Shelby Lynne produces a personal record touching on her Alabama past.
There’s an old line that is sometimes attributed to the genus of performer known as the singer-songwriter: “I’ve suffered for my art, now it’s your turn.” By that measure, you might expect Shelby Lynne’s audience to have a fair bit of suffering in store.
She was raised in rural Alabama, in a musical but dysfunctional family. When she was 17, her alcoholic father shot and killed her mother, before turning the gun on himself.
In her new album, Revelation Road, she touches on the traumas of her childhood more directly than she has in any of her 11 discs in a 25-year career. And yet the whole thing is so deeply musical and – crucially – free of self-pity that one never feels one is being subjected to someone’s catharsis.
Not to say Shelby Lynne doesn’t brush emotional nerves. In I’ll Hold Your Head she reinhabits her teenage self to give comfort to a younger sister. (Lynne’s actual sister, four years younger, is the country singer Allison Moorer, who is married to Steve Earle.) “It ain’t fair for a young ’un, all this hurtin’, battlin’ the blues and the beer and the bourbon,” she sings in her remarkably unblemished voice, and it has the effect of a lullaby, even while you imagine the violence that is taking place in the next room.
Few songs are as gently heart-rending, and when in the final choruses Shelby slips in a few bars of that impossibly happy standard Side By Side, the devastation is complete.
There is a similar moment of impact in Heaven’s Only Days Down The Road. Sung from the perspective of a self-loathing, shotgun-wielding drunkard, the song concludes with a pair of drumbeats that have the finality of gunshots.
Dark as these examples are, Revelation Road also has plenty of light. Even on the more prosaic tracks there is always the sheer beauty of Lynne’s voice. Though her background is as country as biscuits ’n’ gravy, she sings with the skill and subtlety of a jazz singer. And there is the growing depth of her writing, which at its best can conjure the South in almost literary detail. (Scrambled egg sandwiches, anyone?)
There are reasons that Lynne may have waited until now to make such a personal record. In 2009 she launched her own label. Not only did she write and sing every note on Revelation Road, but she also self-produced and played every instrument, in a style that is not flashy, but is timeless and intuitive, and leaves all the necessary space for these songs to breathe. And maybe it just took this long before she could sing, with what sounds like genuine longing, ‘I want to go back, so I can run away again.’
REVELATION ROAD, Shelby Lynne (Everso).