Shelby Lynne’s reappearing act

Is Shelby Lynne eligible to win the best new artist Grammy again?

Well, no. But given that her best new artist award in 2000 marked not the start but the renewal of her career -- she’d been a country recording artist for a decade before getting the honor for her rootsy reemergence on the “I Am Shelby Lynne” album -- Grammy voters may have to consider her again.

Her new album constitutes a similar fresh start and an even more personal statement.

Lynne made the cheekily titled “Identity Crisis” largely on her own, at a low-tech home studio in Palm Springs and a Hollywood facility. It’s a stark contrast to her last album, 2001’s “Love, Shelby.” That one was a full-on attempt to make her a pop star, with lavish production by Glen Ballard, the man behind hits for Alanis Morissette, Aerosmith and Dave Matthews.

“That was about as high-tech as you can go,” Lynne says of the Ballard project, which she says was made under pressure from executives at her label, Island Def Jam, to produce a pop hit. “It was an enjoyable album to make, but it was completely opposite ends of the thing.”

It also, in her words, “was floppier than flop,” selling just 84,000 copies, compared with 235,000 for “I Am.”

“I wanted to disappear, which wasn’t hard,” she says.

So she parted ways with the record company by mutual decision (she says) and retreated to her Palm Springs home, where she’d spent little concentrated time because of recording and touring schedules.

“It kind of gave me a starting-over-again place,” she says. “I started putting this studio in the house. And these songs started coming. There was not even a thought about a record label or what we were going to do. I was just proud to do it. I’d come home and say, ‘I’m so glad about this. I just want to hear it myself.’ ”

The songs range from the dark “Telephone” to the gospel-inspired “10 Rocks” to the Patsy Cline tribute “Lonesome,” the last featuring Lynne doing multitracked vocal harmonies. Although Little Feat’s Bill Payne added keyboards and a couple of songs have strings, the album as a whole is a bare-bones affair, in sharp contrast to “Love, Shelby.”

When the album was nearing completion earlier this year, Lynne’s manager, Elizabeth Jordan, started playing it for record company executives but met some resistance to the spare approach. Capitol Records President Andy Slater and Vice President Ron Lafitte, though, took to the record immediately and made a deal to release it as is, with plans for a September launch.

Lynne will support the album with some club shows and join Nanci Griffith, Rosanne Cash, Iris DeMent and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on a fall tour called Sweet Voices. From there it depends on how the album does, but it’s not something she’s worrying about,

“If people hear it, it’ll be really cool,” she says. “But it’s definitely not geared for that hit machine.”

A reunion of Monterey Popsters

Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, one of the organizers of the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967, is putting together a reunion of people who played at the concerts for a screening of the film “Monterey Pop” July 3, opening the fifth annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

Phillips has been calling and writing survivors of the big rock event. Although many headliners have died -- Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding and Janis Joplin among them -- the lineup also included the Byrds, the Grateful Dead, the Who, the Jefferson Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel and Ravi Shankar.

The two-week America Cinematheque salute to the swingin’ ‘60s will also include a tribute to the Bee Gees’ Maurice Gibb, who died in January with the U.S. premiere of “Cucumber Castle.” The 1969 TV special starred Gibb and his brother Barry romping in faux medieval-fantasy splendor with cameos by Mick Jagger, Roger Daltrey, Donovan and Marianne Faithfull. It includes the only TV appearance made by Blind Faith, the supergroup featuring Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. .

For a full schedule and ticket information, see the Web site www.modsandrockers.com.

Small faces

* Mars Volta has pulled out of its spot as opening act on the Red Hot Chili Peppers tour in the wake of the May 25 death of band member Jeremy Ward, who was the L.A. group’s sound manipulator. But it will not alter plans for the June 24 release of its debut album “De-Loused in the Comatorium” from Universal Records’ GSL/Strummer Recordings label or for the band’s headlining tour starting in July. No decision has been made about replacing Ward.