When Shannon Davis was 16, she picked up her uncle’s jumbo acoustic Epiphone guitar. She had never known her uncle — he had died when she was a baby, but she knew he’d been a folk singer-songwriter. She’d listened to tapes of him playing original songs and covers recorded in the early 1970s.
“He was a very passionate artist,” Davis says. “And he was a lonely guy.” She felt a kinship with him on that front. “I felt like a lonely person, too.”
Davis, who grew up in Harwich, wrote poetry and kept a journal in high school. Listening to her uncle’s music made her feel less alone. She decided to learn guitar. “I taught myself ‘The Needle and the Damage Done,’ by Neil Young,” she says, and she took lessons for a year.
At college in Oregon, Davis studied field biology, and songwriting took a back seat to bumblebees and stinkbugs. Occasionally, “I’d pick up the guitar and play cowboy chords,” she says. She also wrote a couple of breakup ballads.
After graduating, Davis went to Madagascar with the Peace Corps from 2016 to 2018. She brought a travel guitar, a Baby Taylor, and wrote some songs there. Once again, there wasn’t much time for it. The same thing happened when she came back to Cape Cod with a job working for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture at Otis Air Force Base in Sandwich.“I kept getting really depressed because I didn’t have enough time for music,” she says.
But Davis was playing and writing enough to win a prize at the New England Songwriting Competition for “When We Were Kids” in 2020. And a couple of years later she turned to gigging full time.
Tell Me a Story is Davis’s debut album, released in October 2023. Grammy-nominated Jon Evans was the producer, and he plays every instrument on the album except for acoustic guitar, played by Davis, and the drums, played by Matthias Bossi.
“People ask me, ‘What kind of music is it?’ ” Her answer: “Dark, sexy, romantic.” The songs, folksy, with a Western tilt, sung by Davis supported by a small band, are mostly about made-up characters and stories, she says, but she has woven her experiences into them. They are fiction, she says, but feel very real.
The album’s seven songs are “cousins,” she says. In “Are You a Sailor,” she sings to someone very far away. “It’s a song about a widow who is waiting for her lover to return from being out at sea,” Davis says. Her smooth voice settles on the insistent undulation of a finger-plucked guitar. The song is eerie; it follows an unpredictable, destabilizing chord progression like a folk song on the edge of something. Underneath, barely identifiable, a drone sounds deep and heavy.
“Hey Lover,” sings Davis in “Tell Me a Story.” The song seems to smile. “I know your name.” It’s about a certain kind of affair, she says. “You know it won’t last, but you tell yourself you’ll enjoy it while it does. When it all goes to hell,” says Davis, “you wonder why you did that to yourself.”
Davis’s loneliness lingers in “Flesh and Bone.” She harmonizes with herself: her voice, like on every other song, is unbothered by vibrato. It emerges from and retreats into the conversation between piano, drum set, and guitar. “I’m just a ghost girl,” she sings, “standing alone.” She’s been betrayed. “But I’d do it all over again.”
The final track, “Fade Into Dust,” begins with her clear and plaintive plucked guitar over a harmonic progression that sounds vaguely Latin. Her uncle’s guitar, from which her music started, has not disappeared or faded into dust. She still has it. But she recorded Tell Me a Story on an acoustic Larrivée that she bought used a few years ago and loves for its light and airy sound.
With the album out in the world and her characters pouring their stories into the ears of strangers, a funny thing has happened. “It doesn’t feel like it’s mine anymore,” she says. But she likes that feeling. And anyway, her guitars, which used to belong to someone else, are hers to keep.
