Loretta Lynn

Genius is a peculiar thing. Even the most brilliant musicians can drift into stagnant creative waters, leaving them out of step with both the spirit of their seminal work and the contemporary artists they’ve inspired. It happened to Bob Dylan; it happened to Johnny Cash. And while she never became desperate enough to file for artistic bankruptcy by re-recording her old hits or doing a covers album, some would say it happened to Loretta Lynn.

“I think it’s hard for a lot of us out of her world to realize how much she has been lauded and how much acclaim she has gotten in her life,” says Jack White, producer of Lynn’s latest, Van Lear Rose. “She’s won so many awards and sold so many records and had so many people tell her how amazing she is. That’s a hard thing to deal with when people do that to you,” he says, undoubtedly having encountered the same in the media- and critical-frenzy surrounding The White Stripes. “You start to lose appreciation of what it is that you do, and you kind of become this thing that it’s hard to say what it is. But I think she has a really strong knowledge of her storytelling being appealing to people, and when she puts that in her music and when she tells it like it is, people go for that. I know she knows that.”

Still, that’s the danger in being an icon: No matter how compelling your current work is, you’re continually being measured against yourself and your legacy. But just as producer Rick Rubin knew how to reclaim the innate power in Johnny Cash’s music by stripping it down to its essence, someone outside the Nashville establishment realized creating another classic Loretta Lynn album meant once again pairing her inimitable persona with her voice’s undiluted purity and her songwriting’s naked honesty. As unlikely as the coupling may seem—of Appalachia with Detroit rock; a 70-year-old country-music legend with a guitar god who’s celebrity tabloid fodder—the sound of Van Lear Rose couldn’t be more natural.

A household name who hasn’t had a Top 40 hit in 19 years, Loretta Lynn inhabits a unique place in the American landscape. As an icon whose life story plays late at night on classic movie channels, it’s easy to forget that 42 years have passed since her first hit, virtually leaving her a living relic from country music’s heralded past. Still, her legacy commands respect, whether earning her an invitation to the Kennedy Center Honors or the tributes of every would-be diva performing in Nashville’s dives. Great new album or not, it’s difficult not to be at least a little intimidated by her, even over the phone.

“OK, are you ready to talk to Loretta?” asks a particularly harried publicist, lending the moment even more nervous anticipation. The next voice I hear is Lynn’s. “Matt, are you ready for me now?”

She laughs disarmingly, seemingly amused by any notion of her grandeur. On this day, she’s fresh from a David Letterman appearance with Jack White and the Do-Whaters (so named by Lynn because of their ability to “do whatever” she wanted as a backing band), making a brief stop before heading back out on the road. “I’m home right now, and we’re leaving … maybe tomorrow … I think,” she says, apparently a bit disoriented by the whirlwind of press and acclaim that has returned her to magazine covers and radio playlists. “I just got in last night from New York. We went up and done all that TV stuff.”

No doubt, their performance of “Portland, Oregon”—a curiously unwinding duet with White, as much wall-of-sound as it is honky-tonk, that weaves through a minute-and-a-half intro before Lynn’s entry—provided a moment of pop-culture trivia. I tell her as much when I mention I saw the performance. “Oh, did you?” she laughs. “I went back to the hotel, and I missed it because I fell off to sleep waitin’ for it.”