Over a roil of strings, drums and knotty guitar, Shelby Lynne sings "Your lies won't lea-eave me alone," attacking the line, belting, stretching the words like bungee cords.
The opening salvo of her 2000 album, I Am Shelby Lynne, "Your Lies" was a revelatory slice of classic pop R&B, the sound of emancipation, the coming-out of a singer who could bring the whole package: range, chops, precision and an intuitive way of drilling to the emotional core of a tune. On the surface, it was another angry love song, but scratch away some scar tissue and it was also a testy fuck-you to the country music machine that for more than a decade tried to turn Shelby Lynne into a polite little Nashville marionette.
Critics freaked over I Am. And the comparisons to Dusty came almost immediately. Shelby Lynne was 32 at the time and had only recently become a fan of Dusty Springfield, the soulful British pop singer of such hits as "Wishin' and Hopin'," "Son of a Preacher Man" and "I Only Want to Be With You" who had died in 1999.
Lynne still doesn't quite get the comparisons. "No way we sound alike at all," she drawls over the phone, every bit the native Alabaman. "I don't understand how people could say we sing alike."
Lynne pauses a beat, reflecting. "The only thing — we're both emotional interpreters. We have to believe it in order to sing it. When I hear Dusty, I believe her."
In January, eight years and four albums after the release of the watershed I Am, Shelby Lynne dropped Just a Little Lovin' (Lost Highway), her renditions of nine classic Dusty tunes (and one Lynne original). The disc is a culmination of an idea that had percolated for a couple of years, an idea whose origins came via an e-mail from none other than Barry Manilow, a Shelby Lynne fan whom she met a few years earlier at a Grammy function.
Cover albums are often derided as marketing gimmicks or as way stations for blocked songwriters. Lynne sees her project differently. "I had to be daring, really had to be daring," she asserts. "I was walkin' on sacred ground. You don't want to do a karaoke record. That's the danger zone. But I thought, 'What the hell. I love Dusty. It gives me a chance to honor her.'"
Lynne enlisted storied producer Phil Ramone, who in turn assembled a bare-bones quartet of veteran session musicians. They gathered at Capitol Records Studio A in Los Angeles at around 11 on a Monday morning in January '07. The group had a "menu" of songs but no plan, no sense of how the interpretations would take shape. Lynne suggested they start with "Just a Little Lovin'," mainly because it happened to be the first title on the list.
Drummer Greg Field laid down a plaintive drum pattern at ballad tempo; the keyboardist, bassist and guitarist gradually joined in. "We didn't have any arrangements," Lynne explains. "We all knew the song; they found a key and a groove. I told 'em I'd start singin' when I was ready."
Lynne waited 26 bars before intoning, almost offhandedly, "Just a little lovin', early in the morning." Her vocal simmered through the first verse, and then a pause. For seven seconds she stayed silent as the instruments dissolved away. Exquisite. Daring. And then the chorus: "This old world, wouldn't be half as bad, it wouldn't be half as sad, if each and everybody in it had …" she sang with a subdued radiance.
As soon as the first take was done, Lynne knew the album would be an artistic success. Whereas Dusty's 1969 version of the song was an uplifting testament to the benefits of sending your man off to work with a smile, Lynne's is a Sunday morning come-on that says, "Let's start slow; we could be here awhile."
The feel was set. The Dusty record would be an intimate, downtempo affair with restrained vocal performances. Singer and band breezed through "Anyone Who Had a Heart," "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me," "The Look of Love" and the rest, rarely requiring more than two or three takes. They cut a couple of songs a day for five days. "We'd get in there around 11 — it's an L.A. session thing — take a lunch in the afternoon, come back and work 'til about 6," she explains. "After that, we'd stand around and drink and listen 'til we got tired. We recorded live. We didn't fix anything [after the fact]. We cut the damn songs and there it was."
Just a Little Lovin' has stirred up the most buzz of any Shelby Lynne CD since I Am. It peaked at No. 41 on the Billboard 200 album chart, the highest position of her career. But that doesn't mean she intends to take another shot at stardom. Lynne's cult status and independence seem to suit her just fine as she nears her 40th year.
By now, her fans know the tragic story: She grew up Shelby Lynne Moorer in small-town Alabama. Her sister, Allison Moorer, also a recording artist, is four years younger. The girls sometimes sang with their father's local band on stage. When Shelby was 17, her father, an abusive alcoholic, shot and killed their mother and then himself.
After a one-year marriage to a hometown kid, Shelby lit out for Nashville, Allison in tow. It didn't take long for Shelby to get discovered. She signed with Epic Records' country division in 1988, and for a first single the label paired her with pompadoured country vet George Jones on "If I Could Bottle This Up." Over four years, Lynne released three Epic albums and a number of singles, none of which cracked the country Top 20. She increasingly chafed at the control freaks running Music City and wound up releasing two more discs in the '90s on smaller labels.
During the latter half of that decade, Lynne was mostly M.I.A. In 1998, she relocated to Palm Springs, Calif., and worked with songwriter/producer Bill Botrell on a whole new direction. The twang that had once been foisted on her gave way to a more suitable blues- and pop-oriented bent. I Am Shelby Lynne, while it only reached No. 165 on the Billboard 200, is an unmitigated classic.
The disc earned Lynne the Grammy for Best New Artist, curious at the time, considering it was her sixth full-length. Some newly minted fans, myself included, were indignant. Lynne gave a baffled acceptance speech. As the years pass by, though, the award makes more and more sense: With I Am, Shelby Lynne did in effect unveil herself as a new artist.
I wondered if she had come around to a similar realization. "I don't know if I feel any different about it now," she says. "I guess part of me thinks about it the same way you do, but number one: I don't make the rules. I'm just glad to have it."
At the turn of the millennium, suddenly hot, Shelby Lynne had a career decision to make. Her label, Island, figured that with her extraordinary voice, sultry looks and salty personality, she had the makings of a major star. Lynne admits to being "on board," but quickly adds, "I wasn't going to make any record I didn't want to make. It was still going to be a Shelby Lynne record."
Island paired her with Glen Ballard, the writer/producer who had steered Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill to mega-sales. On the cover photo of Love, Shelby, the singer poses on her knees in a cluttered bedroom, wearing unbuttoned Daisy Dukes and a tank top. Despite the questionable taste of the packaging, Love, Shelby was an estimable pop record, although most other critics did not see it that way. Neither did the public. The disc stalled at No. 109. But perhaps the public was distracted: Love, Shelby was released in mid-November 2001, when American minds weren't focused on embracing a new pop star.
Lynne's take? "The problem with that record, [people] wanted I Am Shelby Lynne again. That's all there is to it."
She's not about to repudiate Love, Shelby. "This is the thing: I love that record," she says. "I don't regret that record at all. It was my biggest effort at trying to be commercial, so I just don't think it's in me. You could put me with the most famous commercial producer out there, and it would wind up being fucked up."
Lynne switched to Capitol Records and released two far less commercial discs before the Just a Little Lovin' endeavor. Neither Identity Crisis nor Suit Yourself cracked 100 on the album survey. Then the label dropped Lynne from its roster, leaving the Dusty project in limbo until Lost Highway, home to Ryan Adams, Lucinda Williams and Van Morrison, scooped it up.
Shelby Lynne's days of grasping for the brass ring are over. "All I know is that I've been making records since I was 19, and I'm still making records at 40, and I've never had a hit single," she says without a trace of rue. "It's just as well. I would have to sing some silly little ditty every night that I probably wouldn't even like."
If all goes well, Shelby Lynne should enjoy a steady career for, oh, a few more decades. She's touring with a lean four-piece, the same instrumentation as that of Just a Little Lovin'. She'll also play songs from her other albums. Will her set at Tampa Theatre have the same torchy feel or will she mix it up? "No idea," she says. "We'll find out when we start playing."
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2008.