NASHVILLE, TENN.- Shelby Lynne left Nashville, Tennessee, both physically and metaphorically behind 2 1/2 decades ago.

In 2000, she released “I Am Shelby Lynne,” a genre-defying declaration of self that helped land her first Grammy, for best new artist. She’d spent a decade in Nashville, putting out five albums that never quite harnessed her sweltering Southern soul, then moved to Palm Springs, California, and jettisoned country music. While she found success with the bluesy rock and retro pop of “I Am,” produced by Bill Bottrell (Sheryl Crow’s “Tuesday Night Music Club”), she floundered in a life of her own intractable artistic standards, bad decisions and drinking.

Back in Tennessee, sitting on the patio of Soho House, the Nashville outpost of the British social club, in rust-colored Dickies overalls over a crisp white dress shirt and tailored black jacket, she laughed, a slow-rolling molasses tumble, looking back at it all.

“I’d come back here to be near Sissy,” Lynne, 55, explained in a slow, vowels-extended drawl, referring to her younger sister, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer. “I was always kind of making records in California, but I thought that part of my life was over. I just wanted to write some songs, maybe get a publishing deal, which I never had.”

Nashville being Nashville, the creative hive often rises to meet legacy talent. With the 25th anniversary of “I Am” on the horizon, Katie McCartney of Monument Records offered to reissue it. But Lynne also had new songs on her mind, which she was starting to realize with help from country stalwart Ashley Monroe, whose introductions led to female collaborations that proved to be wildly different from anything Lynne had experienced. The result is “Consequences of the Crown,” her 17th studio album, due Friday.

Lynne’s all-woman core creative team for the LP includes Monroe, Karen Fairchild of Little Big Town and producer and engineer Gena Johnson. Lynne, in the midst of heartbreak, poured her emotions into songs, often live in the studio surrounded by this supportive tribe.

“We went in with a bunch of songs, but wrote a lot in the studio on the fly, smoking weed and just letting things go,” she said, picking at a chocolate croissant. “I think it has to do with being women. It’s different than working with men. We communicate differently. We’d sit there, the four of us, and they’d go, ‘Come on, girl! You know you can do it.’ I’m like, ‘I sound like ass,’ and they’re like, ‘You can do it.’”

“Consequences of the Crown” is a mostly sung, occasionally spoken exposition of a moment in Lynne’s life that wrings tough emotions with a sublime angst. It starts with the atmospheric “Truth We Know,” delivered as raw-voiced rumination where she confesses, “I can’t forget your number, because it means I might be letting you go.” On the sauntering “Consequences,” she drops the damning realization, “You don’t please me.”

Scalding truth has defined Lynne since she arrived in Nashville at the age of 19. The respected Tammy Wynette and George Jones producer Billy Sherrill helmed her 1989 debut, “Sunrise,” trying to make her radio-friendly by blunting the fire and pain in her tenor voice. Five of her releases, including albums of jazz and big band swing, faltered, yet crossover ’90s star Faith Hill was galvanized by what she heard.

“The first time I heard Shelby, I cried,” Hill, who recorded “Keep Walkin’ On” with Lynne in 1995, said in an email. “Shelby bleeds soul and honesty in her gifts, completely unaware of her power,” she added. “Once you realize you are telling your truth without judgment, then and only then you are free, no boundaries. This is the very essence of Shelby Lynne, and I’ve learned an unmeasurable amount of freedom just simply by hearing her voice.”

It was Bottrell, the producer of “I Am Shelby Lynne,” who finally unlocked her pain. The unspoken brutality of her past — in 1986, Lynne’s father killed her mother, then turned the gun on himself — was always sidestepped in Nashville. But it had long smoldered inside this wafer-thin artist.

“Bill Bottrell taught me pretty much everything I know about songwriting; having the courage to write my life was his idea,” Lynne said. “I knew I wanted to write, and he said, ‘It’s your life.’ I figured it out. Why else would I do this? I’m not going to make [expletive] up.”

Ill-prepared for the success of “I Am,” released first in the United Kingdom in 1999, then in the United States several months later, Lynne continues to joke about “the leather and liquor tour” with Matchbox Twenty to support the breakout collection. “It still felt underground, most of it,” she recalled. “But I kind of threw a lot of things away, made some big mistakes.”

Her voice trailed off. Lynne, who easily chatted about topics including Peter Guralnick’s book “Sweet Soul Music,” kudzu, hotels along the road, forgotten industry executives, Billie Eilish and Beyoncé, was thoughtful and curious, but honest about how life goes. “I’ve learned a lot since I was 30, even getting lost along the way. Drinking, not thinking and taking things for granted, those mistakes, running out of money, hardheadedness,” she said. “I drank too much, and then when I couldn’t do anything about it, I just drank more.”

Living in the desert outside Palm Springs, she could do things herself, tour a bit and make ends meet. But time passed. She realized she and her sister should be closer. She didn’t expect her move back to Nashville to open such charged creative collaborations, nor did she foresee the abrupt end of an intense, if brief relationship.

“It was pain that brought me there, and it was fresh then,” Lynne said of the new album’s origin. “Most everything was one or two takes. Then we’d go do our harmonies, whatever we dreamed up on the fly, add some piano. It was so free.”

Lynne, a closet bass player, also played drums and guitar. Monroe played keyboards; Johnson programmed. Laughing, Lynne raved, “It was cool to switch grooves in the middle without having to explain it to anybody! My girls were on it. It was such a creative space I could see us all taking big, long breaths of sunshine and air.”

The diaphanous “Gone to Bed” interpolates Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Alfie,” its chaos of emotions buttressed by the ’60s pop classic. As Lynne admits in the lyrics, “We didn’t build anything but scars,” the memories, little details and self-recrimination are reflected by Fairchild, Monroe and Lynne’s swirling voices.

Beyond the pain, there’s the acoustic “Mr. Regular,” an empathetic song about her father, and the Wurlitzer-basted, low-key soul of “Dear God,” a conversational self-assessment and surrender that suggests brighter days ahead.

On Sept. 18, Lynne will receive an Americana Music Association lifetime achievement award. The organization’s executive director Jed Hilly remembered hearing “I Am” all those years ago: “I pulled over and turned the engine off in my car, listened three times,” he said in an interview. “Her voice was captivating. It gave me a full, emotionally satisfying feeling. She wasn’t trying to fit a format or genre, just her truth. Americana seems a home for such originality. Like Bettye LaVette, Lucinda Williams or Steve Earle, she was distinct, and original.”

Lynne isn’t so sure what comes next. She’s more determined to enjoy the moment, really experience what she missed when she was on the verge of real stardom two-plus decades ago. She realizes “Consequences" is something special.

“This is maybe the record everybody wanted after I made ‘I Am,’” she said. “Maybe all that time between was getting ready for this one, you know?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.