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SHELBY LYNNE
BACK ON TRACK

Shelby Lynne was already a decade and five albums into a lackluster career on Music Row when she scored an ironic victory with 2000’s I Am Shelby Lynne (Mercury/Universal), winning a Grammy for best new artist. Even if she wasn’t a tidy fit for the category, she did deserve a major accolade for abandoning the niceties of Nashville for something rootsier and harder to pin down — a style that incorporated the down-home twang of old-school country, the sensual groove of classic Muscle Shoals R&B, and all the liberated attitude of a post–Lilith Fair songstress. Then she blew it in 2001 by teaming up with Glenn Ballard for the overwrought Love, Shelby (Island/Universal), an album that tried to cast her as a thinking man’s Shania Twain and liberated her from Universal. That freed her to strip down to the folksy acoustic basics of the well-reviewed if largely ignored Identity Crisis (Capitol, 2003). She’s learned her lesson, it seems: for the new Suit Yourself, she split the dif between hushed homespun county and smooth studio-polished grooves by taking lo-fi guitar/vocal demos to Nashville and fleshing them out live in the studio with seasoned sessionmen. It may have taken two albums to get there, but she’s delivered a genuine follow-up to I Am . . .

Sporting a black sleeveless Willie Nelson/Harley Davidson T-shirt, unfussed bleached blond hair, and a Telecaster that dwarfed her skin-and-bones five-foot-nothing frame, Lynne came on like a seductive bad-ass — a woman who’d been there and back half a dozen times — last Sunday at the Paradise. She radiated a kind of carefree, Alabama-bred "how y’all doin’?" charm as she got down to the business of playing the rock-and-roll chick frontin’ three of Nashville’s finest on guitar/pedal steel, bass, and drums. "Turn the air conditioner off — I don’t like no shit blowing on me," she insisted after a heartfelt cover of Johnny Cash’s "I Walk the Line" that left no doubt about the identities of the lovers in Suit Yourself’s "Johnny Met June." That tune was one of the countrified highlights of a set that bobbed and weaved from soulful grooves to acoustic strums, pedal-steel bends, and the countrified rock of the Stones’ "Dead Flowers," Lynne proving once again that she’s at her best when she’s just being herself.

BY MATT ASHARE

Issue Date: July 22 - 28, 2005
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