Les Shelleys

THE SHELLEYS, Together for old time's sake by Ken Smith and Scoop Stevens San Diego City Beat“It’s a name I’ve always loved,” confides romantic singer-songwriter Tom Brosseau. “In elementary school, I had a friend, a girl in the second grade, and her name was Shelley.”It’s early on a Sunday morning, but Brosseau and musical partner Angela Correa are up and ready to talk about their new project, The Shelleys. Both are established solo artists—especially Brosseau, who has been played on influential college radio station KCRW, and was recently featured in the station’s “Next Up” concert series.The new collaboration, however, allows them to interpret a wide range of material from other tunesmiths. Essentially, The Shelleys is a cover band by two top-notch San Diego artists.Although now based in Los Angeles, Brosseau spent most of the past four years as a perennial in the local coffeehouse circuit, and was introduced to Correa’s music by iconic crooner Gregory Page.“I first heard her music when she was doing avante-garde recordings on a four-track cassette recorder,” Brosseau recalls. “Gregory turned me on to that, and he kept saying that Angela and I would be great as a duo.” Fate—and a need to pool monetary resources for recordings—brought the two together.“Angela borrowed my mini-disc player to record her first effort. She asked me to sing on a couple of her songs. The sound of the two voices together and the fact that we both enjoyed the same range of music made it a natural progression.”Laughing, Correa clarifies: “I kept pestering him to record more duets.”For the last couple of months, the duo has been road-testing the material, preparing to unveil their debut album, Popular Songbook.“The album came out of songs we had already started performing, in the folk tradition,” says Correa. “For this disc we were looking for more obscure material that we could rearrange and make our own.”“It’s looking like it’s going to be a series,” Brosseau adds. “The first album that we have is folk music. We go as contemporary as John Prine, or as traditional as Leadbelly. We tried to pick a couple of obscure ones by Bob Dylan, but that was pretty hard, because everybody already knows even the bootleg stuff.” (They settled on “Billy” from Dylan’s soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.)The pair will continue their solo work, but they say they’re already finishing up a second Shellys album. “The next one is 1950s pop music,” Brosseau explains. “That’s how we got on the kick of singing together, doing things by Kay Starr or Les Paul & Mary Ford and so on.”Correa suggests that the simple musical backdrop of two guitars and two voices brings out the best in the vintage tunes they’ve chosen, like Nino Tempo & April Stevens’ “Deep Purple,” written in 1934.“I personally enjoy music that’s stripped down and bare bones,” she says. “Great songs don’t need all the bells and whistles to stand out. The tunes and lyrics can carry the moment. I have a real passion for lo-fi sound, along the lines of the K Records aesthetic. And there is such a huge, untapped wealth of songs that lend themselves to this sort of recording.”Brosseau realizes getting a larger audience for arcane songs is an uphill battle in today’s music scene—especially for tender folk artists without Hot Topic appeal—but that’s not a consideration with this project.“We’re not concerned about getting on a label, or dealing with any of that sort of thing right now,” he says. “We just hope to get people enthusiastic about the old songs again.”