Shelby Lynne – Songs in the key of Springfield
Lynne treasured the Dusty comparisons as a compliment, but she’s never quite heard the similarity, especially where the women’s voices are concerned. “Sometimes people will put together, ‘Well, she’s from the south, and there was the Dusty In Memphis record, but I never got it,” she said. “At the same time, I knew how good that record was. I knew how different it was too. I’m just glad people got it.”
Until that point, neither fans nor people within the music industry had ever really “gotten” Lynne. Not the voters at NARAS, who in 2001 awarded her the Grammy for Best New Artist even though she’d been making records for more than a decade by that point; and certainly not her record companies, who perennially cast her in roles that never quite fit.
“If I Could Bottle This Up”, a duet with George Jones from her Billy Sherrill-produced debut, was a minor hit back in 1989 and an auspicious start. After that, however, Lynne made forays into everything from mainstream country to big-band swing, a largely aimless period that culminated with the aptly titled Restless in 1995.
Her vocal gifts have never been in doubt, but it wasn’t until Lynne moved to Palm Springs and hooked up with Sheryl Crow collaborator Bill Bottrell that she really came into her own — not only as a singer, but as a writer. Just A Little Lovin’ is the fourth album she’s made since she reinvented herself with I Am Shelby Lynne, and all three of the intervening records have been strong, from the sultry pop of Love, Shelby to the country-blues-inflected Identity Crisis. “From record to record it’s just so different every time,” she explained.
“That’s probably why nobody can really put a finger on what I’m doing,” she went on to say, alluding to those who couldn’t discern a thread that ran through her projects, despite their often staggering emotional depth and resonance.
“The older I get, the more I say to myself, ‘You know, if you’d have stayed with this a little bit longer, maybe you could’ve…’ But things do the way they’re supposed to do. I have to do what I have to do and it’s kinda all over the place. It’s my fault.”
To the contrary, in addition to revealing that she could sing “small” — on her Nashville sessions, she had a tendency to belt more, and even oversing — Lynne’s handful of California records have proven her to be an incisive and bracing confessional songwriter.
“Pretend You Love Me”, the only song she wrote on her Springfield album, captures Dusty’s “You don’t have to say you love me” ethos to devastating affect. Despite being as haunting and spare as the blues of Robert Johnson, the song is so completely of a piece with the rest of Just A Little Lovin’ that it’ll likely take listeners a couple-three plays, if not a scan of the credits, to discover that it isn’t one of Dusty’s.
As tempting as it might have been at times to throw in a little of what Lynne calls “High Dusty” into the mix, Just A Little Lovin’ is, if anything, under-produced, and gloriously so. There are no horns or strings or background singers to be heard on any of its ten tracks, and really no overdubbing. From its liberal use of silence to the sympathetic, uncluttered settings, Lynne’s record leaves plenty of room for the songs to open up and become hers.
Often, she lingers on a note or repeats a phrase to see where it might take her. “We walked in there with no arrangements,” she explained. “I don’t know how we could. Some of ’em took a little, ‘Hmm,’ scratchin’ your head a couple of times. Some of ’em just felt down on the take.
“That’s another thing. We cut it on tape and I knew, after we cut the basic tracks, that that was basically it. We didn’t do anything else. After I had some time to live with the record, I just thought, ‘The more you do to it, the more you run the risk of making it into a cheesy record of lounge covers.’ So I just decided to leave all the space in there.”
Having Phil Ramone behind the board, as well as the superbly cast band he put together for the sessions, certainly helped. “When I dedicated my heart to making this record, I knew I needed the right guy,” Lynne said of Ramone, whose prodigious resume as an engineer and producer includes marquee collaborations with everyone from Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin to Madonna and Pavarotti.
Lynne first met the fourteen-time Grammy winner — whose new book, Making Records: The Scenes Behind The Music, co-authored with Charles L. Granata, was published in October — when the two of them were working on an event for MusiCares several years ago.
“I needed somebody who would have no ego in this, somebody who would allow me to have a say,” she said. “But a producer without an ego? That’s tough, but Phil doesn’t have one. He’s wonderful. He understood my language. He understood my not ever wanting to rehearse. He just was a friend.”
To hear Ramone tell it, the process of making the album, which they recorded at Capitol Studios in Hollywood while Lynne was still under contract to that label, was very intuitive. “If we’d start into a tune and change our minds, we’d just do something else or come back to it later,” he said. “The takes are very short. There are no long instrumentals. It’s not overdubbed. I didn’t do anything but put it together from the roughest mix of the day to the end of the week.
“After weeks and weeks of listening, Shelby just called me and said, ‘I don’t wanna change any of this.’ Well, I’m thinking I gotta correct a couple of guitar glitches and maybe put a solo here. Or maybe not. But we both realized that this is a special record. I’d talk to her every couple of days and she’d say, ‘Damn, I think it’s really good.’ And I’d go, ‘Well good. We’re allowed to love it.'”
ND Senior Editor Bill Friskics-Warren writes about music, pop culture and social issues for The Tennessean. As a freelancer, he’s recently done pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.