Shelby Lynne is Facing the ‘Consequences of the Crown’—“I Did Not Expect to be Making a Record”

Everything has consequences. Love, especially. It rocked Shelby Lynne’s world and transported her from Los Angeles, where she lived since 1998, back to Nashville in 2018. Upon returning, Lynne planned to lay low by landing a publishing deal, writing songs for other artists, and spending more time with her younger sister, singer and songwriter Allison Moorer. Then, Lynne connected with Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild.

“Karen just took the reins, and we started writing songs like crazy,” Lynne tells American Songwriter. Soon after, Fairchild became Lynne’s manager and helped her land a record deal. “I’m almost 56 years old,” says Lynne. “I thought, ‘They don’t give those out to middle-aged people anymore, I might as well jump at this.’ I did not expect to be making a record. I honestly just wanted to move back here and be closer to my sister, but the songs just started coming in, and they were too good.”

Co-producing with Fairchild, Ashley Monroe, and Gena Johnson, Lynne began writing about one of the biggest heartbreaks of her life on her new project, Consequences of the Crown. “Collaborating with these special people has been an awakening for me,” says Lynne. “We started breaking all the rules and not having any rules. We made this record ourselves and had a real enjoyable time—the four of us. That’s why we share production on this. It was truly a four-way effort.”

The 12 R&B-bent tracks, which also feature contributions from Ben Chapman, Carter Faith, Waylon Payne, Jedd Hughes, Angaleena Presley, and Meg McRee, see Lynne sweep through love and loss and the transformation on the other end. On Consequences of the Crown, Lynne acknowledges the root of her heartache, reveals her own accountability, and reveals her role as a heartbreaker.

Part beat box spoken word, which Lynne dubs “spoken blues,” the opening “Truth We Know” revisits the harsher breach of love with Lynne’s chilling refrain, and I shake and a freeze. “You know how we’ve all felt that way, and there’s nothing else you can do but feel it,” says Lynne of the chilling lyrics. “You can’t run from it. All you can do is freeze and shake, and you feel like you’re standing outside yourself.”

More spoken word slips in on “Gone to Bed” and “Dear God” and was something Lynne was first introduced to as a young girl after hearing Barbara Mandrell’s 1977 cover of Shirley Brown’s No. 1 R&B hit, “Woman to Woman,” from 1974.

“Hearing her say ‘Hello? You don’t know who this is, but the reason I’m calling you is because I was going through my man’s pockets this morning. And I just happened to find your name and number… So woman to woman,’” said Lynne. “At the time, I was thinking, ‘Wow, that’s country? It wasn’t country at all. The first recording of that is Shirley Brown, and that’s a whole other bag, and that’s where Barbara got the idea.”

[RELATED: Shelby Lynne: I Am Shelby Lynne – Deluxe Edition]

She adds, “I’ve always liked talking on records. I certainly don’t consider myself a rapper. I’m a talker. I think there’s a lot of power in spoken word. I write a lot of poetry, and at the time, that particular song [‘Truth We Know’] was just about the loss of a great love in my life and a summer that I spent in love that ultimately ended in heartbreak.”

Lynne discloses the anguish of regret on “Consequences”—Bad way of thinking … I must have been out of my mind … loving you has consequences—before delivering something more familial on the luminescent ballad “Butterfly,” a song she wrote for her sister, Moorer, who she lovingly refers to as “Sissy.” In 1999, Lynne penned another tribute to Moorer with her B-side “Miss You Sissy.”

The sisters also collaborated on the 2017 duets album Not Dark Yet, and Lynne appeared on Moorer’s 2003 live album, Show, and her 2008 release Mockingbird.

Another bridge to Lynne’s past appears on “But I Ain’t,” featuring an interpolation of “Dreamsome” from her 1999 breakout album I Am Shelby Lynne. She owns up to some of her own faults on the broodier pop of “Clouds”: I got high on a plane, and it felt like I was under the wing / I got mad on a merry-go-round, I said everything.

“I have to write what I know,” says Lynne of her revealing lyrics. “And this record is about devastating pain and finding my prayers to be worthy. I don’t have anything to write about if I’m not writing about what I go through because whatever I’m going through, we all are going through. That’s why it’s Consequences of the Crown.”

Arrangements ebb and flow with Lynne’s revelations, from a tender piano-dipped “Regular Man” to the orchestral swell of “Over and Over.” By its end, Lynne finds some redemption on the slowly simmered “Good Morning Mountain,” her soulful prayer on “Dear God,” and one last ray of hope on “Keep the Light On,” a song Lynne says “puts a button on it.”

A little rougher around its edges, the closing track was pulled directly from a demo with Lynne on guitar. “It’s not about doing it a certain way,” she says. “It’s about getting that magic, and sometimes it’s not perfect, and that’s the best thing. I’m still after those little nuts and bolts of mistakes.”

Consequences of the Crown shifts from “devastation to heartbreak to life to salvation,” says Lynne. “I allowed myself to be honest. I believe it’s the most honest record I’ve ever made because there are a lot of personal things that happened in my life on this record. It moves from the first track, an outline of a poem of me talking to my partner, but I’m actually talking to an empty room, to the story about what happened to me in a love affair, and it ends with ‘Dear God.’”

The penultimate “Dear God” is Lynne’s musical prayer. “It’s definitely about crumbling to pieces and looking for salvation at the same time,” says Lynne. “Sometimes the only thing that you have are your friends who see you at your worst and help pick you up. But until you can get up off the ground yourself, you’re not going to recover. I spent a lot of time alone and reconciling the whole thing with my God. I do a lot of praying. I always do a lot of praying.”

Nashville has also been a source of salvation for Lynne. “It’s been great, but it’s been a whirlwind because I didn’t expect any of this to be happening,” shares Lynne. “I’ve been out of the business for a while. I’ve always made records, but I’ve been out of the big label thing for a really long time, and I have gotten used to not doing it.”

For someone who always considered herself an “analog queen,” Lynne says she would have never done a beatbox record 20 years ago and credits the women behind the album. “Gena and Ashley are amazing at programming, and Karen and I are from a sisterhood raised in the ‘70s, so the four of us had something to give each other,” says Lynne. “It’s cool working with women. It’s a different vibe. When you’re in the studio, and you’re doing something so private, and you’re willing to share it with the planet, you don’t need anybody in there going, ‘I don’t know.’” She adds, “With my girls I never had that. They were like, ‘Right f—king on, man.’”
Since the album provided some closure for Lynne, she insists that Consequences of the Crown is no longer hers. “It’s like making a painting, and then you give it away, and it’s not yours anymore,” reveals Lynne. “It goes back to the ‘freezing and shaking’ [on ‘Truth We Know’]. We know what that feels like, but there’s a lot of world out there that’s not connected to itself. We only suffer if we don’t get in touch with knowing ourselves. How can we give ourselves to anybody?” Lynne laughs, “And believe you me, after that last summer, I’m not really into giving myself to anybody. I would rather just give myself to my audience.”

Lynne continues, “Whatever I’m going through, we all are going through. That’s why it’s called Consequences of the Crown. You know how we call each other queen because we all live through these chapters, and it’s hard because you have to show a face of no pain. It’s always those masks we wear, and I took mine off to make this record because it’s real.”

Now 35 years since Lynne’s debut, Sunrise, she cites her sixth album,I Am Shelby Lynne (1999), reissued in 2024 to commemorate its silver anniversary as the turning point in her career as a songwriter. “All the way back to the I Am [Shelby Lynne] record was when I realized that I could learn how to write,” admits Lynne, who didn’t have any writing credits on her first three albums—Sunrise (1989), Tough All Over (1990), and Soft Talk (1991). That year, Lynne also starred alongside Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson in the TV movie Another Pair of Aces and continued taking on more acting roles, including Johnny Cash’s mother, Carrie, in the 2005 film Walk the Line.

After leaving her label to explore more genres in the early ‘90s, Lynne began navigating more rock, R&B, pop, and Americana and contributed two tracks to her 1993 album Temptationand another on six on Restless in 1995. I Am Shelby Lynneproducer Bill Bottrell—who had previously worked with Sheryl Crow on her 1993 debut, Tuesday Night Music Club, and collaborated with George Harrison, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Tom Petty—is who Lynne credits with helping find her way as a writer and as an artist. 

Bottrell co-wrote the majority of the tracks on I Am Shelby Lynne, leading to her winning a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 2001. That year, “Dreamsome,” which Lynne wrote with Jay Joyce and Dorothy Overstreet, also appeared on the 2001 romantic comedy Bridget Jones’s Diary soundtrack.

“He was generous with his artistic mind and what he had learned himself in the studio for years,” says Lynne of Bottrell. “That was my waking point of knowing that I love to write songs and that if I didn’t tell my own story, I might as well be a club singer—not that there’s anything wrong with it. But you gotta write your story. You have to sing your picture.”

Photo by Becky Fluke