With an Assist from Karen Fairchild, Shelby Lynne Makes 'One of the Best Records of My Life' (Exclusive)

Little Big Town member, Ashley Monroe nudge Grammy winner back into studio: "It's just what she's meant to do"

Shelby Lynne is the first to admit she didn’t think she had another album in her.

Thankfully Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild, Ashley Monroe and other members of Nashville’s elite music community begged to differ. Together, they nudged the Grammy-winning artist back into the studio one more time. And now Lynne couldn’t be more grateful.

“I just made one of the best records of my life,” the 55-year-old Alabama native tells PEOPLE about her just-released Consequences of the Crown.

That’s saying a lot for Lynne, who’s not only her own toughest critic but also the creator of some of the most soulful and singular music of the past 25 years.

She’s under no illusion that younger audiences may have heard of her, but those who have — like Fairchild — put her in the most rarefied category of vocal artists, a singer’s singer.

“She was just the cool girl that everybody loved and wanted to be with,” says Fairchild, 54, recalling when Lynne first came on her radar with the trailblazing album, 1999’s I Am Shelby Lynne.

It’s no wonder Fairchild jumped at Monroe’s invitation to join Lynne in a Nashville songwriting session in January 2023 even though Fairchild — a multi-Grammy winner herself — admits to nerves.

“I was kinda scared — you know, is she gonna like me?” Fairchild confesses. “I didn’t know what she was gonna be like because she’s such a force.”

But also on Fairchild’s mind was what so many other admirers have wondered: Why hadn’t she heard about Lynne in recent years?

As it turns out, Lynne is the one who had tucked herself away. It’s been a long journey back.

She first burst onto the scene in the 1990s with major-label country albums in Nashville. But chafing under the format, she escaped to Los Angeles in 1998, re-emerging with I Am Shelby Lynne, a masterful genre-defying project that took full advantage of her soulful voice and well-sharpened songwriting skills. Lavish critical praise quickly introduced Lynne to a wider audience, and in 2001, she earned her Grammy for best new artist. Yet she was never able to fully capitalize on that career boost, and by 2006, she was plying her music on smaller labels, creating a long string of what she calls “living room records.” There are gems among them, but not many people were listening.

That lifestyle, she says, allowed her to avoid tangling too much with the machinery that runs the major music market. “Never liked the business anyway,” Lynne says. “I love to create. I love to perform. I love to do those things, but it’s never been easy.”

Lynne also admits other things were getting in her way, too, including alcohol and what she describes as “unhealthy” relationships. She made ends meet with regular gigs in front of diehard fans at small venues, but otherwise, she says, she isolated herself: “I was scared, scared to go out in the world. Put me in front of 10,000 people, that’s a snap, but get me out socially, I’d just go behind the curtains.”

Then a little more than two years ago, she decided she had to make dramatic changes. A big first step was quitting alcohol. “I got help,” she says, “because I was determined to stay sober.”

Lynne also realized she was weary of LA’s concrete sprawl and longed for a more natural setting: “I’m a Southerner through and through. I can live anywhere, but I really missed the humidity,” she says, adding with a chuckle, “Few people can say that.”

Her younger sister, Allison Moorer, herself a country artist with a major-label career in the late 1990s and early 2000s, beckoned her to join her back in Nashville. Returning, in 2022, “just felt like the right thing,” says Lynne.

Still, she was certain her recording career was over; her dual focus was on staying healthy and finding a place in the city’s songwriting community. For a while, that’s exactly what she did, along the way learning — for the first time in her life — how to write collaboratively in the sessions that Nashville is known for. She honed her craft with, among others, singer-songwriter Waylon Payne, Monroe and Monroe’s fellow Pistol Annies, Miranda Lambert and Angaleena Presley. Then Fairchild entered the picture, instantly charmed by the wisp of a woman whom she’d been so nervous to meet.

“She came up to me and gave me a big hug and said, ‘I’ve been watching you for a long time,’” Fairchild recalls, “and I think we wrote three songs that day. We just hit it off.”

As sessions continued, talk turned irresistibly to the idea that Lynne should be recording. How could it not when Lynne herself was workshopping the songs being written?

Fairchild, for one, was in awe. “The voice is powerful, soulful, raw,” says Fairchild, who knows more than a few things about powerhouse vocals. “It has an aching in it that I don’t hear very often. It’s that intangible thing that is inside her body and her soul that comes out in the voice. It’s just what she’s meant to do.”

Lynne says she finally decided to give recording a try with “Butterfly.” The song, a joyful tribute to her sister that’s now on the album, features the lush, layered vocals of Lynne, Fairchild and Monroe.

“We were so blown away by it,” Lynne recalls. “We worked so well together in that moment, and it was just like a first take. And then we built a record around it.”

Grammy-winning engineer Gena Johnson signed on to the project, and the four women were off and running, each sharing the role of producer; Monroe and/or Fairchild have co-writing credits with Lynne on all but one of the album’s 12 tracks. Other songwriting contributors, including Presley and Payne, fill out the credits.

As with so much of Lynne’s catalog, the finished product defies easy categorizing. But genre doesn’t really matter with music so full of the sort of surprises that demand repeated listening: the vivid and evocative lyrics (that double as poetry), the twists and turns of melodies, the spontaneity of the sound. The through line is Lynne’s voice, purring and raging, rejoicing and despairing.

Just as Fairchild attests, no one quite does pain like Lynne, enticing in with a bracing intimacy. The source she draws from is deep, not only a lifetime accumulation of romantic heartbreaks, but also a childhood plagued by a father’s abusive behavior. It ended in 1986 in devastating fashion, when her father shot and killed her mother and then committed suicide, a history detailed in Allison Moorer’s acclaimed 2019 memoir, Blood.

Related: Allison Moorer on Trying to Heal After Her Parent's Murder-Suicide: I Have to 'Reject the Fear'

Lynne’s own trauma has now had almost 40 years to heal, and profoundly, she declares she has turned pain into "a friend."

“Because,” she says, “it lets me use it to make my work.”

She also calls pain a “wellspring,” though she adds – after a deep inhale and exhale — “it’s pretty intense.”

“I think if you’re brave enough to write the pain, it just works because so many people are living it that don’t get to sing records, that don’t know how to write poems about it,” she says. “I guess what I do is about sharing.”

Music, Lynne says, “saved my life.” Even as a child, she could pick up her guitar and soothe herself with a song. “No matter how disconnected the voice was from the feelings,” she says, “I could hear my heart.”

As an artist, Lynne has always found a way to put that heart into her music — with all its pain and vulnerability — and she knows she couldn’t make her brand of it without the backstory she was dealt. But now she also understands you can make art without being a tortured artist.

That realization, she says, has been part of her process of getting healthy. Lynne admits that, as much as her music has overflowed with vulnerability, she also had built walls in other parts of her life.

“I never thought I could possibly be vulnerable from having to be strong for so long about everything,” she says, “but I don’t want to be the tough one anymore. I’m waiting on vulnerable to come all the way in.”

Making that task easier are the health-driven people she’s surrounded herself with, people who are affirming all of her, sometimes even more than she’s able to.

“I’m getting better because nobody wants anything from me except everything good,” she says, almost incredulously. “And I’m able to see it. That’s what I’m really working on. I know it sounds a little guru-y, but I had to get there. I think the record is an example of being healthy.”

Indeed, much of the album reveals Lynne with a deft scalpel, opening and tending to the wounds of a relationship’s recent end. (She says she is now contentedly uncoupled.) But amid the songs of heartache is the brightness of “Butterfly,” and tellingly, the album ends on its two most hope-filled tracks, “Dear God” and “Keep the Light On.”

“What’s that saying — you can’t know what good feels like until you know bad?” Lynne says. “I’m ready for a lot more good, and I am blessed because the good has arrived. And that reconciles all of it, running away [from Nashville], hiding, then coming back to Nashville, then sitting down and writing songs that are good songs with people who are amazing, and being free — just being free to find happy.”

Lynne resists mustering expectations for the album. Just making it, she says, is enough accomplishment. Fairchild, who helped Lynne get signed to a major label, has other ideas. She hears the potential for another Grammy nomination.

“I think if people listen to it,” she says, “then it’s absolutely within reach. So that’s kind of our job to get the record in the hands of her peers and ask them to take a deep dive. I think they’ll love it.”

Fairchild is now serving as Lynne’s unofficial manager, though she describes herself more as a “gatekeeper.” Lynne, in turn, describes her relationship with Fairchild as “like getting a sister, an older sister” (though Fairchild is a year younger).

Says Fairchild: “I feel protective of her, and I want her to get her due and her shot. I’m just making sure her dreams are getting met with the right team around her. I’ll always do whatever role she wants me to do. I just get really passionate about people that I know need to be heard and have something to say.”

Lynne already has several dates on her calendar that start to give her that due. On Sept. 18, she will receive a lifetime achievement award from the Americana Music Association, and on Oct. 24, she’ll earn a coveted endorsement of superstar soul man Chris Stapleton, opening for him at London’s 02 Arena. She’s also preparing to headline Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium on Sept. 26 in celebration of the 25th anniversary of I Am Shelby Lynne.

Lynne considers that album’s memorable title, and she turns reflective.

“When I said it then,” she says, “I was not quite her.” But she adds: “Now I am.”

What’s different?

“Then it was ‘I’m Shelby Lynne, damn it — everybody, notice me,’” she says. “‘Now, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I am Shelby Lynne.’ And it’s true. I feel her now. I know who she is, and I know who this is.”

And she knows she’s enough.

“Yeah, that’s 25 years’ difference and all that learning, of walking into corners and walls and meeting not the good people,” she says. “Not that they were bad, but not good for me. I don’t want to sound like a bag of cliches, but I had to figure that out: You’re enough. It’s that simple.”

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