My 11,000-mile round trip to meet country-soul singer Shelby Lynne began with a disastrous motorcycle journey… and got worse after that.

I was expecting this interview with country-soul singer Shelby Lynne be tricky; it turned out to be probably the worst I’ve ever done. And I’d flown 5,500 miles to Los Angeles to do it. 

To make matters worse I’d been given a ride to the Hollywood hotel from Venice Beach riding pillion on my friend Dan’s motorcycle. I hate motorcycles; and it broke down in the middle of Venice Blvd – suddenly lost power and glided to a standstill. I was just glad I’d talked him out of taking the freeway – I’m not sure I’d still be here.

Anyway, I made it on time to the interview – just – thanks to a passing taxi (the rarest of beasts in LA) and Dan’s ability to let out a piercing whistle with his fingers. By the end I almost wished I hadn’t: to say it didn’t go well would be an understatement.

The Sunday Times – 30th October 2011

Shelby Lynne is slouched on the sofa of a Hollywood hotel room. A tiny figure, all faded denim and bleached hair, she has an entourage of two dogs, two film-makers, her manager and her publicist. She looks wary and nervous, like someone in a dentist’s waiting room before a root canal. But more apprehensive.

Lynne’s life story reads like a classic country song. Born in Alabama, growing up singing harmonies with her mother and younger sister. Orphaned at 17, when her alcoholic, abusive father shot her mother, then turned the gun on himself. Married her high-school sweetheart and hit the road for Nashville to become a country superstar. Quit town after five flop albums and turned to drink and drugs when the dream turned sour. Bounced back with a Grammy for the comeback album that put her on the map. Then ran away to California with the wife of the man who helped her make it.

Now, at the age of 43, she has delved deep into her past to make the album of her career.

A stripped-down counterpart to her breakthrough, I Am Shelby Lynne, released a decade earlier, Revelation Road is a fusion of country, soul and blues that is heartfelt and heartbreaking, honest and intimate, passionate and personal. She recorded it at her own studio, wrote and produced all the songs herself, played all the instruments, overdubbing her own harmonies, and released it on her own label. It’s her defining achievement.

On stage, Lynne seems to be entirely at ease with herself and her audience. The night before we meet, she plays the new songs live, for the first time, in the intimate setting of a Santa Monica guitar shop. It is spellbinding, spine-tingling stuff, leavened by anecdotes and wisecracks about its sad words and dark themes.
Next day, with no audience but me, she’s a bag of nerves. Interviews are “torture”, she says, but gigs merely make her nervous.

“I try to concentrate on just… the abyss,” she says in her Southern drawl. She can’t even pour herself a stiff drink to cope. “I don’t drink any more,” she explains. I wonder if the change of routine is difficult. “No,” she replies. “It’s not difficult. It’s better.”

We move on, hastily, to a subject about which I expect her to be enthusiastic: her exceptional new album, which I adore. I tell her I feel that, over the past dozen years, she has gradually been revealing more and more of herself, peeling back the layers, and that the latest collection might represent the core. Does she feel that? “I don’t know what I feel,” she shrugs. “I just write what I wanna write. There’s not any special kinda… serum.” She spits the word out like a bad taste.

At her concert, Lynne chatted amiably between songs, talking often about her family, which seems to be the predominant influence on the album. “Well, it might be,” she concedes grudgingly, “but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I know how to sit here and talk about it. So you’ll have to figure that out.” Does she agree that she has revealed more of herself than ever before? The question is met with a stony silence.

I don’t think about Nashville. It doesn’t have anything to do with me

Lynne has a history of awkward, verging on disastrous, interviews, and says she has not read any of her press for 12 years. Yet I had hoped that, after recording 10 albums for six labels prior to setting up her own one, Everso, two years ago, things might have improved. Especially as she is settled happily in Palm Springs and seems finally to have gained complete control over her career. “No, I’ve always had control,” she insists. Does she not feel she was manipulated at the start of her career?

“In the very beginning, yes. Nashville is that way. But I was 18 or 19 years old. You’re still in a childlike setting and you do what you’re told.

Luckily, we survived it and moved out of there.” She adds: “When I started out, I wanted to be a famous country star [like] Tammy Wynette. But I realised quickly in Nashville that it wasn’t necessarily about the quality of the music, or the songs. It was more about getting on the radio and being politically correct.”

She claims she never felt like a puppet, not even when being shuttled between labels, songwriters, producers and stylists. “Nashville is the puppeteer. It’s the way they roll. You’re a product. I remember cutting my hair one time, and they freaked out.” What does she make of the music that comes out of Nashville today? “I don’t listen to it. I don’t think about Nashville. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. I’m selling records out of the back of a van that I’m driving on this tour. I’m schlepping my own merch.”

Lynne left Nashville after the fifth and last of her albums there, then took a break of several years before returning with I Am Shelby Lynne, the wonderful country-soul album that won her a Grammy for “best newcomer” — after 13 years and six albums — in 2000. What was she doing during that hiatus? “Took some time off. Went bankrupt. Got in bad relationships. Took a lot of Valium, smoked a lot of dope, drank, had car wrecks.” She looks up. “We all need to take a year off to do that. It’s like going to college. Everybody [‘Ever-body’] should do it.” Did the experience change her? “Well, honestly there was nothing else to do. Nobody had any interest in me, I had to make that transition from Nashville to… somewhere. I knew I had to make records, but I had to get out of Nashville.”

Revelation Road is a far cry from the Nashville of big hair and big hats. It’s dark and downbeat and confessional, and its central song, I Want to Go Back, haunts you with its refrain: “I want to go back so I can run away again.” Lynne explains, obliquely, that when you find the courage to leave something devastating in your life, it feels so good to do so that you want to go back and do it all over again: “You can’t let that pain go away, you wanna keep it close, so you can always feel that, because it’s bittersweet. You have to have that pain to walk around or survive, because without it you’re nothing.”

The most startling song on the record, Heaven’s Only Days Down the Road, taps directly into Lynne’s darkest demons. In the past, she has refused even to talk about her parents’ deaths, let alone tackle the tragedy in song. Now she relates the incident — starkly and without any sense of recrimination — from the point of view of her father. The song ends in a double gunshot. “I wrote that from my dead father’s perspective. And the song tells the story,” is all she says. Did it represent a catharsis for her to write and sing the song? “It is what it is. It’s for the listener to decide. I did my job by writing the song — I’m not gonna tell ’em how to feel when they hear it.”

Last year, Lynne shared a stage with her sister, Alison Moorer, who is also a successful country singer, and about whom Shelby sings with touching affection on a song about their childhood, I’ll Hold Your Head. They sang duets on each other’s songs, and I had heard that they subsequently went into the studio to make an album, but that it did not work out. Is that true? “No.” Is it something she would ever do? “No.” Any particular reason? “No. Don’t want to.” How did the tour go? “Great.” Pause. “It was what it was. Easy cabbage. We made a little money.”

Lynne has little time for other people’s views about her or her work. “If you put your heart and soul and pain and insides into a record, and you’ve given it everything you can from the guts of your soul, what gives somebody the right to give me one star?” she asks angrily. “What gives somebody the right to say anything negative about anything anybody does from their heart? Just because it’s not your f***in’ cup of tea, that doesn’t make it right for you to destroy it, stomp on it. So no, I don’t read press, good or bad. You just do your art and roll on.”

She explodes when I suggest that her job opens her up to be judged every time she sings. “I don’t wanna be judged!” she exclaims, eyes flashing. “I don’t think anyone should be judged. That is what Revelation Road is. We’re all on the same path. At the end of the day, we’re all gonna wind up standing in the same f***in’ line to get in the same f***in’ door — rich or poor, good art, bad art.”

Time to end the torture, for both of us. I remind Lynne that she once said I Am Shelby Lynne came from her “most vulnerable, desperate place”, and ask her where this album came from. “Well, I’m not vulnerable and desperate any more. I’m free and happy. To do whatever the hell [‘hay-all’] I want. When I want, how I want, whoever I want.”

And is this, the past hour or so notwithstanding, the happiest she has been in her career? “In my life,” she replies. She fixes me with her pale blue eyes and repeats, without the trace of a smile: “In my life.”