For her third album, with no significant hits to her name, Epic tried to meet her halfway. They encouraged her to interview producers and find a favorite. She settled on James Stroud, at the time an emerging Nashville producer with hits by Clint Black and Tracy Lawrence. Stroud agreed to let Lynne choose the songs and the musicians.
The resulting album, Soft Talk, turned out to be even more generic than her previous albums. As with the others, her vocal talent is obvious, and there are performances worth hearing. But the arrangements don’t do her any favors.
“I’m proud of all my albums, you know I am,” she says. “Some of them are just not very good. I think there’s good stuff on each of them. There’s also songs on those records that when I hear them, I think, ‘I can’t believe I cut that shit.’ But what are you going to do? You can’t take them back.”
In September 1990, between her second and third albums, she accepted an invitation from Nelson to visit him at his Pedernales ranch and studio near Austin. Nelson and Lynne cut a recording of standards in two days that Evelyn Shriver insists is by far the best thing she recorded back then. But it has never been released.
“It was the first time she’d gone into a studio and just did what she wanted,” Shriver says. “She didn’t feel rushed, didn’t have to worry about what other people thought. It’s a fabulous album that no one will ever hear.”
Meanwhile, Lynne’s dissatisfaction became more and more evident. She rebelled, refusing to perform any of her singles during concerts and repeatedly finding new ways to upset the routine.
“The record company was calling me every day bitching about something she did,” Shriver says. “She was screwing up every weekend and do some nightmare thing. Shelby’s just not the kind of artist you trot out to meet businesspeople and sponsors and radio people. She doesn’t have the temperament for it. But they insisted on trying to plug her into the same system as everyone else, and it was a disaster.”
In one incident, Lynne fully mooned the crowd while opening for Alabama, as the first of three acts on the bill. “Her name wasn’t on the marquee out front, and it pissed her off,” Shriver says. “When she came offstage, I asked her why she did it. She said the audience didn’t come to see her, they didn’t know she was going to be there. She didn’t see it as a chance to win them over at all. She was an angry girl back then.”
By the time she asked out of her Epic contract, the company couldn’t agree fast enough. “Oooo, man, I was fighting them back then, wasn’t I?” she laughs. “I thought everyone fought with their record company. It was like getting your teeth pulled. I hated what they wanted me to do, and they hated me for not doing what they wanted.”
She regrouped, considered several opportunities, and eventually signed with Morgan Creek (a West Coast independent with major-label distribution) because the company agreed to let her record a full-fledged western swing album. Working with producer Brent Maher, who had produced the Judds, she cut her favorite and best Nashville album, Temptation. The 1993 release featured a big band and Lynne pouring herself into the project with the full-throttle vocal performance of her career.
“I was starting to become my own woman by that point,” she says. “And Brent Maher, God bless him, he’s one of the best. I mean, man, I got to make a swing record — a swing record! How cool is that? I was just damned determined to do it, and I did. And I was really proud of it. Still am. And it was so great to see Nashville players really get to play something they loved. Because everybody loves swing.”
But Morgan Creek didn’t last, and Lynne’s contract folded into another startup, Magnatone, which featured some of the same executives. Restless, her 1995 album, found her trying to straddle swing with contemporary country — a move prompted by her company’s desire for a radio hit. It, too, has some great songs, but it’s not nearly as powerful or as consistent as Temptation.
Perhaps more discouraged than ever, and with her personal life in disarray, Lynne retreated completely. She moved to Mobile and rented a $250-a-month room near the waterfront. A Nashville truck accident where she ran off a rural road into a ditch had severed the top of one ear. She was hitting bottom, she says now. She told a reporter that she spent a year taking valium, smoking pot, drinking beer and staring at Mobile Bay.
Eventually, she started writing songs. Tony Brown, then president of MCA Nashville and one of Nashville’s most respected talent scouts and producers, heard some of the material and offered her a record contract. Lynne turned it down, wary of returning to Nashville. She instead sent a demo tape to producer Bill Bottrell because she loved the work he’d done with Sheryl Crow on her debut album.
