Which Random Weekend song will scare us on this Halloween morning?
It’s ‘I Will Stay,’ surprisingly the first song I’ve featured from Shelby Lynne’s 2003 album Identity Crisis.
Singer-songwriter Lynne toiled for a decade, releasing five albums, before having her breakthrough with 1999’s excellent, bluesy I Am Shelby Lynne. She was amusingly nominated for, and wound up winning, Best New Artist at that year’s Grammys.
Shelby Lynne won the Best New Artist Grammy in 2001, the year she released her best album, I Am Shelby Lynne.
Lynne had released five albums prior to this one, and had been recording for more than a decade. The criteria for the Best New Artist awards is this: “For a new artist who releases, during the Eligibility Year, the first recording which establishes the public identity of that artist.”
Sometimes I feel like these Random Weekends are part of a stealth marketing campaign by music studios that have tapped into my iTunes account.
Shelby Lynne pops up today, with a track from her 2005 album Suit Yourself, and it prompts me to see what she’s been up to recently. Lo and behold, she has a new, self-titled, album that dropped less than a month ago. So I listened to a couple of tracks from that record, a release I would have known nothing about if not for the Random iTunes Fairy.
Shelby Lynne’s 2008 album Just a Little Lovin’ is a tribute to Dusty Springfield, with Lynne covering nine songs popularized by the late English chanteuse.
Lynne drew comparisons to Springfield after her 1999 album I Am Shelby Lynne (a great one to check out if you haven’t already) and was later encouraged by Barry Manilow, of all people, to record a collection of Springfield’s songs. Lynne shelved the idea but returned to it several years later.
When today’s random iTunes song — the title track from Shelby Lynne’s 2008 album of Dusty Springfield covers — popped up, I was prepared to write a “whatever happened to?” post. Often these Random Weekend selections serve as reminders of artists who recorded their last albums years ago and then fell off the map.
But to my surprise, Lynne has stayed quite busy since this record. She started her own label and released four well-reviewed albums between 2010 and 2015.
Meet Me In Montauk 