Loretta Lynn comes 'Full Circle' on first album in 10 years
On a cold February night, on the dark edge of downtown Nashville, blocks away from the city’s honky-tonk strip, 83-year-old Loretta Lynn looks out the window of her tour bus. It’s parked next to Municipal Auditorium, where red letters on the marquee announce a concert that hasn’t been advertised and may never actually happen at this venue: “Loretta Lynn ... Willie Nelson.”
“He’s flying in sometime tonight,” the country music legend says. “Tomorrow we’re shooting a video in there. I think me and Willie will play it low-key. I don’t like fancy stuff and I know Willie don’t either. I asked David (McClister, the video director), ‘How am I gonna dress?’ He says, ‘Well, dress like Willie!’”
She smiles. “And I said, ‘Holy cow! Maybe I’d better put on a gown instead!’”
Lynn’s speaking voice is soft, sweetened by a honey-rich drawl. You can hear the years in it — a little quaver now and then. But on her duet with Nelson, Lay Me Down, and every other track on her new album Full Circle, out Friday, it’s clear and strong. Whether revisiting her classic hits Fist City and Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven or singing songs she’s long loved but never recorded, she might be easily mistaken for her younger self, back when she set country music on its ear with feminist anthems such as The Pill and You Ain’t Woman Enough while also embracing country’s traditional fiddle-and-steel sound.
It’s been more than a decade since her last album, Van Lear Rose, a collaboration with producer/artist Jack White that combined her deep-roots aesthetic with post-punk’s rougher edge. Full Circle follows a different path, with her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and Johnny Cash’s son John Carter Cash co-producing.
“Patsy pretty well let me do what I wanted to do. I’d say, ‘I know, Patsy … but I’m doing it like this,’” Lynn said, with a laugh. “Her and Johnny actually hadn’t heard all the stuff that I’d recorded. My daughters were like, ‘That’s just Mommy singing’ and they didn’t pay any attention. But now that her and John were producing, they wanted to do things a little bit different. I wanted them to because I want something new too.”
Full Circle was cut at Cash Cabin Studio, built by the elder Cash in 1978. “I started recording maybe two years ago and just kept going,” Lynn says. “We ended up with 97 songs in the can, so when Sony Legacy called about doing this new album, I said, ‘Y’all come and just pick out the ones you want.’”
Appropriate to the title, Full Circle begins with the first song Lynn ever wrote, a wistful waltz titled Whispering Sea. “I was in my 20s when I wrote that,” she remembers. “See, I had four kids in school when I was 21 so I didn’t have time to start singing until I was 27. On the day I wrote it, me and Doo (her late husband Oliver Lynn) was fishing. ... I was up in this tree, with a line out in the ocean, and I just started writing it. It was nothing any hard. I just sat down and wrote, ‘The sea whispered to me. It brought back an old love affair that used to be.’”
She pauses and admits, “Now, I wasn’t old enough to have a love before my husband. But it wasn’t that hard at all to write. One line just leads to the next.”
With Full Circle behind her and a special segment of the PBS “American Masters” series, Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl, premiering Friday , Lynn is ready to concentrate on her tour which kicks off March 18. “I only regret that my husband isn’t going with me,” she says. “He’s been gone for 21 years now. Of course, we’d planned on maybe stopping sometime and going places, just me and him. But that’s not what happened, so I’m back on the road again. I guess I’ll be back there forever.”