Shelby Lynne is sitting on the couch next to her collaborator and friend Karen Fairchild, who’s supposed to be promoting a greatest hits project from her own popular country vocal group, Little Big Town. And yet, here Fairchild is talking up the new music Lynne’s made, specifically Lynne's fluent transitions between poetically bluesy spoken passages and handsome, stirring hooks.
“She'll just start singing some beautiful melody,” Fairchild marvels.
Lynne responds with appreciation for what Fairchild’s mere presence does for her own creativity. “She just walks in and everything feels better,” she says.
“The other day, she texted me and said, ‘Are you OK?’ ” Lynne says of Fairchild’s protectiveness. “And I said, ‘Hell no. I'm not OK. But I'll be there Thursday [for this interview].’ ”
It’s practically unheard of for an artist to be managed by another currently in-demand star the way Lynne is by Fairchild.
“She didn’t have anybody,” Fairchild explains, “and I get very passionate about people that need opportunity and need to get back out there and share their talent.”
Lynne has her own theory of why the arrangement’s working: “[Who] better to understand what it’s like than another artist?”
An extra measure of empathy is necessary, Lynne recognizes, because she’s not the easiest client to manage. “I haven't ever thought of myself as anybody but an old, grouchy Alabama woman that sings pretty good,” she says with a hint of mischief in her steely, blue eyes. “I never liked the business. When we started working, I had a paper trail that would scald a dog.”
There was so much to sort through, from convoluted contracts to the stockpile of master recordings that Fairchild was alarmed to discover were stacked next to Lynne’s fireplace (as opposed to in climate-controlled storage). Those are the artifacts of the long and complicated career of a true singer’s singer.
From the moment that a teenaged Lynne arrived in Nashville in the late 1980s, she impressed country music’s legendary old-timers with her pipes (right out of the gate, she dueted with George Jones) and mystified industry executives with her self-determination. More than a decade later, she was crowned “best new artist” by the Grammys — her bright, but brief, pop breakthrough. And because she was never at ease in the music industry, her artistic contributions fell by the wayside over time. It’s music-making women like Fairchild, who admire Lynne and have walked their own challenging career paths, who’ve beckoned Lynne back to the spotlight.
Only now is she truly making sense of what’s transpired during her 35 years of recording, from the big-budget projects to the DIY ones. Back in the day, she wasn’t always pleased with her output, even when it made a modest showing on the country charts the way her early ‘90s breakup ballad “Things Are Tough All Over” did. “That was a hit record,” she notes, “and I never would sing it because men folk made me [record] it."
"I didn't care how good it was. Oooh, I was starting to be my rebel, miserable self!”
Lynne wanted more say in what songs she would interpret — and the chance to write her own. “That was what was missing in my records,” she reflects, “my stories, my feelings.”
After a decade of chafing against the control of the men who ran the Nashville music industry, she left for the West Coast, leaving plentiful lore behind. And out there, she wrote a revelatory southern soul and pop album, and titled it like a proper introduction: I Am Shelby Lynne.
That’s what got her Lynne the Grammy. But with that success, industry pressure only increased. And the media pried into her personal life, which she resisted with all of her might. She retreated into making stripped-down, self-released albums in her living room. It didn’t help, Fairchild points out, that Lynne wasn’t sober.
“Yeah, that’s a big deal,” Lynne concurs.
So big that Fairchild checks in: “Is that OK to say?”
“Absolutely,” Lynne reassures emphatically.
When she quietly returned to Nashville in 2018, it was to be near her singer-songwriter sister, Allison Moorer. Lynne had no designs on reviving her recording career. She didn’t exactly expect a welcome.
But one friend connected her with another artist, Ashley Monroe, who called up Fairchild. They casually started writing songs around Lynne’s kitchen table and, with the help of engineer and producer Gena Johnson, gradually persuaded Lynne to make an album, something Lynne says she was in no emotional shape to do by herself.
“It's difficult for me to say it, but I'll say it: I have not really liked myself a lot,” she says. “Because I didn't know who I was. And I'm starting to know who I am because of the safety net. And that comes from Karen and Ashley and Gena. I'm allowed to know myself, and I'm looking kind of forward to it.”
Lynne would toss out melodies worthy of pop standards, and the others would support her voice with theirs, as though they were an R&B girl group. They built throwback drum machine beats and layered on guitar, bass and keyboards. And they did it all without calling on Nashville’s famed session players. “We just had a vibe,” Lynne explains. “We wanted to keep going with it.”
They wove a sample of a wistful song from I Am Shelby Lynne into a new tune called “But I Ain’t” that captures the serrated edge of fresh heartache, only to discover that Lynne didn’t own the rights to use the old recording that way. So during a late-night session, they just retracked those parts.
That’s not the only way that the circle of music-making women who’ve gathered around Lynne are lifting up her legacy. They helped her get settled on Monument Records, the present-day version of the first record label she signed with back in the day. And that’s who’s put out her new album, Consequences of the Crown, and reissued her most famous one for its 25th anniversary.
Next month, Lynne will receive a lifetime achievement honor during AmericanaFest, and she’s about to play some of her highest profile shows to date, one opening for her manager’s band, Little Big Town.
Fairchild wants to see Lynne get her due. And maybe some more Grammys. And a Country Music Hall of Fame induction. Those are, after all, some of the primary ways of acknowledging an artist’s enduring importance.
“Do we want some of the accolades?” Fairchild asks aloud. “Do I selfishly want them for her? Yes. Probably more than I would want them for myself. But the icing on the cake will be to watch fans appreciate the record, and for the word to get out that she's back.”
Listen to Jewly Hight's interview with Shelby Lynne and Karen Fairchild on Member station WNXP.
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