This time, she’s carrying a torch

SHELBY LYNNE, hiding behind vintage sunglasses and a casual sneer, slumped back against a bus-stop bench on Sunset Boulevard and checked her cellphone one more time. Lynne’s manager was still fighting cross-town traffic and the singer was overdue for a lunchtime appointment with a pitcher of margaritas.

“You’ll like me better after a couple of drinks,” the country singer said to the journalist sharing the bench. “After a few, I’ll say anything.” Lynne likes to have fun with her reputation. Back in the 1990s, when she was a newcomer in Nashville, she was labeled a problem child in a company town that only pretends to love mavericks. Then she picked up some other labels -- commercial disappointment, studio hard case, party girl -- and there were whispers about her past, especially the lurid death of her parents back in Alabama when she was 17.

Lynne’s talent, however, was never in doubt, which is why there was always another record label ready to take a chance on her. Billy Sherrill, the producer who crafted “Stand By Your Man” for Tammy Wynette, had come out of semi-retirement the first time he heard Lynne sing. She proved Sherrill’s instincts right in 2001 when she won the prestigious Grammy for best new artist for her album “I Am . . . Shelby Lynne,” a masterpiece of torch songs and tortured stories. Great successes were predicted; they haven’t happened yet.

Now the people surrounding Lynne are pulsing with excitement that her breakthrough may be here. On Jan. 29, Lost Highway Records will release her 10th studio album, “Just a Little Lovin’. “ The collection is a spare, mesmerizing tribute to the late Dusty Springfield, another singer with a haunting voice and haunted past. “This,” Lynne said, “is sacred ground to me.”

Her handlers hope that Lynne, like Norah Jones or Amy Winehouse, will cut through with a sound that is both of the moment but also a valentine to the past. Nothing would make Lynne happier than to live in a flintier analog age.

On the bus bench, the singer wearing a Morrissey shirt was sitting with about $160 worth of just-purchased music, almost all of it on vinyl, from Amoeba Music. James Brown, Roberta Flack, Tammy Wynette, Muddy Waters -- stuff that she could never find back in Palm Springs, where she has lived for six years because “it’s quiet and I don’t like scenes.”

Lynne is most comfortable in the studio and on stage, where she is a self-described “belter.” Through the years her music has taken her in different directions -- into lush and soulful zones as well as her alt-country base sound -- but in November, during a five-city club tour, the Springfield songs took her to a new place of quiet restraint, and won strong reviews.

Anchored in the past

LYNNE’S Alabama drawl is easiest to hear when she’s drinking or angry and, like some John Ford character marooned in a Dr. Phil universe, the things that make her angriest are flimsy talents, pretension and the modern obsession with technology. Her new album was recorded on 2-inch tape, not with Pro Tools. She has a MySpace page but has never seen it. She had a computer once but, well, it broke.

“I am the youngest dinosaur, believe me,” the 39-year-old said while wandering through Amoeba. “I had an iPod but I am so over that, I’m done. I believe in vinyl. You have to dedicate yourself when you put a record on: You have to get up to turn it over. You can’t get up and walk around the yard. And the album covers -- you can’t roll a joint on an iPod.” Lynne is enthralled by music history and feels an evangelical power coming off those secondhand LPs, too. Walking around Amoeba with her is like touring a cathedral with a true believer. “Oh, look, Faron Young!” “Have you heard Sister Rosetta Tharp?” She breathlessly told the tale of the gypsy caravan fire in the 1920s that scorched the hand of guitar demigod Django Reinhardt (“His fingers were fused but he still played amazing!”) and, a heartbeat later, debated the legacy damage Buck Owens suffered by co-hosting “Hee Haw.” You could call Lynne petite (she’s 5-foot-1 and “a size zero,” as her manager, Elizabeth Jordan, puts it), but there’s something in her bar-fight glare that would make you think twice. She enjoys the rowdy rep but say she spends more gardening, recording in her garage studio and doting on Junior, her Italian greyhound. The dog can flat out fly if it wants to, but usually it just lolls around the house. “I love that,” Lynne said. “It’s the same as me.”

Outside Amoeba, staring into a display window with antique turntables and grinning images of Fats Waller and Louis Prima, she abruptly announced she will no longer attend burials.

“I haven’t been in the South since my grandfather died 2 1/2 years ago,” she said. “I decided that was the last funeral I’m ever going to. I don’t care who dies. I’ve been to too many damn funerals. I’m not sending flowers either.” It’s not the caskets that bother Lynne. “The reason is I am strong person and I have a hard time dealing with people who aren’t. People don’t deal with bad things well and I do. You have to have practice I guess.”

The notion of the Springfield album came from, of all people, Barry Manilow, who lives near Lynne. The idea really took hold when she presented it to Phil Ramone, the producer who has won 14 Grammys for work with artists such as Ray Charles, Barbra Streisand and Paul Simon. Ramone brought in Al Schmitt, the esteemed recording engineer, and last January took Lynne into the historic Studio A at Capitol Records. All songs were recorded in live takes with no overdubs.

“You had to feel it to do this music, and I could feel it there,” Lynne said. “Phil and Al let me pretend I was in control. That was nice of them. We cut the record the week Capitol Records busted up. So we’re downstairs wondering why upstairs isn’t coming down to check us out. Turns out there was no upstairs there.”

Some artists would have panicked, but after stops at more than half a dozen labels, Lynne shrugged and looked for the next stop. She and her manager took the album to Lost Highway founder Luke Lewis, who eagerly took it off Capitol’s hands.

‘From Jim Beam to Jobim’

RAMONE, who had heard tales about Lynne, said she does have “a whiff of danger about her,” but that her musical focus and talent are amazing. “I think this album shows a wide audience who she is and what she can do.”

The album finds Lynne channeling familiar Springfield songs such as “The Look of Love” and an especially sparse rendition of “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” The slow and airy arrangements manage to be both aching and burnished. Lynne, with a hearty laugh, said the guiding motto was “from Jim Beam to Jobim.”

Beyond the music, Lynne knows the media will find it compelling to explore the links (either real or projected) between herself and Springfield, who died in 1999. There were of plenty of tales about the British chanteuse, who grappled with substance abuse and mental illness.

Lynne immersed herself in all things Springfield while preparing for the album. But she declined to analyze the singer beyond the vinyl. “I read every book, but how true could a book be? You can’t really determine if it’s just people talking,” she said. “I hate to even say what I read because I don’t want people to think I believe it.”

Lynne has too much experience on the other end of cruel chatter. She loathes interviews because they drift into questions about her love life or old personal tragedies. When she was 17, Lynne and her sister Allison Moorer (an accomplished country singer in her own right) were witnesses as their father murdered their mother and then killed himself.

Lynne says she stays awake fretting about interviews and how she will be portrayed, revealed or misunderstood. “It’s hard to trust people. I don’t like doing press. I’m not good at it.”

Over Mexican food and margaritas, as promised, she loosens up and tells tales about her crush on George Strait, long phone calls with Willie Nelson (“He’s always on his tour bus -- parked in front of his house, he’s on his tour bus. I love that.”) and a bitter feud she has with a certain singer. Just before a deliciously ripe description of the backstage melodrama, Lynne, defying her own claim that she’s not adept at the press game, leans over and clicks the tape recorder off. “This is just between us, mister.”

After a few hours and a more few drinks, Lynne was back at her hotel, Le Parc, or, as she calls it, Le Dump. “I like it though. There are no famous people here and the bar stays open late.” She was eager to listen to her new LPs and already worried about this article.

The grown-up Alabama wild child grew solemn and said she wonders where her career will go if this album doesn’t connect. “I’m risking my life with this album.” But then she smiled. “You know, I spent a lot of time not being able to listen to myself, but now I’m finally comfortable. And how many people get to do this for living. C’mon now, tell the truth!”

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geoff.boucher@latimes.com