Shelby Lynne

Shelby Lynne impressed critics, country fans, and pop listeners alike with her breakthrough album, 2000's I Am Shelby Lynne. Just formerly, she'd been a pissed-off 32-year-old Virginia-born/Alabama-raised ex-country singer of modest commercial success, and Nashville regulars who heard the album routinely wondered why it hadn't more explicitly shown off Lynne's big voice. In fact, Lynne's unusually tedious demonstrations of her instrument, an involving low soprano of pure silk and unfazed regionalism, had represented her cardinal problem. She and L.A. producer Bill Bottrell had conceptualized I Am Shelby Lynne with textbook perfection.

From 1989 through 1991 in Nashville, when she recorded with producers as professional as Bob Montgomery and James Stroud, not to mention as all-out legendary and musical as George Jones' and Tammy Wynette's Billy Sherrill, Lynne recorded song after song that always seemed to be about nothing except her voice. It was as though, unhappy with Nashville methodology, she'd decided to bore everyone to tears. For proof, consult Epic Recordings, probably her best work from the sulky Music Row years when Lynne was a favorite of singers such as George Jones, Randy Travis, and Willie Nelson.

During this time, Lynne's work recalls a less glossy k.d. lang bereft of concepts. Before I Am Shelby Lynne, on albums for Morgan's Creek and Magnatone (1993's Temptation and 1995's Restless, both out of print), she'd tried on some period nightclub and pop-jazz and wildass-folk stuff; nothing proved the proper fit. But on I Am Shelby Lynne it was as though she'd never experienced a creative difficulty in her life; suddenly she sang like a specific person with wildly expressive capabilities instead of a country mannequin hypnotized by technique.

On songs such as "Your Lies" and "Leavin'," Bottrell put Lynne in frankly fucked-up, symphonically inelegant settings that suggested the noisy truth instead of the fluffy memory of Dusty Springfield records; Lynne sounded like no one except herself, a young woman with a tragic past (she grew up orphaned, the victim of parental murder-suicide, looking after her younger sister, the singer Allison Moorer), Alabama roots, a voice that exposed real beauty and woundedness and strength. "Life Is Bad," Lynne sang on a country rocker too skanky to be called Sheryl Crow music; "Gotta Get Back," she declared on a soaring salute to Muscle Shoals greasy pop that seemed like a natural new retro-soul hit.

But commercial success eluded Lynne. Perhaps as a result, she followed up with Love, Shelby, made with the superproducer Glenn Ballard. There's really nothing wrong with Lynne's singing here, or with songs such as "Trust" or the sexy "Bend," but Ballard leads her into crassly arranged radio-ready music that, while canny, does nothing to mesh with the conceptual advances of I Am Shelby Lynne; it's like he never heard the earlier album. Love, Shelby has just one essential track, "Killin' Time," a spray of heartache memorable from the film Bridget Jones's Diary, as well as a couple of decent others.

With Identity Crisis, Lynne got back on track by stripping her sound down to its roots -- acoustic guitars, touches of old gospel and blues, and a gorgeously bummed, torchlit ambience. "Lonesome" is a soulful echo of Patsy Cline, but most of the album is more like "I'm Alive," where Lynne speed-drawls a difficult lyric over roiling gusts from a vintage keyboard. The elegantly disconsolate "If I Were Smart" could be a grainy black-and-white noir about a woman who has finally quit smoking but still gets in fistfights with bad men. (JAMES HUNTER / PAT BLASHILL)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide