Shelby Lynne Interview and Pictures

	It's 108 degrees Fahrenheit outside her home in Palm Springs, but over the phone Shelby Lynne is as cool as can be. Which is exactly what you'd expect, given the tenor of her recent recordings. After some initial fame as a mainstream country singer, Lynne reinvented herself with her 1999 album I Am Shelby Lynne. Her new sound was more soulful, had a harder edge, and was much, much deeper. It brought her reams of critical acclaim and a Grammy Award, although she never really did Britney numbers, saleswise. But she solidified her fan base with solid albums like Identity Crisis in 2003 and Suit Yourself in 2005. Lynne's records tend to be worlds unto themselves, but she really outdid herself on her latest LP, Just A Little Lovin', a tribute to the late British pop-soul singer Dusty Springfield. Covering songs by one of the most soulful singers in pop history is a daunting task, but Lynne succeeds by stripping the songs down and delivering them in a hushed, intimate manner, like she's playing a small jazz club in the wee small hours of the morning.
"If a song is worth a damn, you don't need to make it fancy," reasons Lynne, who will be appearing at the Burnaby Roots and Blues Festival Sunday at Deer Lake Park. "The song will do the work for you, you just need to be in service of the song, and that's what we did, you know. Just let the great melodies and the beautiful lyrics take us where we wanted to go. That's as simple as it is. A great song stands through many many years and many many artists and many many singin's and many different versions. If it can still stand up and you treat it right, it'll work for ya, yeah." Some of the covers are well known (I Only Want To Be With You, You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, The Look of Love), others are a little more obscure (Breakfast in Bed, Willie and Laura Mae Jones). But Lynne gets to the emotional core of each one, simultaneously paying tribute to Dusty and making the songs her own. One of the highlights is a spellbinding version of I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore, a tale of heartache and betrayal written by Randy Newman. The lyric is sung by a woman whose man may be having an affair -- at least that's what the neighbours are saying, which the woman can hear through her paper-thin apartment walls. Lynne's vocal is so forlorn, so lonely, it's simply heartbreaking. "That's the song that [I heard where] I fell in love with Dusty," she says. "I love the whole Dusty in Memphis record, I love Son Of a Preacher Man and all that stuff, you can't beat it. But Randy Newman in that frame of mind just blows me away." Many of the songs have great storylines. She is totally into another song that was recorded during the Dusty In Memphis sessions, Willie and Laura Mae Jones. It was written by swamp-soul cult hero Tony Joe White, who also wrote Polk Salad Annie and Rainy Night in Georgia. "Tony is one of the great storytellers we have, of all time," she says. "He can really paint a picture of the story he's telling. It's always nice to get a visual, you can really see the story play out as you sing it. And those are fun to sing. I like tellin' a story in a sung way, and he just writes those kind of amazing songs. He just happens to be a friend of mine. We've written a couple of songs together, and we really relate to each other." Oddly enough, the first version of Willie and Laura Mae Jones that Lynne heard was by Waylon Jennings -- Springfield's version sat in the vaults for a couple of decades before it was unearthed on a Rhino Records reissue of Dusty in Memphis. But Springfield's version was the definitive one. "She has such a kind of sultry way of tellin' a poignant story," says Lynne. "That's the great thing about Dusty, she could tell a story. A great interpreter can always make you believe what they're saying, and that's one of the things that sold me about Dusty's singin'. Her heart, her soul believed what she was singin'. That's what makes great singers." Your Ad Here Lynne turns 40 on Oct. 22, which means she was barely born when many of Springfield's hits were recorded. Growing up in in Frankville, Ala., she never really heard much Dusty -- her first exposure to You Don't Have To Say You Love Me was on a live Elvis Presley record. But when she finally discovered Dusty in 1997, she was hooked. Still, the idea to do an album of Springfield covers wasn't her own. It was a suggestion by Barry Manilow. "We've been friends for several years," she relates. "He lives here in the desert. We're musician friends, and he's a wonderful, wonderful man, I really admire him." She didn't act on the idea for a couple of years, but when she finally suggested it to Capitol Records, they were enthusiastic. She decided to record it at the fabled Capitol Records building in Hollywood, a mid-century modern masterpiece which resembles a stack of records. She recorded it live in the studio in five days with a quartet. It was all old school -- it was recorded to tape, not done digitally, and was produced by Phil Ramone, a music legend who did everything from Astrud and Joao Gilberto's The Girl From Impanema to Dionne Warwick's Do You Know The Way To San Jose and Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. "I like his style," she says. "He's really calm, he's the ultimate gentleman. He dug what I brought to a song, and I really needed someone to understand what I wanted to do with this record. I could hardly find some young sprite that would understand my way [of doing things]. First of all I have to do all analogue, I like to use tape. I need to have cats around who can still do that."
	Everything clicked in the studio, but one thing was amiss. Even though they were recording in the same building as her record company, no-one came down to check out the sessions. That's because Lynne was recording the very week Capitol Records was going under. "I kept wondering why nobody upstairs was coming downstairs to see what I was up to," she says. "It was because they were exploding. There was no secret, we knew for awhile that Capitol was kind of falling apart. I kind of already knew I was going to call Luke [Lewis at Lost Highway records] and say 'You're gonna dig this.' I didn't waste any time, I cut that record and sent it to him. Just took my chances with people gettin' mad [at Capitol]. "But I didn't give a damn at that point. I've been jerked around so many times. And I'm not whinin', and I'm not cryin'. Labels are just good for about a two-year warranty, and then you're screwed." Lost Highway did indeed love the album, and it came out on that label. It hit number 41 in the Billboard Top 200 album chart in the States, the highest chart position Lynne has ever achieved. A record done out of love and respect, with no thought of commercial appeal, wound up being one of her biggest commercial successes.