Shelby Lynne: I Am Shelby Lynne : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

From the title on down, this disc announces not only that Shelby Lynne exists but that she wants you to listen. Lynne is a true original, synthesizing various, mostly Southern musical strains into a style that is as one-of-a-kind as an individual's DNA. Scattered about this engaging, enigmatic disc is a bit of Dusty in Memphis, a touch of Bobbie Gentry's swamp-country persona, a hint of Prince's instinct for making voices and rhythms sound positively libidinous, and a whole lot of Shelby Lynne.

You won't find much country music per se on Lynne's sixth album - there's more soul and jazz than steel guitar, with no trace of the usual Nashville slick country-radio fare. What you will find is a genuine evocation of country, which is to say, the rural landscape and the associations it triggers. "Where I'm From" is Lynne's fond, vernacular-filled tribute to her home state of Alabama, and like much of I Am, it moves on a lazy river of sound, seducing you after repeated listenings rather than bowling you over from the outset. On songs such as "Leavin'," with its slow but determined gait, and "Thought It Would Be Easier," with its insular, ruminative funk, Lynne describes her state of mind with an uncanny knack for aural metaphors as powerful as country's weeping guitars. And the way she harmonizes with herself throughout the record is nothing less than righteous.

Like MeShell Ndegeocello's masterful Bitter, Lynne's I Am is a breakup album that lingers. Her musical purview is as singular as her emotions are naked; check out the fusion of R&B and country in the mandolin-spiced "Life Is Bad" or the high-pitched keyboard whine that makes "Why Can't You Be?" wiggle ever so weirdly. With I Am Shelby Lynne, the woman Tammy Wynette once called "the best voice in country music" has made an album that lives up to that billing, and then some. (RS 834)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH