Shelby Lynne is the first to admit that she didn’t think she had another album in her.
Fortunately, Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild, Ashley Monroe and other members of Nashville’s elite music community begged against it. Together, they pushed the Grammy winner back into the studio once more. And now Lynne couldn’t be more grateful.
“I just made one of the best records of my life,” the 55-year-old Alabama native tells PEOPLE of her just-released Consequences of the crown.
That says a lot for Lynne, who is not only her own harshest critic, but also the creator of some of the most witty and unique songs of the last 25 years.
There is no illusion that younger audiences may have heard of her, but those who have – like Fairchild – have placed her in that rarest of vocal artists, the crooner.
“She was just a cool girl that everybody loved and wanted to be with,” says Fairchild, 54, recalling when Lynne first appeared on her radar with the pioneering 1999 album. I’m Shelby Lynne.
It’s no wonder Fairchild accepted Monroe’s invitation to join Lynne for a songwriting session in Nashville in January 2023, though Fairchild — a multiple Grammy winner herself — admits she’s nervous.
“I was a little afraid—you know, will she like me?” Fairchild admits. “I didn’t know what it was going to be like because it’s such a force.”
But Fairchild also had what many other fans were wondering: Why hasn’t she heard from Lynne in recent years?
Shelby Lynne.
Becky Fluke
As it turns out, Lynne is the one who snuck in. It was a long journey back.
She first appeared on the scene in the 1990s with major-label country albums in Nashville. But nervous about the format, she fled to Los Angeles in 1998, re-emerging with I’m Shelby Lynnea genre-defying masterwork project that took full advantage of her soulful voice and well-honed songwriting skills. Abundant critical acclaim quickly introduced Lynne to a wider audience, and in 2001 she won a Grammy for Best New Artist. However, she was never able to fully capitalize on this career progression, and by 2006 she was releasing her music on smaller labels, creating a long line of what she calls “living room records”. There are gems among them, but few people listened to them.
This lifestyle, she says, has allowed her to avoid messing too much with the machinery that runs the big music market. “I never liked the job anyway,” says Lynne. “I like to create. I love to perform. I love doing those things, but it’s never been easy.”
Lynne also admits that other things got in the way, including alcohol and what she describes as “unhealthy” relationships. She made ends meet with regular performances in front of enthusiastic fans in small venues, but otherwise, she says, she isolated herself: “I was afraid, I was afraid to go out into the world. Put me in front of 10,000 people, that’s easy, but throw me out of society, I’d just go behind the curtains.”
Then, just over two years ago, she decided she had to make dramatic changes. The first big step was to stop drinking alcohol. “I got help,” she says, “because I was determined to stay sober.”
Lynne also realized she was tired of the sprawling concrete of LA and longed for a more natural environment: “I’m a Southerner through and through. I can live anywhere, but I really missed the humidity,” she says, adding with a laugh, “Not many people can say that.”
Her younger sister, Allison Moorer, herself a country artist with a major-label career in the late 1990s and early 2000s, invited her to join her in Nashville. Returning in 2022 “seemed like the right thing to do,” says Lynne.
However, she was sure that her recording career was over; her dual focus was on staying healthy and finding a place in the city’s songwriting community. For a while, she did just that, learning along the way—for the first time in her life—how to co-write in the sessions Nashville is known for. She honed her craft with, among others, singer-songwriter Waylon Payne, Monroe and Monroe’s Pistol Annies bandmates Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley. Then Fairchild entered the scene, instantly charmed by the lock of the woman she had so nervously met.
“She came up to me and gave me a big hug and said, ‘I’ve been watching you for a long time,’” Fairchild recalls, “and I think we wrote three songs that day. We just hit it off.”
As the sessions continued, the conversation irresistibly turned to the idea that Lynne should record. How could it not be when Lynne herself was learning songwriting?
Fairchild, for one, was in awe. “The voice is strong, soulful, raw,” says Fairchild, who knows more than a few things about powerful vocals. “He has some pain in him that I don’t often hear. It is this intangible thing that is inside her body and her soul that comes out in her voice. That’s what she was meant to do.”
Lynne says she finally decided to try recording the song “Butterfly.” The song, a joyful tribute to her sister now on the album, features lush, layered vocals from Lynne, Fairchild and Monroe.
“Butterfly”, Shelby Lynne
“We were so excited about that,” Lynne recalls. “We worked so well together at that moment and it was like the first time. And then we built a record around that.”
Grammy-winning engineer Gena Johnson signed on to the project and the four women began work, each sharing the role of producer; Monroe and/or Fairchild co-wrote all but one of the album’s 12 songs with Lynne. Other songwriters, including Presley and Payne, fill in the check-out words.
As with much of Lynne’s catalog, the finished product defies easy categorization. But genre doesn’t really matter with music that’s so full of surprises that demand constant listening: vivid and evocative lyrics (which are poetry at the same time), twists of melody, spontaneity of sound. Through the line is Lynne’s voice, purring and raging, rejoicing and despairing.
Just as Fairchild confirms, no one inflicts pain like Lynne, beckoning with reassuring intimacy. The well she draws from is deep, not just a lifetime’s accumulation of romantic heartbreaks, but also a childhood affected by her father’s abusive behavior. It ended in devastating fashion in 1986, when her father shot and killed her mother and then committed suicide, a history detailed in Allison Moorer’s acclaimed 2019 memoir. Blood.
Allison Moorer on trying to heal after her parents’ murder-suicide: I have to ‘let go of the fear’
Lynne’s own trauma has now had nearly 40 years to heal, and she declares that she has turned the pain into a “friend.”
“Because,” she says, “it allows me to use it for my work.”
He also calls the pain “the source”, although he adds – after a deep breath in and out – “it’s quite intense”.
“I think if you’re brave enough to write pain, it just works because so many people live it who don’t get to sing records, who don’t know how to write songs about it,” she says. “I guess what I do is about sharing.”
Music, Lynne says, “saved my life.” Even as a child, she knew how to pick up a guitar and soothe herself with a song. “No matter how detached the voice was from the feeling,” she says, “I could hear my heart.”
As an artist, Lynne has always found a way to bring that heart into her music—with all its pain and vulnerability—and she knows she couldn’t have made it her brand without the backstory she encountered. But now he also understands that you can make art without being a tortured artist.
This realization, she says, was part of her healing process. Lynne admits that as much as her music is overflowing with vulnerability, she has also built walls in other parts of her life.
“I never thought I could be vulnerable because I had to be strong about everything for so long,” she says, “but I don’t want to be tough anymore. I’m waiting for the vulnerable to go all the way in.”
This task is made easier for her by the people who manage her health and who surround her, people who affirm all of her, sometimes even more than she can.
“I’m recovering because no one wants anything but good from me,” she says, almost in disbelief. “I can see that too. That’s what I’m really working on. I know it sounds a bit guruish, but I had to get there. I think the record is an example of how to be healthy.”
Indeed, much of the album reveals Lynne with a deft scalpel, opening and nursing the wounds of the recent end of a relationship. (She says she’s happily separated now.) But among the sad songs is the cheerful “Butterfly,” and it’s telling that the album ends with two hopeful songs, “Dear God” and “Keep the Light On. ”
“What does that say—you can’t know what a good feeling feels like until you know a bad one?” says Lynne. “I am ready for many more good things and I am blessed because good things have come. And that reconciles everything, running away [from Nashville]to hide, then come back to Nashville, then sit down and write songs that are good songs with people that are amazing, and be free — just be free to find happiness.”
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Shelby Lynne.
Becky Fluke
Lynne defies album expectations. The fact that she succeeded is enough of an achievement, she says. Fairchild, who helped get Lynne signed to a major record label, has other ideas. She hears the potential for another Grammy nomination.
“I think if people listen to it,” she says, “then it’s absolutely within reach. So it’s kind of our job to get the record into the hands of her colleagues and ask them to take a deep dive. I think they will like it.”
Fairchild now serves as Lynne’s unofficial manager, although she describes herself as more of a “gatekeeper.” Lynne, on the other hand, describes her relationship with Fairchild as “like getting a sister, an older sister” (even though Fairchild is a year younger).
Fairchild says, “I feel protective of her and want her to get her due and opportunity. I just make sure her dreams are met with the right team around her. I will always do whatever role she wants. I just get very passionate about people who I know need to be heard and have something to say.”
Lynne already has a few dates on her calendar that are beginning to earn her that accolade. On September 18, he will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association, and on October 24, he will be eagerly supported by superstar soul man Chris Stapleton, opening for him at London’s 02 Arena. She is also set to headline Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium on September 26 for its 25th anniversary celebration I’m Shelby Lynne.
“I gotta go back,” Shelby Lynne
Lynne finds the title of that album unforgettable and imagines herself.
“When I said that then,” she says, “I wasn’t really her.” But she adds, “I am now.”
What is different?
“Then it was, ‘I’m Shelby Lynne, dammit — everybody, pay attention to me,’” she says. “‘Now, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m Shelby Lynne.’ And it’s true. Now I know who she is and I know who this is.”
And she knows that she is enough.
“Yeah, it’s 25 years apart and all that learning and walking around corners and walls and meeting bad people,” she says. “Not that they were bad, but they weren’t good for me. I don’t want to sound like a sack of cliches, but I had to realize it: you are enough. It’s that simple.”
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Source: HIS Education