Shelby Lynne’s CD launch tour last week passed through Toronto’s Hugh’s Room where she featured the new Revelation Road in its entirety for the first half of an almost two hour set. Grammy-winner Lynne then gave the second half over to selections from her past, and usually highly acclaimed, catalogue and many of these songs were welcomed with delighted reactions that denote familiarity from repeated listens.
Since Hugh’s Room is one of the most welcoming, almost cozy, of venues, Lynne and her devotees were of one vibe from the opener Lead me Love. Lynne, live, brought more of an elongated purr to her singing of this song which on the CD also features a hip swaying rhythm and a vocal touched by Jobim and Dusty respectively. This cut caresses and warms like a clean spirited offering form one’s heart and one senses a confident intimacy in lyrics like “I’ll be courageous this time/Won’t turn to stone/ I’ll give a deeper love than you have known.”
Woebegone offered a punched out, deliberate rhythm for its introspective lyric and was delivered with a big vocal edged partially gospel and partially soul and totally committed. As a southern gal, genetically attuned to quintessential hurtin’ songs, Lynne pushed her hopelessness and passion gradually toward a wailing sound. She sang “I should drive off of the road/ I’m in a war I cannot win/ I can’t explain the worth of cryin’/ I thought I had a thicker skin.”
The title track, Revelation Road, both live -and recorded- had much going for it: a voice of solid delicacy, the sense of a life experienced and reflected upon quite deeply, all with a shuffling, subtly fatalistic tempo. On the CD, produced with discretion and an acute ear for freshness in effects, the percussion track and solo guitar and mandolin display an understated and simply punctuated assertiveness, one that is not showy but does contribute to a haunting result. The vocal hangs back slightly, almost as if taken against its will. It is a potent statement that sounds deceptively relaxed as it backs existence into a corner. Lynne’s lyrics are concise and evocative: “I don’t know what happened/ I was acting on my passion/ Wearing latest fashions I wandered in the cold.” Also: “ Doing unto others is a farce, a laugh, a joke/ Remember when the black veil falls/ We all stand alone/ Barefoot on the gravel man/ We’re on Revelation Road.”
Lynne then explained that in writing a song she likes to “keep an idea around and let my heart take me where it needs to go”. The next song, I’ll hold your head, took her back to Alabama with her mother driving her and her sister to school at a time when she “was learning about being a girl and about life”. The song concerns a painful childhood that is depicted with gripping restraint, especially since both the lyrics and gently compassionate delivery sound like one wounded heart consoling another with confident vulnerability. The concise depiction of an inescapable alcoholic childhood is painfully beautiful: “It ain’t fair for a youngun’ all this hurtin’/Battlin’ the blues and the beer and the bourbon/ Come on Sissy let’s close the door/ Don’t want to hear the noise no more.”
I don’t need a reason was delivered, as on the CD, with a deliberate and irresistible beat as Lynne strummed an acoustic guitar that gave a casual back porch dimension to the performance. Lynne vocally stretched the melody into upper registers in a manner that reminded me of Maria Muldaur at her oasis. The lyrics have a tell-the-world feeling to them and sounded resolved about being down, as if solitude was a fact of life. And who is more concise about solitude than Shelby Lynne? Try “Maybe I’m just better off alone/Nobody wants to make a cave a home/ I got misery to share/ With anyone who cares/ I even got a tear or two to spare.”
Lynne introduced Even Angels by informing us that “we all have angels around us” and that “sometimes those you love most are the ones that hurt most, but it makes for good songwriting.” The song featured a tonally more rounded sound, a more declarative style and, with its ever popular major minor shifts, seemed an idiomatic “girl song” that many would cover. “Even angels fall down sometime” was a slightly generalized depiction of a given truth to a solid beat and it made for, and perhaps was intended for, a catchy listen.
I want to go back was wistful and reflective. The acoustic guitar and the melodic line had a drifting feel to them, as if emotion and thought were each carrying the other off somewhere. It was an uncompromising take on the connection of song writing and the life that feeds it and touched on how life’s pain fuels itself: “ Oh why does it feel so right to hurt so long/Is it just what I’m used to/ Does my heart need these scars to keep me alive/Oh and every time I pick up my guitar/Aw the sweet chord and memory/I just add to the collection of my broken dreams/ And I want to go back so I can run away again.” Also: “Singing don’t always suit my every need/ Aw it’s a necessity/ So I won’t fall to pieces in my empty room.” The song’s performance received a number of murmured “wows” from the audience.
For The Thief, Lynne switched to a 1968 Fender 12 string because “it adds to the depressing quality of a song”. Again Lynne made the listener feel almost like a voyeuristic intruder who overhears the tension in a delicate song that involves the unresolved relationship of two lives. The song began with “Cold on a Friday afternoon/ You’re on the other side of the room/Even with the fire going strong/ It’s chilly when I think about us/Living all alone.” The song ended with “As we sit parted listening to the wind/ I think of you and hope you’ll want me/ once again” and was delivered with painful understatement that was gripping.
Toss it all aside was performed with only voice and guitar, a format in which Lynne can seem sometimes too emotionally close. The song offered a counterpoint of an exquisite simplicity in performance and an undercurrent of suicide-leaning emotional pain. Its intimacy was compactly-expressed and lyrical: “Loving on your body/ loving you love mine.” But an emptiness that could not be filled or remedied prevailed: “Those dishes in the sink I can hardly think/ It’s like you’re almost standing there/ My heart is full of holes and I can’t find my clothes/ And my mind is feeling faint it tells no lies.” The reference to suicide was casual and thus doubly believable: “That cannon in the closet calls me over there/ Begging me to use it and dispose of my despair.”
Before she sang Heaven’s Only Days Down The Road, Shelby Lynne reflected “When I was seven, my daddy had a guitar like this. I’ve heard a lot of guitars and, yes, I’ve had a love affair with a Gibson.” The song, sung in the person of her father, who shot her mother and then himself, was an intensely personal “revelation”. It moved from “I won’t be afraid because my soul’s been set free” to a man who describes himself thus: “Been insane since I was nine/ never was the crying but the fighting kind”. It showed that a man who can feel and say “Lost all the faith a man can own/ My hopes are empty and so is my soul/ Heaven’s only days down the road” can do thus: “Can’t blame the whiskey or my Mammy’s ways / 2 little girls are better of this way”. At the song’s conclusion Lynne declared “You’ve listened to the whole album and that has taken a lot of courage”.
Actually she left I Won’t Leave You as her pre-encore finale which she introduced this way: “We can’t choose our family, but we are lucky enough to choose our friends and this song is about friends after your family has black sheeped you to death…… The closest people to me don’t have my DNA.” Her realistic remarks received many knowing nods and grunts and laughs of understanding from the audience. The song was poignantly gentle and comforting in word and voice and Lynne showed her artistry as one who can take the complexity of life’s pain and recycle it into profound simplicity. She conveyed that she knew from experience the profound value of what she said: “Sleep now rest your pain/Sleep again/When you play/In your dreams safe to see/It’s your time we got time//I won’t leave you.”
The rest of the program included favorites like I’m Leavin’ and Why Didn’t You Call Me? and a song “for all the old dogs in the audience” and Alabama Frame of Mind. The latter was introduced with “Y’all wanna sing with me?” and that’s indeed what the audience wanted to do. I’m Leavin was introduced with “I wanted to write songs and here’s the first one I wrote on a 40 dollar guitar.” Elsewhere we learned of a creation “that started out to be a poem and turned into a song” and later, since Shelby Lynne played Johnny Cash’s mother in the film Walk the Line, that “It was like meeting a mountain when I met John R. Cash.” Several of the songs allowed Lynne to belt out at substantial volume in upper registers and still maintain her ability to subtly shape an emotion in each word.
Shelby Lynne is an outstanding presence in contemporary music. On Revelation Road she is the sole singer, writer, musician, and producer and over and over proves that she can take her songs from inklings of ideas through to exceptional recordings and always on her own terms. Everso is Lynne’s own label and her first three recordings have, without outside intrusion, been gems of individuality, especially because she has both finely-honed taste and sufficiently diverse talent to achieve consistently high standards. Shelby Lynne is above all a vocal stylist who, instead of sounding mannered or preconceived as too many singers do, instead sounds genuine, uncompromisingly intimate, and spontaneous. Without affectation, her vocals seem full of emotional truth like direct lines from her heart to those of her listeners. She’s a gifted singer for adults, an important artist, and I suspect that her gig at Hugh’s Room was taken by many in her audience as a privilege.
