NYT on Seattle: "Crunchy and Aerobic"

Shelby Lynne at The Triple Door on Nov. 5. Photo by Lil' Scoop.

Rob Hoerburger has a fantastic profile of the country artist Shelby Lynne in today's NYT Magazine. The piece revolves around Lynn's quixotic quest for commercial success. Here, she delivers what has got to be one of the all-time paradoxical quotes, this coming from an artist about to release an album of Dusty Springfield covers: "What Carrie Underwood is singing about has already been heard. It’s in a beautiful package. But my duty is to take the hard route.”

Of local relevance is the setting for most of the article: Seattle. Hoerburger tagged along with Lynne for the November days leading up to an invite-only gig at the Triple Door (which we reviewed here), which fuels the piece's funniest passage: "Seattle turned out the biggest sea of bald heads I’d seen in a concert hall, perhaps a sign that they knew the music’s provenance." Other locally relevant excerpts, including a section which finds Lynne nursing a noonish pint at the Cyclops, appear after the jump.

"Shelby Lynne, the torchy pop singer, and her band, about a half-dozen slightly shaggy regular Joes, ambled into the Viceroy, a retro lounge in downtown Seattle, in early November, looking to get a head start on Saturday night. They were in town to perform songs from her new CD, “Just a Little Lovin’,” a tribute to Dusty Springfield, due out Jan. 29, but because their concert wasn’t for a couple of days, Lynne announced, with a knee slap in her voice: 'I am off work! I want to get drunk and hear some music.'"

"Seattle: crunchy and aerobic, city of steep hills, high literacy, designer caffeine bars. Shelby Lynne, though, declined my offer to meet at one of its main attractions — I’d suggested the Rem Koolhaas-designed library — and instead took the elevator down from her hotel room and walked a few steps across the street to Cyclops, a bar (her kind of bar, the old-fashioned kind). There was a portly bartender, football on the TV and a felt poster of mid-’70s Elvis (shades and spangles but not yet busting out of his jumpsuit) on the wall behind the table in the front window, where I found Lynne installed at 12:30 in the afternoon, halfway through a Guinness."

"Toward the end of an interview I did with Springfield for this magazine outside London in 1995, she asked if I would be exploring the city alone that night, and when I said yes, she cautioned me. 'Be careful,' she said. 'You think London is safe. But it’s not.' Lynne asked practically the same question about Seattle. 'Ah, private music,' she said. 'Well, don’t let it hurt you.'”