Far From a Country Club Type

Shelby Lynne is half an hour late for an interview, but she doesn’t bother to offer an explanation. She simply flops into a chair on the hotel patio and orders a beer. She probably figures that in the grand scheme of things, she’s the one who deserves an apology. For more than a dozen years, she has been denied her rightful appointment with stardom.

The petite country-soul singer from southern Alabama had every reason to believe in 1987 that she was going to be the next big thing in country music, maybe even in all of pop-rock. She arrived in Nashville at 18 with a voice as commanding as any female country singer since Wynonna--and a spirit every bit as unbending.

One appearance on a Nashville cable-TV show prompted writer-producer Billy Sherrill, who helped craft Tammy Wynette’s classic “Stand by Your Man,” to come out of semiretirement and work with her on her debut album. Wynette herself called Lynne the best voice in country music, and the legendary George Jones said he was honored just to sing on Lynne’s debut single.

But things quickly began to derail for Lynne. Nashville has never been easy on strong-willed mavericks. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings became superstars only after rebelling against tight Nashville controls. The greatest recognition for other nonconformists, such as Lyle Lovett and Steve Earle, has come from outside country music. And there’s a whole layer of artists, from Mickey Newbury and Billy Joe Shaver to Guy Clark and James Talley, who fell through the cracks.

For a while, it looked as if Lynne would be another casualty.

Nashville was going through one of its pop crossover phases, and Lynne balked. She complained so much about the gutless, pop-minded material and the copycat arrangements being chosen for her that she got a reputation for being an ingrate and a troublemaker.

Some country power-brokers blamed her behavior on a personal tragedy.

“Well, you know,” one heard repeatedly in the early ‘90s when asking about Lynne’s troubles in town, “she saw her father shoot her mother to death and then kill himself with the same gun.”

After making five albums for three labels, Lynne gave up on Nashville in 1997 and headed home to Alabama, where she rented a $250-a-month “shack” on Mobile Bay.

“I hated it,” Lynne says of her Nashville period. “The songs were bull----. I remember thinking, ‘This [expletive] ain’t moving me.’ I’d despise the records so much that I wouldn’t even sing the hits when I’d go on the road. That’s what gave me the bad reputation. . . . ‘This bitch won’t even sing the hits.’ But it was fluff and I just couldn’t do it. I could feel my career slipping away, but I didn’t give a [expletive].”

The only way she’d ever make another record, she vowed, was on her own terms. To make matters worse, a four-year relationship would soon end.

“I took a lot of Valium and smoked a lot of pot and just sat in my robe and looked at Mobile Bay,” she says. “I didn’t want to do anything, but then the songs started coming.”

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It’s the anguish and affirmation of that retreat that serves as the emotional heart of “I Am Shelby Lynne,” the new album whose key moments finally capture her smoldering artistry.

Because the record shifts musical styles so aggressively, it feels awkward in places. But you can picture the rejuvenated Lynne eager to explore every style that she has admired, from the Phil Spector-inspired explosiveness of “Your Lies” to the soulful, candlelight delicateness of “Leavin’ “to the rock bite of “Life Is Bad.”

At its best, the album recalls the bittersweet soulfulness of Dusty Springfield’s landmark “Dusty in Memphis” album. And Lynne, unlike Springfield, now writes or co-writes her own material.

The country-flavored “Lookin’ Up,” probably the most accessible track, is a statement of disillusionment that conveys the isolation and grace of vintage Kris Kristofferson. It’s the story of someone driven so low by heartache that she’s reduced to “lookin’ up for the next thing that brings me down.”

Released in the fall to rave reviews in England, the album is now generating equal acclaim in the U.S., where it was just released by Island Records. Spin magazine gave it nine out of a possible 10 points, while Rolling Stone declared, “Lynne is a true original, synthesizing various, mostly Southern musical strains into a style that is as one-of-a-kind as an individual’s DNA.”

The album’s producer, Bill Bottrell, who co-produced Sheryl Crow’s debut album and subsequently went through his own period of disillusionment with the record business, said working with Lynne rekindled his love of making music.

“Despite all the [expletive] in the record business these days, this experience reminded me that you can still find authenticity in popular music,” he said in a separate interview. “I was lucky enough to run across someone who had it. It renews my faith that real, heartfelt music can find a place on a major label and still be heard.”

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You don’t have to listen to Lynne’s music to sense her independence. She crosses the lobby of the exclusive Palm Springs hotel, which is near her house, with the cocky authority of someone who knows she’s special. She prides herself on being honest and blunt.

A British journalist captured her bravado when he wrote of her recently, “If there had been a third passenger in Thelma and Louise’s car as they revved over the cliff, lapsed Baptist Shelby would have gotten the role.”

Lynne moved here last year because she likes the desert heat and because she is intrigued by the town’s link with old Hollywood glamour. She thinks it’s cool that Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley had houses here.

It was listening to Elvis records back home in Frankville, Ala., that first convinced Shelby Lynn Moorer that she wanted to be a singer.

Born in Quantico, Va., on Oct. 22, 1968, Lynne grew up in the tiny Alabama town of 150. Her dad was a high school English teacher who loved Willie and Waylon, while her mom was a legal secretary whose musical tastes leaned more toward ‘50s and ‘60s rock.

Lynne’s younger sister is singer Allison Moorer, who won an Oscar nomination last year as co-writer of the song “A Soft Place to Fall,” which was heard in “The Horse Whisperer.” Her second album is due in the fall. The two are close, Lynne says, but she just laughs when asked if she ever tried to give her sister career advice.

Lynne doesn’t remember her childhood as an easy one. She felt like an outcast at school because she didn’t dress like the other little girls (“I was very much a tomboy”) and because she liked country music, which wasn’t cool.

Things were also tense at home.

“I loved and admired him,” she says softly of her father. “But we just fought all the time. We were too much alike. Daddy had a drinking problem, and I was the only human being on Earth who ever stood up to him. I think he was a brilliant man with no outlet, very frustrated. He always wanted to be a musician and he wasn’t that good.”

Lynne never talks about the details of her parents’ deaths, but she does discuss the impact of the incident, which happened when she was 17.

“Everyone says, ‘She’s so good [a singer] because this happened’ or ‘She’s so difficult because. . . ,’ ” she says forcefully. “Maybe so, but only partially. I was just as damn difficult when I was 7 years old as I was when I was 18. My father always told me to be an individual, and I’ve remembered that every day of my life.”

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After losing her parents, Lynne lived with her grandmother, who broadened the teenager’s musical tastes to include R&B; and jazz singers. But Lynne was restless. She wanted to be on her own. She got married when she was 18 and headed to Nashville. The marriage lasted less than two years, but Lynne got what she wanted: a contract with Epic Records, the home of Wynette.

“Isn’t she something?” Sherrill says by phone from his office in Nashville when asked about his memories of working with Lynne a decade ago.

“I thought she was the best thing I ever heard in my life, country-wise, but I couldn’t get across to the people who ran the company how good she was. She’s definitely her own person, but people are wrong when they say she’d never listen to reason. What she wouldn’t listen to is idiots.”

Lynne isn’t so harsh. She says she feels bad when she reads her own tirades about Nashville because there were lots of people in town who encouraged her.

“I always had people, like [MCA executive] Tony Brown, encouraging me,” she says, sipping beer on the hotel patio. “They gave me 120%. The difficult thing was when I was making the records--the difference between the records I wanted to make and the kind that the companies thought were going to sell.”

On Lynne’s five Nashville albums for a series of labels, there are occasional moments of interest. Basically, however, you can go right to “I Am Shelby Lynne.” It’s the first time the intensity and daring of her live shows have been captured on record.

Lynne knew she wanted to work with Bottrell in 1995 when she heard Crow’s debut album, “Tuesday Night Music Club.” Through a former manager, Lynne got a demo tape to Betty Bottrell, Bill’s wife and manager.

Betty Bottrell has received more than 1,000 tapes from professional singers and hopefuls since the Crow album, and Lynne’s is one of only a dozen or so she’s ever forwarded to her husband.

Bill Bottrell wasn’t familiar with Lynne’s music, but he’d heard stories about how difficult she was to work with, including one about her pulling a gun on a producer to underscore her displeasure over the way a session was going. (Lynne denies the incident, saying it’s typical of the Nashville lore that built up around her.)

But Bottrell was drawn to what he heard on the tape. People talk about soul a lot in music, but you don’t hear it very often. Bottrell heard it in Lynne’s demo--and he vowed to bring it out in the album.

After a year of working together in California and Alabama, Lynne and Bottrell finished the album, but they didn’t know if there was a place for it in today’s youth- and novelty-dominated marketplace.

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The Bottrells and Lynne flew to New York in January 1999 to play the album for top executives at Island Records, which inherited her contract from Mercury Records in the consolidation of labels after Seagram’s purchase of PolyGram.

“We were knocked out,” recalls Jim Caparro, chairman of the Island/Def Jam Music Group. “We all felt she made a brilliant record. We could have put it out then, but we didn’t want to send it to radio cold. We felt we needed to put together a special marketing plan so that there would be an audience waiting for the album. We didn’t want to run the risk of having this album fall between the cracks.”

Because executives of Island Records in England were also enthusiastic about the project, the plan was to release it in England and hope that enthusiasm would infect the rest of Europe and the U.S., which is what Caparro feels has happened. “The reviews were sensational in England,” he says, “and the album is a hit there.”

“Putting the album out in England was very important because Shelby wanted it to be heard,” Bill Bottrell says. “She didn’t want it sitting on a shelf for a year. If it hadn’t come out somewhere last year, she would probably have seen [the delay] as one more record company problem that got in the way of her music. When the reviews started coming in from Europe, she finally felt validated.”

With the album available in the U.S., Lynne is headed to Europe for some promotional shows. When she returns, she’ll finalize plans for a U.S. tour with her five-piece band and two backup singers.

“I’ve already reached my dream by just making the album,” she says. “Everything else is a bonus. . . . But it would be nice if it went gold. It would be great to know that many people understand what I’ve been trying to do all these years.”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.