Shelby Lynn and Allison Moorer are each successful singers/songwriters in their own right, but on Nov. 5, area residents will have the chance to see the sisters perform their first collaboration, along with some of their own originals.
“An Evening with Shelby Lynne and Allsion Moorer” will be held at 8 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 5, at the Ponte Vedra Concert Hall. The sisters released their first joint album “Not Dark Yet” in August, and are touring together for the first time since 2010.
“We’re really having a great time touring,” Moorer said. “We waited a long time to do this, and that wasn’t for any reason other than we wanted to make sure the time was right. And we both felt like the time was right when we went in to make the record last year, and touring is just the icing on the cake.
“As soon as we got on the road, the record that we made started to evolve into something else, and so, as it always happens, your live show morphs and changes, which is really thrilling,” Moorer added. “We’re just having a blast.”
Moorer and Lynne have more than 20 albums between them, in addition to a Grammy win for Lynne and an Oscar nomination for Moorer. Fans at the Ponte Vedra show can not only expect to hear the sisters’ latest album, but be treated to plenty of extras.
“We do the record in sequence, and after we’re done with that, we get into each other’s back catalogue, and probably another 35, 45 minutes of things we’ve already recorded and switch verses and sing on each other’s songs,” Moorer said. “It’s really special because we’ve written a lot of things about where we come from and each other, so we share that with the audience and we let them in on the stories and what the songs are about and how they were inspired and really share those personal moments. So, it goes from the record into something deeper and sort of an all-encompassing picture of the musical part of our relationship.”
“Is It Too Much,” the sole original song on the album, delves into the sisters’ unique bond, having dealt with personal tragedy while growing up in Alabama. The sisters’ father shot and killed their mother before killing himself when Shelby was 17 and Allison was 14.
“(The song) was an idea Shelby had,” Moorer said. “She had a couple of verses and she batted it to me and I did some work on it, and then we finished it up together. It’s just about thinking about the burden that each other carries having to deal with our family history, where we’ve been and where we are now. And sometimes it does get heavy, but at the end of the day, we’re there for each other, and we want to express that.”
The new album also covers a wide range of songs from Nirvana’s “Lithium” to Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings.”
“If we had made this record six months before or six months after, it would have probably been totally different,” Moorer said. “There are a million songs we could have covered. There’s no shortage of great songs in the world. It really just came down to what we felt like doing at the moment. We wanted to obviously bring in some things from our childhood and some present-day reflection of where we are. And for the record to have a beginning, a middle and an end, and I think we succeeded in that.”
“Not Dark Yet” may be the first compilation from the sisters, but Moorer said it won’t be the last.
“I think we’re both working on individual projects and we always will be, but we so have plans to make another album together, so we’ll start on that sometime next year,” she said.
For more information, visit www.shelbyandallison.com. For tickets to the show, go to www1.ticketmaster.com/event/22005336C5E5A456.
