Lynn, White Ready "Rose"

Country star to release first album in four years with White Stripe producing

Loretta Lynn will release Van Lear Rose on April 27th on Interscope; the record is her first in four years and was produced last year by White Stripes frontman Jack White.

The Kentucky-born Lynn, who turns seventy on April 14th, wrote thirteen new originals for the record, which takes its title from a new song about her mother. Lynn says that the record will be a bit of a departure for fans of her three decades of iconic honky tonk. "The songs are all songs that I wrote and they're country," she says, "but a little bit different. The sound is different than anything I've done before, and it's been great working with Jack."

White and Lynn first hooked up after her manager slipped her a copy of the group's 2001 album White Blood Cells, which was dedicated to Lynn, whom White had never met. Lynn invited White and bandmate Meg White to her Tennessee ranch, and soon after the Stripes and Lynn shared a bill at a New York City gig. Lynn and White recorded the album in Nashville during two sessions, one in June and one in September.

"I'm impressed but not surprised that she sings better now than she ever has," Jack White says. "She proved to me again and again that she was the greatest female singer-songwriter of the twentieth century, and she's got more to say and an amazing way to say it than most people nowadays. Her stories are cuttingly acute and witty -- she's a clever angel. Her songwriting is impeccable, She's so real I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

Rose is already garnering Lynn the most attention she has received since her early-Seventies run as one of country music's hitmaking queens with a string of brassy singles like "Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)," "Fist City" and "You Ain't Woman Enough." A video has already been shot for the first single, "Portland, Oregon," and Lynn has also been in talks to appear on Saturday Night Live.

ANDREW DANSBY and DAVID SWANSON
Rolling Stone
(March 30, 2004)

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