SHELBY LYNNE
Consequences Of The Crown (Monument)
LOVE AND HAPPINESS AREN’T a given with soul music, country music, southern music … and Shelby Lynne. And yes, that may be, after “Robert Kennedy Jr is a bit odd”, the understatement of the year.
To that end, it’s doubtful anyone is going to be surprised that her new album finds Lynne, once more leading with a deep vein of soul infused with southern sensibility and country sensitivity, reckoning with the aftermath of love and the struggle for happiness. A place where “It burns/It rages/It tears the pages/Of the story we wrote/Over and over and over and over”.
So attractive to listen to and rich with detail even as the sonic choices lean more on minimal than lush, the tempos here are slow to medium, the voice front and centre, the language direct but refined, the feelings bared right to the marrow, and joy is only a very occasional guest, a visitor not an inhabitant.
But for newcomers to Lynne’s work – hello, welcome, sit a spell, you’re going to love it – you should know that there is no wilting flower of pain here. She may be vulnerable but she isn’t broken; she may be light within the layers of But I Ain’t and Dusty-hopeful in the Breakfast In Bed-like sunlight of Good Morning Mountain, but she isn’t conceding, nuh-uh.
That would be “a bad way of thinking,” as Lynne sings in Consequences, a slow march to dissatisfaction whose beat has a drawl but whose coat trails a metallic edge. Yes, she’s standing in the rain, yes there is hurt (“Lord I hate this pain”) but she wants that now-abandoned lover to know “you don’t please me”, and coming back from this isn’t possible. “Regret is lonely” but love has consequences and “Sorry baby, you don’t get to love me anymore”.
This, as much as the quality of her writing and singing, is what makes Shelby Lynne so compelling an artist: regrets and recriminations can come from anger or disgust just as much as defiance, but nothing will destroy her core, and your pity isn’t going to soften her. Yet her emotions are never impermeable.
If only they were, you might think, to spare Lynne. But then she wouldn’t be a great soul singer. And whether it is the slight crack in her voice in Clouds, the way huskiness gives way to clarity and then ascendance in Butterfly, or how in the gospel-inflected Over And Over she smooths and ruffles at the same time, there is no question that Lynne is one of the finest soul singers around.
As warm and firm, and so very adult, as her singing is across these dozen tracks, two spoken word sections – one to start the record; one as a long introduction in the middle of the album – could explain the complexities or contradictions of these songs, of wanting love, hating what love does, clinging to what love might yet bring.
The opening Truth We Know finds Lynne discombobulated, declaring “I can’t forget your number/Because that means I might be letting you go/Might not ever be ready for that/Even though I already turned away”. Then in Gone To Bed, she describes herself as “always shooting for the moon” while her best friend next to her is “awake spinning on a quartet/Singing to somebody else”. Either way, no matter they’re technique or their missteps, they are “Moving towards winter/Cycles since gate and rakes/Cold a lot of time/Waiting by the sink”.
Truth is “the weather works the way love goes babe”. Yep, the evidence on that is clear. My advice? Don’t give up on love, but rug up and hold Consequences Of The Crown close.
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