When Shelby Lynne returned to Nashville after 25 years, she believed her record-making days were through. “I was over it and tired of it, and I didn’t think there was any interest,” the songwriter tells Rolling Stone in her signature raspy Southern drawl. Perhaps she’d write some songs and perform a few gigs at smaller venues, as she had done throughout the years. After all, releasing 16 albums was no small feat. A “true blue Southerner” as she describes herself, Lynne was more focused on readjusting from a quarter century of soaking up the sun in California to relocating home so she could be closer to her sister, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer.
Contrary to her inherent belief about her career, there was interest in her music. “I just wanted to move back to Nashville and not be in the record business, but here I am. What the fuck do I know? Nothing,” she quips, while lounging in bed on vacation.
But with more than 35 years in the music industry, Lynne has learned to embrace the unexpected. After releasing five albums over a decade that toyed with different approaches to country music, it wasn’t until the singer-songwriter relocated to Palm Springs, where she crafted 2000’s I Am Shelby Lynne, that she had her breakout moment. The album, on which she collaborated with producer Bill Bottrell of Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club fame, featured a soulful rock-meets-pop sound — and songs like “Leavin’” and “Gotta Get Back” — that helped her hit her stride. “That record was my freshman year into songwriting with Bill Bottrell,” Lynne recalls, “and now I know how to do that better.”
On the heels of the 25th-anniversary reissue of I Am Shelby Lynne, Lynne began writing songs with Ashley Monroe, along with a group of rotating artists including Waylon Payne and Angaleena Presley — as well as country star Miranda Lambert. But it wasn’t until last winter when she met Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild that the idea of making an album became something she would entertain.
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“[Karen] started laying the rules down for a plan that she had, and that was to get me to make a record,” Lynne recalls. “And I still wasn’t sure until the last moment. Shit, I’m not even sure now.” It was Lynne’s present stage of life that ultimately persuaded her to take it. “Fifty-six-year-old women don’t get record deal offers,” she says.
Alongside Monroe, Fairchild, and producer and engineer Gena Johnson, Lynne formed an all-female creative team that became a “sisterhood.” “It’s wonderful to work with women in a closed, tight space that all know what they’re doing,” Lynne says. Each time they gathered, they experienced a “love and creative fest” where sharing their collective wealth of information was the norm. “They really made time for me, and it shows in the record.”
What surfaced from their time together was Consequences of the Crown, Lynne’s 17th studio album. Twenty-five years since I Am Shelby Lynne, the 12-track project is unintentionally a full-circle moment for Lynne — it’s another breakup album. “Every song is about feeling like shit because you got your heart stomped,” she explains. The breakup, she says, fundamentally changed her. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over it,” she confesses. But Lynne used the heartbreak to feed her music and “to define every relationship I’ve ever had.” Deep in the fallout from that busted relationship, she “kept picking at the wounds” by listening to a playlist that featured Moses Sumney, which she compared to a “knife stabbing you over and over.” Still, she couldn’t stop herself from hitting repeat on Sumney’s songs, in between listening to old-school R&B and the Spinners.
Consequences of the Crown is a record teeming with raw emotion, soul and jazz flourishes, Nineties R&B and a touch of Americana. But no matter how much genre fluidity surfaces within her records, Lynne won’t consider it anything other than a country album. After all, she’s “as country as a stick.” “It’s a country record, just like the Beyoncé record’s a country record,” she explains. “I think we can call anything anything we want to.”
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From the album’s largely spoken-word opener “Truth We Know,” Lynne’s pain is palpable. “I can’t forget your number, because it means I might be letting you go,” she admits on the track. While there was a sketch for the song, Lynne went fully off-script. “I was right in the middle of feeling like hammered shit,” she confesses, “and you can hear it in the vocal.” On the atmospheric “Gone to Bed,” Lynne interpolates Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s Sixties pop classic “Alfie” in between her soliloquy and a sweeping chorus assist from Monroe and Fairchild. “Good Morning Mountain” showcases Lynne’s penchant for experimentation, pairing biting lyrics with a palette of electro-R&B-meets-hymnal. “If you want redemption/Go find yourself an altar,” she sings in a swirling chorus. By the end of the record, Lynne does seek salvation in the spoken-word slow jam, “Oh God.” “It’s about still being alive after you thought you were in something that was hard enough to kill you,” Lynne says of the song.
While Consequences of the Crown may seem like a rebirth of sorts, she hesitates to call the album a comeback. “I’ve never gone anywhere,” she says. “I just haven’t been around here.” Instead, Lynne has been working on another project — a memoir. Growing up in southern Alabama, Lynne and Moorer were surrounded by rage and abuse but found a balm in the dream of country stardom. Their lives were irrevocably upended in 1986 when their abusive, alcoholic father fatally shot his wife and turned the gun on himself.
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Processing years of trauma hasn’t been easy for Lynne, and the book, she says, has admittedly changed a lot over time. “If, or when, it ever comes out, I want to make sure that there’s a lot of forgiveness and a lot of my true feelings about it now,” she says. “I don’t want to just write about then. I want to write about what those things in my childhood make me feel now.” Lynne is hesitant to nail down its release. “Don’t hold me to next year yet, I’ve only been working on it 20 years,” she laughs.
For now, Consequences of the Crown is telling her story, even if she’s still in disbelief that it exists. “Don’t make plans,” Lynne shrugs.