to mention her lyrics, which avoid easy
sentiment—indicate infinite, potentially treacherous depths
beneath the placid surface.
Canoo‘s carefully cultivated mood can be attributed to the
album’s extended span of recording, which allowed Short and her
collaborator, guitarist Alexis Gideon, to lay down tracks over the
course of a year.
“It was just really nice not to have a time limit,” she says.
“Recording at home, I didn’t have the feeling of having to worry about
paying by the hour, or when to go in, so it could be in the middle of
the night. It added a lot of freedom, which I think was really helpful.
I had an end in sight but I wasn’t trying to push it, so when it felt
right, then I knew the songs were all finished.”
“Since I met you, I’m afraid of dying,” Short sings in “Familiar,”
as grunting cellos butt up against Gideon’s pointillist guitar,
grabbing isolated points of light from a dark firmament and smearing
them into a messy galaxy. “Mockingbird” sounds like a haunted lullaby,
and the late-night bleariness of “How Was the Water?” transforms a
life-affirming melody into something a bit more ominous. But the
album’s “Interlude” is perhaps its weirdest jag, consisting in part of
a found recording of a young boy singing “(There’s a) Bluebird on Your
Windowsill.”
“My parents found this really cool 78 at a thrift shop,” says Short
of the track. “It’s red and cardboard, and it has this plastic coating.
They used to have booths you could go into and record. My dad did it
when he was a little kid, ’cause his dad was in the war, so he could go
in and be like, ‘Hi, Dad! We miss you!’ and then send it. I think
that’s what this is—from that kind of booth, although I’m not
sure.
“There’s a little boy singing that bluebird song,” Short continues.
“And on the flipside of the record is him playing an accordion. It’s
really cute. I don’t know who it is. It doesn’t have a label on it, but
I just really—I love that little song. It’s really uplifting the
way he sings it.”
The song, originally written by a Canadian nurse for a sick child,
flows into a pastoral acoustic guitar passage and a field recording of
rainfall, to create a moment of simple introspection that balances
perfectly against the rest of Canoo‘s relative menace. The
album’s songs’ simplicity—along with their rare, menacing
beauty—thrusts Short into a naked spotlight, and her ability to
transform languid folk music into stark reflection results in a
challenging, seductive record that’s not easily forgotten.