Shelby Lynne – This year’s model
Identity Crisis, due out September 16 on Capitol, is Lynne’s eighth album, after previous releases on Epic, Morgan Creek/Mercury, Magnatone and Island/Def Jam. Only one of the previous records (I Am Shelby Lynne) sold in six figures domestically, and it still hasn’t gone gold. Yet she keeps getting another chance with the big labels because she’s extraordinarily talented, and because she seems to make undeniably interesting albums just at the point she could be expected to drop from sight.
“It’s sure not because I’m good at playing the game,” she laughs. One of the reasons she lives in the California desert retreat of Palm Springs, of all places, is because it gives her an excuse not to show up at Hollywood soirees, record-company events and other attention-drawing, name-dropping scenes that help raise the profile of those trying to worm their way into the public consciousness.
“If you see me somewhere, it’s because I couldn’t get out of it,” she says, laughing even harder this time. “I mean, I love doing concerts and all that. But you get around things like the Grammys, and there’s parties all week that you’re supposed to go to, and there’s meet-‘n’-greets — I don’t know, I’m not into it. I just like to keep it simple. I like to sit around the house, fool around in the studio and write.”
Palm Springs spells escape. And the heat suits her Alabama frame of mind.
“I guess it is unusual for me to live here,” she says. “At least that’s what people keep telling me. But I love it. I don’t want to live in L.A., because I can’t stand the hassle of it. The fucking traffic makes me crazy. And Alabama is too far away, unfortunately. I keep a cabin in my home town of Frankville, and I feel more at home there than anywhere, but it’s hard to get to Los Angeles from Frankville. So this works for me. I mean, hell, I’m like an old lady. I just want to be home.”
She’s also made it work. She made an album she’s proud of, she’s getting big-time support from a major record company, and, most revelatory, she emphasizes over and over again that life is good.
“I’m a happy person,” she says, her voice softer than at any time during the interview. “I’m learning to look at the brighter side of things. I’m happy with my life, happy with my career. I feel like I keep getting better at what I want to do. I feel like I’m in a totally good place.”
For those who know her, such words are as startling as they are comforting. Adjectives have been thrown at Shelby Lynne for years, but happy is not one of them.
“I think she’s found some sort of peace,” says Evelyn Shriver, George Jones’ manager and a former publicist who began working with Lynne before her first record back in the late 1980s. “And, by god, good for her. She deserves it. But I don’t know if anyone thought she’d ever get there. She’s a different person, and it’s great to see her there.”
Identity crisis, then? At this point, that may be more zen acknowledgement than character assessment for Lynne. She feels more settled within her skin now. But it took a couple years of getting away and getting into her head to arrive there.
After the commercial flop of her 2001 album Love, Shelby, Lynne retreated to her desert home and began some serious self-reflection. She spent more time with family and friends, and focused on the part of her career she loves: singing, songwriting and indulging her love of making music.
“I’m coming out of a funky time in my life,” she says. “I was trying to figure out who I was. I think that comes out in the music.”
She then returns to the album title, recalling the moment that convinced her to go with her manager’s suggestion. “When you look up the definition of identity crisis in the dictionary, it’s pretty cool,” she says. “That’s how I know it was right.”
identity crisis. n. A psychological state or condition of disorientation and role confusion occurring as a result of conflicting pressures and expectations and often producing acute anxiety.
But doesn’t she keep stressing how happy she is, how newly settled she feels? Yes, she says, she is — after two years of spiritual soul-searching. The album she made reflects her two-year journey, not its result. The gist of Identity Crisis, in other words, can be found in a line of “Telephone”, its opening song: “The pain of living with the hand that’s dealt is more than I can stand.”
Or, as she puts it, “We’ve been talking a lot about how life is just damn hard. But I’m not one to cry about it. That’s the reason I dig the blues. There’s something about it that makes me feel good. So maybe that’s why I made the album I’ve made. I was singing the blues because I was looking back on what’s happened to me in my life. I was in a period where I was determined to try and make myself feel better. And the blues — my blues — is what came out. It’s the music that’s closest to my soul. It’s also just who I am. And that’s what I want in my music — I want it to reveal who I am and what I feel.”