Shelby Lynne

The 20-year-plus career — and personal life — of the country artist Shelby Lynne has been a famously tumultuous one. As a child, she and her sister, country singer Alison Moorer, lost their parents to a murder/suicide. Lynne married once, briefly, at 18, though no discussion of that or any other romance has made it into the public sphere since then. As a teen, she was groomed to be a Nashville country-pop belle, though after a few albums she rebelled and released the critically acclaimed I am Shelby Lynne, the work that saw her signature rough-edged combination of confrontation and confession fully blossom.

Though a critic and fan favorite — and an artist who’s certainly stood the test of time — Lynne never managed, after multiple stops, starts and label switches, to land the hit record that seemed to dangle just out of reach. Now, she’s made the choice to take the rockier road again, recording an album of covers taken from the iconic 1969 Dusty Springfield LP Dusty in Memphis, an album most listeners would agree bears no messing with. “I’ve never done a cover record,” she says. “So I thought I might as well do an important one.”

She chose a difficult artist to take on — an artist whose own painful personal life is well known, and whose songs deal with the same topic. Although she’s no stranger to difficulty, Lynne’s reticent about sharing any personal details, saying only: “You have to pull the emotions out from somewhere. I don’t sing songs I don’t believe.”