Shelby Lynne's a bit of a hero of mine. A couple of years ago, she made a wonderful album called I Am Shelby Lynne, and the earth moved. Her brand of country soul music grabbed at my innards and gave them them a good shaking.
Then a massage. Then another shaking. It was the perfect reminder of why soul is so called.
No one knew quite how to describe it. So the critics reached for their icons and told us that we could hear Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday and Bobby Gentry and Aretha Franklin in Lynne. Perhaps more than anyone, we could hear Dusty in Memphis.
Lynne sounded like a woman who knew pain, but wasn't wedded to it.
She had travelled, unremarkably, through five previous country albums, five different haircuts, five different images, and seemed to have finally reached her true destination as a singer-songwriter. Hence the title. The record was brilliantly produced by Bill Bottrell, who co-wrote all but one of the songs.
They seemed to be a perfect team.
Lynne has just released a new album, Love, Shelby, and is travelling Europe to promote it. The album is good, but not great like the previous one. There are moments of transcendent soul, but she has transformed herself into a rock chick, happiest blasting out anthems. On the cover, a sexy Lynne toys with her finger in her mouth. At 33, she seems too old to play Lolita. Love, Shelby is confusing.
I am taken up to a hotel suite by her press officer and introduced to another press person, then Betty, the manager. The story of Betty and Lynne is pure country. Betty Bottrell is the former wife of producer Bill. It was Betty who encouraged Bill to produce Lynne. Soon after the collaboration, Betty left Bill and moved in with Lynne. There is no sign of Bill on the new album (produced by Glenn Ballard, who produced Alanis Morrissette).
Lynne sticks out a hand. She is sitting behind a desk. She looks unbelievably pretty, with ruby lips, bottle-blonde hair straight out of a noir movie, and freckles. Her suit cuts away at the chest to reveal another layer of freckles.
The desk is long. She points me to the other side. There are pads of paper and pens at regular intervals. I feel as if I'm seeing my bank manager for a mortgage. I've been warned that if I lose eye contact with Lynne, she'll lose interest, possibly walk out. She's that kind of gal.
Is the new album a departure? "No. I'm not sure what I would be departing from." Does she like the rock chick image? "Sure." A rock chick rather than a soul artist? "Hey, you know what? I'll take it. It's fine." I later learn that this is Lynne in expansive mode.
Most of the songs on I Am Shelby Lynne were about truth, lies and trust, and there was something so painfully honest in her phrasing. Does she think she is a compulsive truth-teller? "Yes, I insist on the truth. I surround myself with people who tell the truth. I don't like bullshit. It's hard in the music business not to be around bullshit." So how does she manage it? "Sometimes you just have to walk away from it."
Lynne eventually walked away from Nashville when she realised that it respected neither truth nor individuality. She says she was regarded in Nashville as the devil incarnate. Why? "I just don't conform very well." What were they expecting her to conform to? "You were supposed to do the country thang, whatever that is. I wrote a song, there's a line in it, you can drown your sins with whisky as long as you get to church on time." But country music is about the truth, isn't it? "I don't know, I have no opinion," she says, just for the sheer bloody contradiction of it.
Lynne grew up in Alabama, with her younger sister, the country star Alison Moorer - another huge talent. She was an introverted loner, a terrible student who spent much of the time living inside her head. Was she a happy child? "I don't know. What is happy? I think happy's in the moment. I don't think everybody can be happy all the time." When she was 17, her father shot her mother dead and then killed himself. It's one of those things that seem too big, too brutal to even try to make sense of.
Shortly after, she married and divorced, and began her career in music. Her parents seem to hover in the background of her music, like permanent shadows. On the new album, she sings John Lennon's Mother. It sounds even more anguished than Lennon's version - a bewildered cry of love and anger that her parents are not there for her. Lynne insists it's simply a song she loves rather than a personal statement.
She says so many people assume her family life was a mess, and it's not true. "I had a great childhood. It was very free. I had great parents, hard-working parents. I had a great sister, my father came from a long line of loggers, and was a teacher, and he could do anything, and taught me I could do anything. Both my parents taught me I could do anything." Does she miss them? "Yes." Silence - followed by a hard stare. Did it do her head in when they died? "It changed things. I think it twisted it around a few times. I don't wanna talk about it. You can read all of that."
Actually I can't, because Lynne rarely talks about her parents. But, of course, that is her prerogative. Why should she open her heart and chronicle the ghastly anecdotes just to sell a few more records? Perhaps her terseness is her way of being true to herself.
We talk about her influences. "Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Count Basie, Bob Wills, Hank Williams . . . " She could go on forever. I tell her my daughter will listen only to Hank Williams. She briefly softens. "That's wonderful. That's poetry. That's a killer. Good for her! You encourage that. That's great!"
She names some of her favourite Williams songs: I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Cold, Cold Heart, Your Cheatin' Heart, I'm a Long Gone Daddy - all of them desperate even by the great miserablist's exacting standards. She talks about her favourite writers, Steinbeck and Hemingway. "I like strength. I like fearless." At the age of six, she was singing Elvis, Hank and Willie Nelson, strumming along on an imaginary guitar. "I wanted to be a rock 'n' roll star." What did it mean to her? "It defines life for me. It's all I've ever imagined for myself." The rock'n'roll bit or the star bit? "All of it. I don't think you can just do part of it, or I can't. I love to perform, I love to make records, I love the star part." What would have happened if she hadn't made it? "That's not possible." Why? She looks at me as if I'm mad. "It's just not possible. Determination. Sheer determination." Her face is so changeable. Now she looks mean, angular and over-made.
In the earlier articles written about her, Lynne came across as a hard-drinking, hard-living, straight-talking maverick. Does she still drink loads? "Drink loads?" she says, appalled. "I don't think I ever drank loads. That was a press thing. That's such bullshit. Everybody has a drink or two." How could she give her life to drink, she asks, when she has a dream to fulfil? "I've got work to do."
She seems so different from the tender Lynne of I Am Shelby Lynne. Perhaps the world and her art changed when she dropped Bill Bottrell. Did it cause problems when Betty left Bill for her? "You'll have to ask her." So I look for Betty to ask. But Lynne stops me, saying she wouldn't like it. "It's too personal. I think that's very, very personal. Betty's my manager." A few friends had told me they had heard Lynne has an open relationship with Betty. Was coming out a tough decision? "Coming out what?" As gay.
"Gay? I've never come out gay," she says, shocked.
Oh, sorry, I say.
"I'm sorry. Do I look gay?" I tell her that I don't know what it means to look gay.
"Even if I were gay, I wouldn't tell you." I apologise again, and tell her I didn't think she would regard it as such a personal question. "Too late," she says. "Too late." She lights a cigarette aggressively. "It's very out . . . out of what we're supposed to be talking about." I am surprised that she is so upset by the question - after all, this is country and Lynne is famously honest.
It would have been so easy to laugh it off, or to say yes or no. But perhaps I just got her wrong all along. I think of the rock-chick-sex-doll on the cover of Love, Shelby. Perhaps she wasn't really destined for country-soul heaven, perhaps she was just travelling through on her way to a more brassy, mainstream success.
The PR interrupts urgently. She asks if she can take Lynne away for a minute. There is urgent whispering in the adjoining room. They are unhappy that I've asked about drink, her parents and her love life. Apparently, I was supposed to talk to her solely about her record.
Lynne returns. "Right, one last question," she says. On the new album, there is a song called Starbroker. Is it as angry about the music industry as it seems to be? She nods and quotes me a line: " 'Died for the art, died for the name, all for the beauty of a thing called fame.' It sucks the soul out of the artist, and they die."
Did she ever worry that could happen to her? "At times I have, yes, but not now. Nobody can whip me."