Shelby Lynne is sitting poolside in Palm Springs, California, sipping a mimosa. "It's a good weekend drink," she says in her musical dirt-road twang. "My favorite drink is a Seven and Seven." She currently lives in Palm Springs. But this country-music maverick always lives, as one of her lyrics puts it, in an Alabama frame of mind.

Lynne, who was born in tiny, rural Frankville, Alabama, came by her sense of place early. Asked to describe a typical night in her teens, she says, "Shit, I don't even remember being a teenager. I don't think I did anything. I was so music-crazy and trying to get better on guitar, I just stayed by myself a lot, in my room. Wasn't anything to do, anyway. There was just country, land, livestock, dogs and cats, and my sister and my mama and my daddy. That was it."

Growing up a country girl meant growing up a country-music fan -- Lynne's father played guitar, and her mama "sang really great, a natural." After a series of events that are traumatic even by country-music standards (Lynne's father shot and killed her mother and then himself in 1986, a tragedy that she does not discuss), Lynne married and divorced and hit Nashville at eighteen, where, on her first day in town, she got four offers from record companies before settling on producer Billy Sherrill at CBS. Sherrill hooked her up with George Jones for a duet. "I had never even been in a studio," says Lynne. "The next thing I know I was standing in front of Jones, facing each other on this one mike, and he said, 'Is that right?' And I said, 'Yes, sir, that would be dead on it.' Poor old George. He's had his rough times, and he can get crazy on you -- he is crazy -- but he gets his job done. He's ornery as hell, but he gets it done."

Lynne herself is not without her ornery side. She has been removed from a plane by the police, for example: "Oh, yeah, I got a little drunk and sang a song, and they escorted me off. For singing. They arrested me for singing. I love it." She got into a little trouble with the law one other time: "I took a car over county lines that wasn't mine. In Texas. Don't get arrested in Texas."

This penchant for going her own way in the vehicle of her choice is also, figuratively speaking, at the root of her departure from Nashville. Her new record, I Am Shelby Lynne, is both radical and traditional in its approach to the country sound, but it is never what's known as "new country." The producer, Bill Bottrell, did Sheryl Crow's Globe Sessions, and you can hear his influence in the album's more mainstream pop tracks.

"I started realizing that you cut certain songs, you cut them a certain way, and there was not a hell of a lot of straying from that method," she says of her time in Nashville. "I'm not really one to play by the rules. I like living by the seat of my ass. I made five records in Nashville, but as much as those records have to do with where I am now, they're so completely a Nashville thing, with this big ol' voice and these big productions. I don't listen to them. It just didn't work for me. No freedom."

If it's freedom that produced the intimate, emotionally powerful I Am Shelby Lynne, it's certainly working for her. With its turbulent themes of love and loss, and its country string-and-honky-tonk arrangements framing Lynne's ripped-from-the-heart vocals, the record plays with the urgency of a debut. "I was living in Nashville, but I was totally out of the scene, getting ready to move back to Alabama, and I started writing these songs," says Lynne. "I didn't know what direction I was going in, but I knew it had to be something more to do with me. I love it, because it's really no direction, it's just songs."

The songs range from the classically tear-drenched torch of "Your Lies," which opens the album, to the twangy, guitar-rock-driven "Life Is Bad," but the record's best parts are distinguished by a sound reminiscent of Dusty in Memphis.

"The strings made this record for me," says Lynne. "We went to Memphis to do the strings, because I didn't want Nashville strings, and I didn't want L.A. strings -- Nashville has its way, L.A. has its way, and then Memphis is just stuck in the middle somewhere -- because it's so heavy, heavy, heavy rooted in blues and R&B and country, all three. I wanted a record that felt like a book. I wanted Mark Twain strings, you know?"

For the moment, then, Lynne has her freedom in Palm Springs and the internal freedom of her Alabama frame of mind. "It's probably too complicated to put into words, and that's why I wrote a song about it," she says when asked to define this. "It's just a feeling, and that's about it. I like it. I like home. And I like where I am now."

MIM UDOVITCH
(January 26, 2000)