supervisord with Upstart always hangs

I'm trying to start supervisord with Upstart. The Upstart job is very simple and traditional (start on, stop on, author description, respawn, exec).

I've tried running supervisord in the foreground ("-n") and omitting the "expect" stanza from the Upstart job. The start and stop both hang.

I've tried running supervisord as a daemon (its default mode), and setting "expect" to both "fork" and "daemon" (and "stop", in desperate attempt). start and stop both hang.

The Upstart log doesn't display any entries from my attempts.

The only way that I can get it to start is to write the job and restart the system. It always starts properly. But, the command always blocks when I try to manually stop and start it.

I'm very familiar with Upstart infrastructure and configuration. Does anyone have any advice?