Photo by Lisa VanHecke
She wore a long-sleeved black T-shirt, tight black jeans and a permanent scowl whenever she sang. If the glare of her eyes didn't cut like a laser, her lyrics did.
Is there a more intense female singer working solo than Shelby Lynne?
Her highly anticipated return to the sold-out Dakota Jazz Club on Thursday was downbeat, dark and decidedly raw. At least, the first portion. Lynne did several songs from her week-old album, "Revelation Road," a minimalist effort on which she played all the instruments.
At the Dakota, it was just her voice and an acoustic guitar. While the recording is unquestionably quiet, the songs had more immediacy in concert. Her voice was more assertive, and her demeanor — all seething, coiled intensity — added another dimension to the songs about love and life gone wrong. Luckily, Lynne's comments between songs — usually with a twist of humor whether she was talking about her writing process, her Alabama roots or the family she can't stand — helped diffuse the darkness of the songs.
The two tunes that stand out on the CD did so in concert — the hopelessly slow "I Want To Go Back" with its melodic punchline ("I want to go back/ so I can run away again") and the harrowing "Heaven's Only Down the Road," on which she cut open a vein to sing about her dad killing her mom (in front of Shelby and her little sister) and then committing suicide.
Exhale.
After that, the hard-to-categorize, 43-year-old Grammy winner explored some of her catalog, including the pure country "Leavin'," the pretty, wistful "Where I'm From" and the breezy "Why Didn't You Call Me," which somehow suggested Glen Campbell with its melody and her vocal delivery. The audience responded more enthusiastically to these older numbers.
