(FORTUNE Magazine) – I Am Shelby Lynne Shelby Lynne (Island/Mercury)

I Am Shelby Lynne manages to sound both old and bold. Drizzled with melted-butter strings and dabbed with brown-sugar horns, these proud, yearning ballads call to mind Aretha Franklin's Atlantic years and Dusty Springfield's 1969 sojourn in Memphis. The bold part: Commercially, this kind of music is gone with the wind. Lynne's "Lookin' Up" and "Where I'm From" may be the most majestic heartbreakers you'll hear all year, but where will you hear them? (Forget radio.) Ironically, Lynne's passion for the past might generate fans through the medium of the future; I Am is the kind of slow burner that tends to spark a word-of-mouth brushfire on the Internet. Like Emmylou Harris, Lynne realizes that honoring tradition can be downright radical.

--JEFF GORDINIER