Shelley Short is calling from behind the wheel of her car. As we’re chatting, I imagine it’s a tiny, fuel-efficient compact, zipping through the Pacific Northwest to the first show of her tour. On this night she’s playing in the quaint community of Cottage Grove, Oregon. Given Short’s sugar-sweet folk style, it’s easy to imagine her finding a receptive audience in a place called Cottage Grove.

Her answers employ precious brevity. She seems to eagerly await the next question, although her responses themselves are small: “I’ve never been to Cottage Grove,” she tells me, adding, “I’m really excited!” Short is once again calling Portland, Oregon her rainy home since moving back from Chicago where she’d been living for a few years, and her personality is very much what seems to be the Portland ideal: Enthusiastic realism. Short is simultaneously youthful and wise, both in person and in her songs—a bewitching mix of simplicity and eccentricity.

Since she grew up in Oregon, the move back was seamless, and Short had no problems acclimating to the music scene there; almost immediately her band was rebuilt. “The Chicago music scene was very exciting. It’s such a big city and it was very welcoming, but the Portland music scene is great,” she tells me. “There’s a lot of people who play a similar kind of music and the label I’m on, Hush, has a lot of really nice people on it.” To create her signature sound of old-timey folk, Short has recently employed Portland bassist Nate Query and Desert City Soundtrack trumpet player Cory Gray to accentuate her gently plucked guitars, lap steel, and lilting soprano.

Short has been a musical vagabond, wandering from city to city, recording each of her three records in a completely different location. She developed the Americana influences that abound on her last record, 2006’s Captain Wild Horse (Rides the Heart of Tomorrow) in Chicago while playing with a band that included bowed upright bass, violin, and drums. “That really built my sound. I feel like they really added a lot to how the last record sounded,” says Short. Her debut full-length, Oh’ Say Little Dogies, Why?, released in 2003 on Keep Recordings (now out of print), was a much more isolated-sounding solo effort recorded in the desert of New Mexico. Continuing on her nomadic musical path, Short assembled her newest release, Water for the Day, with new boyfriend Alexis Gideon in LA from the remnants of some unfinished Chicago sessions. The songs were written in a torrent of a year between 2006 and 2007, which brought Short to a self-proclaimed “new landscape.” She says of her mindset when she wrote the album, “I was moving for some of the time while I was writing those, and I was in a new relationship also, so there were a lot of things to write about. There was leaving friends and a new love.”

The tracks on Water for the Day can, at times, be very autobiographical, and Short claims not to fear putting too much of herself into her lyrics. For example, “The Getalong” is about Short and her friends keeping in touch despite their separate travels. “My friends and I would do a correspondence, sort of like a blog, called The Getalong. One moved to southern Illinois and one moved to LA and one stayed in Chicago and I moved to Portland, so that song is really about just moving away and keeping in touch,” says Short. But biographical lyrics don’t limit the writer to simply write songs about just her. “It’s also about people in general,” she muses, “as many have shared that similar experience of attempting to stay connected to friends. I try to do a mix of biographical and general.”

A side effect of putting so much of her own story into her songs is that Short’s life has experienced changes during the long process of releasing an album. “It’s been in my pocket for a while,” says Short of Water, “which took nearly two years from idea to release. I feel different because I’m very settled now. I live in a house now and I just feel more stable.”

The songs on Water—such as “Goddamn Thing”, with the lyrics (“Somebody’s calling my bluff / Somebody’s had enough / I don’t know goddamn / We don’t know anything”)—are rife with uncertainty and the possibilities of endings, of discarding old lives filled with melancholy and those first unsteady steps toward a happier time. Short’s new material that she’s been working on with Gideon address her newfound contentment. “I’ve been writing, and I think I’m close to being done,” says Short of her fourth full-length. “I think I’ll do some recording at home. I’m just excited to try new things.”

When talking, Short’s pleasantly high-pitched voice burbles like a quick stream, and in her singing, the high tone gives her vocals a childlike innocence that complements the often intensely personal matter of her songs. Although she concedes that having a distinctive voice is hugely beneficial, especially to a solo artist, Short doesn’t like thinking too much about others’ opinions of her sound. “People have said that I sound like Dolly Parton or Mazzy Star—just totally different ends of the spectrum. Those two people sound really different from each other!” Short recalls. Although the comparisons are complimentary, they are confusing, but questioning herself is something that Shelley is not interested in doing right now. She’s garnered national attention and critical praise for her honest, refreshing albums, and it seems like she only has bigger, better, and more joyful songs in her future.

Listen: Various tracks  [at myspace.com]

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