“Every note is a song,” Shelby Lynne loudly sings on her ninth studio album, Consequences of the Crown. That’s true here. Lynne has a big voice and a huge personality. When she opens her mouth, the whole world seems to come out. One can find traces of her biography, geography, musicology, and the entire array of emotions in how Lynne expresses herself. Is that Alabama? Do I hear a sharp pain in the heart? Lynne expresses it all.
The singer not only takes on lead vocals, but she also sings backup, plays bass, acoustic and electric guitars, percussion and drums, programming, and snaps. But despite the size and range of her voice, Lynne is not content to do it alone. She’s employed a legion of female artists to help her. She co-produced the album with Ashley Monroe (Pistol Annies), Karen Fairchild (Little Big Town), and Gena Johnson (Jason Isbell), and all the songs are co-written with at least two others, most often Monroe and Fairchild. All of these women also help out with background vocals, which gives the album a dynamic sound.
The dozen tracks here are about the usual tropes: good love, bad love, joy, pain, heart, and soul. It’s the same stuff Shelby Lynne and a zillion other singers have been crooning about for decades. There’s a timelessness to the material. Paul McCartney famously asked if the world was full of silly love songs, but artists such as Lynne pose the opposite question: are there ever too many songs of heartbreak? There’s nothing wrong with that.
To meta-illustrate, consider the cut “But I Ain’t”, co-written with Ashley Monroe, Meg McCree, Ben Chapman, Jay Joyce, and Dorothy Overstreet and co-produced with Monroe, Karen Fairchild, and Gena Johnson. She interpolates the track with “Dreamsome” from her Grammy Award-winning effort of 25 years ago, I Am Shelby Lynne. Nothing has changed, the singer exclaims. She still misses her lover.
Another example in which Shelby Lynne cites the old as a way of connecting past pain to the present is the shuffle “Gone to Bed”. She begins with a spoken word soliloquy about the last day in a personal paradise when the song “Alfie” comes on the radio. The Burt Bacharach/Hal David composition proclaims the purpose of life is love between two people and the failure of the title character to appreciate this. Lynne castigates her old lover and explains that she’s still not over the hurt.
While Lynne is best known as a country singer, her voice suggests she understands singing the blues can be cathartic on songs such as “On a Mountain” and “Shattered”. She also incorporates many electronic effects and rhythms, giving the music a more contemporary R&B feel. As far as I can tell, there is no banjo, steel guitar, or mandolin on the record. Lynne’s thick Southern drawl makes her seem like a country artist, combined with a take-no-shit attitude. She delivers lines like, “If you want redemption / Go find yourself an alter” with spit in her voice. She might yearn for old lovers, but she is not the type to forgive and forget.
Shelby Lynne doesn’t sing about wearing a crown, but she implies she is the queen by surviving her past affairs. Love has consequences, Lynne tells us, and it’s mostly pain. One can find solace by listening to her voice.