Shelby Lynne 'Suit Yourself' album

Shelby Lynne cut the loose and personal Identity Crisis when she came to Capitol in 2003. And now, she’s taken her desire for intimacy and capture-the-moment spontaneity even further with her latest work, the aptly titled Suit Yourself. “I’ve learned a lot in six years,” Lynne says in her Alabama drawl, “and the main thing I’ve learned is to not second-guess my own self. I feel like I know what I want to do, and I’m just doin’ it.”

Lynne makes her intentions clear from the getgo. The first sounds you hear on Suit Yourself are the chatter between the artist and her cohorts as they get ready to lay down a take. “We know where we’re going,” she says, just before the band slams into “Go With It,” a deep-grooved rocker that hits with the force of the Santa Anas in a mountain pass. From this invigorating beginning, the record burrows deep into Lynne’s feelings and observations, audacious in their emotional nakedness, the music’s seamlessness suggesting stream of consciousness. Songs like “Where Am I Now,” “I Won’t Die Alone,” “Johnny Met June,” “You Don’t Have a Heart” and “Sleep” go right to the heart, and soul, of the matter. It takes courage to make a record as utterly unguarded as this one – courage and a whole heap of God-given talent. Lynne has both in spades.

As she was writing the songs that would wind up on Suit Yourself, Lynne began to realize where her muse was taking her. “I wanted to have a band,” she explains. “I wanted the next record to have a band feel, not a studio-player feel, and I wanted to be a part of the band. The important thing to me was finding the perfect guys.”

Find them she did, starting with drummer Bryan Owings and guitarist Michael Ward (a former member of the Wallflowers), who have played with her on stage. Owings turned her on to Brian “Brain” Harrison, who handled bass chores and engineered. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ keyboardist Benmont Tench and pedal steel player Robby Turner round out the band. Additionally, her old pal Tony Joe White stopped by to lend his inimitable guitar and voice to one session. Shelby covered two of his songs on the album, “Old Time’s Sake” and another she mysteriously refers to in the track listing as “Track 12,” (you’ll have to listen to find out which one). Lynne played guitar on every track. “They let me in, and it was fun just playing like a band,” she says. “You can be a girl singer, but I really felt like one of the boys, which is where I’m most comfortable, and the record has that vibe to it, you know, ’cause we cut it live.”

The album is full of candid moments, from the ice cubes clinking in a cocktail glass during “You and We” to the sound of the “Stop” button of the tape machine being pressed at the end of “Sleep.” “I Cry Everyday” captures the sound of a recording session as if you were in the room. The result is a fascinating slice of audio verite that serves to deepen the impression of open-hearted naturalness. The track was laid down without premeditation at Harrison’s house in Nashville on the night they met. None of them knew it at the time, but the impromptu take they banged out would mark the formal beginning of the Suit Yourself project.

“We went over to Brain’s house at midnight, just feeling the vibe,” she recalls. “We were all pretty liquored-up at that point, and it was probably time to go to bed. But that was the beginning of it all. I knew I was comfortable, and this was the cat who would understand how I wanted to make a record. And now we’re best friends. After that I assembled the cats and had a pretty much laid out plan of what I wanted to do, which was add to the existing things and see what happened with Tony Joe when he came.”

Ah yes, the “existing things.” Half of Suit Yourself had its genesis in Lynne’s home studio. A while back she installed a Studer 24-track and a console in her Palm Springs, California, home. “I’m a junkie for the old analog stuff,” she says. She’d gotten into the habit of demoing her songs right onto two-inch tape, and that’s what she did with a batch of songs she worked up last year.

“I went over to my Studer, pushed ‘Record’ and put the song down on the guitar,” she says, describing her process. “Later, Betty [manager and executive producer Elizabeth Jordan] and I were listening to what I was calling demos, and she said, ‘Just take this 24-track two-inch and do what you want to with it.’ We flew the tapes to Nashville, put ’em up on Brain’s machine and added a few little things. So half of this record I did just by myself. Then the other ones we cut live with the fellas at Brain’s house. I really honestly tried to recut some of them, but I couldn’t make them better.”

“Johnny Met June,” “Where Am I Now?,” “You’re the Man,” “You and Me” and “Sleep” all originated in this way, and those first-take vocals she sang alone in her house are the very same ones you’ll hear on the album. The reason she couldn’t beat those takes is because she’d captured them at the very moment of conception. “I’d rather have a great moment than some meaningless fancy moment,” she says in a defiant tone.

There’s a Zen quality to Lynne’s creative process as she describes it…sort of. “I don’t try to write any particular kinds of songs; they just kind of appear,” she explains. “I wrote ‘Go With It’ in five minutes because I picked up the guitar one day and I hit a chord that I’d never played before. ‘Johnny Met June’ I wrote the morning Johnny [Cash] died. There are no secrets here. I’m just a running fireball full of shit and emotion, and the rest of it will present itself. I just think each song needs to be individually great – better than great. There’s no room for mediocre in my thinkin’. My standards are pretty high.”

Lynne makes timeless American music, pure and simple. She seems to tap, directly and naturally, into the mother lode. At the heart of her art is a seemingly innate ability to present this deep-rooted authenticity in an intensely personal way. What’s striking about Suit Yourself is that it’s the very antithesis of “product.”

“It's not to be mean-hearted, but I am stubborn – I won’t let myself not be stubborn,” Lynne says of her single-minded approach. “I’m doing the songs that I want, and this is the way they go, and here it is. I know this record's not easy, but nothing good is. I have to be happy with it, and I am. Really, I’m just doing what I love. This is my latest version of what I do.”

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Shelby Lynne - Suit Yourself