A Labor Of 'Love'

A video documentary crew is shooting Shelby Lynne in the studio as she launches into take 7 of one of her new songs. They may have picked the wrong day to shoot, if this is something they ever want to put on broadcast television. ''Starf---er! Starf---er!'' Lynne wails inside the isolation booth, vamping on the tune's title epithet as her backing musicians wind to a close in the next room. This number, which will soon be euphemistically retitled ''Starbroker,'' won't be a single. But it does rock, fulfilling one of her new album's major mandates. Hunched over the console, producer Glen Ballard announces himself pleased. ''That [take] has got a big star next to it,'' he tells his assistant, then hits a switch to congratulate the band. ''When you guys get your s--- together, it's gonna be really good!''

Their stuff is, in fact, already pretty tight. Lynne may be only five days into recording her November release, ''Love, Shelby,'' but the sessions were scheduled to last only a week, so they're more than half done. The album finds her backed live in the studio by renowned slide guitarist Sonny Landreth, Little Feat B-3 player Bill Payne, drummer Matt Chamberlin, guitarist Mike Landau, and bassist Mike Elizondo. ''You can't buy these guys,'' she brags, taking a cigarette and beer break in the Hollywood sun. ''You gotta leave 'em s--- in your will.'' Ballard calls the players ''the best group I've ever had in the studio, period. If I needed to get into heaven, I would show up with this band.''

Ballard's name isn't the first to come up when you think of Southern-fried rock. But the Mississippi- and Louisiana-bred producer -- best known as Alanis Morissette's collaborator -- says he's getting back in touch with his Southernness, thanks to this hard-drawling Alabama girl who's hardly lost touch with hers. ''There's this Southern thing that is usually expressed lately in a sanitized version of country music,'' he says. ''She has all that vocabulary -- country, blues, rockabilly, soul -- but she's none of those. She's such a thoroughbred, I just want to let her run.... And she never shows off. These days, most people start with the licks on the first verse. Shelby saves it, so there's this tease to the whole thing. When she decides to cut loose in the last eight bars of a song, it's just stunning.''

''Stunning'' was the word often used to describe last year's ''I Am Shelby Lynne,'' which won the singer a Grammy for Best New Artist, although it was the ex-country crooner's sixth album. That intimate, downbeat affair may have been one of the great pop recordings of the last decade...but no, it didn't rock. On the band-oriented ''Love,'' Shelby will rectify that, and even celebrate romantic bliss, while not completely jettisoning the Southern soul psychodrama.

''It's definitely more of a rock record,'' says Lynne. ''It's got its dark points'' -- ''Starbroker,'' the music-biz rant we walked in on, being one -- ''but Glen's energy is very positive and allows me to show a side of me that I was afraid of showing: the happy side, the 'I know what love is' side.'' She glows as if she does. ''There's some intense things but also a lot of love and happiness.'' Al Green would be proud, even if he wouldn't cuss so much.