Shelby Lynne (left) and Allison Moorer
“We’ve been working on this album all our lives,” says Allison Moorer, speaking to the Scene from her home in New York City. Moorer and her older sister Shelby Lynne, both highly regarded roots musicians with long-running careers, didn’t actually start recording their debut collaboration Not Dark Yet until 2016, but Moorer isn’t exactly exaggerating. Many of the album’s tracks — a set of nine covers and one original — are childhood favorites of the two, while others are just as intertwined in their shared musical DNA.
“As far as music goes, I think both Sissy and I consider ourselves inseparable from the other in some ways, having grown up in a musical family together like we did and having sung together for so long,” Moorer says. “I just don’t remember a time we didn’t do that. It’s the most home I think either of us can feel.”
There are moments on Not Dark Yet when Moorer’s and Lynne’s voices interlock so perfectly it almost sounds like one superhuman voice. Moorer attributes the pair’s preternatural connection partially, of course, to genetics, but also to their long history listening to and performing music together. She counts Lynne as one of her greatest teachers, particularly when it comes to vocals.
“When you sing with someone, there’s a bond that’s created,” she says. “You’re exchanging musical information, but you’re also exchanging soul information and heart information. You kind of have to be careful who you sing with, in my experience. [Laughs] ... We have a knowledge about each other’s voices that doesn’t only come from having the same one, but also from doing it, from watching each other, from having that training early on.”
It’s especially fitting, then, that Not Dark Yet offers a glimpse into the songs that were intrinsic to Moorer’s and Lynne’s development as individual artists. The diverse track list boasts cuts from fellow country and roots artists like Merle Haggard (“Silver Wings”) and Jessi Colter (“I’m Looking for Blue Eyes”). Songs originally recorded by The Killers (“My List”) and Nirvana (“Lithium”) might be considered curveballs.
“It’s like going through a person’s record collection,” Moorer says of the album’s track list. “It’s highly informative of their character, sometimes even their habits. ... With these songs, obviously we both have a lot of influences, and we’re both music lovers and record collectors. We get into the minutiae of records and songs, and have our ideas about why we like them or why we relate to them. If we had cut this record six weeks before or six weeks after, the song list might very likely be different. It was recording a moment of where we were at the time.”
The title track is a warm, soulful take on Bob Dylan’s original from 1997’s Time Out of Mind, and it served as something of a compass for the pair while putting the album together. Moorer found immersing herself in the song’s hopeful realism was a cathartic experience for both herself and Lynne, an outlet for their shared trauma — which, in addition to the trials of the music industry, notably includes the murder-suicide of their parents, carried out by their father when the sisters were teenagers.
“That song has always struck me as so stoic and knowing, in a beat-up way that can only come with the knowledge that things fall apart,” Moorer says. “For my sister and me, with our history and all the crap that we’ve been through, not only familial but through trauma, I feel like it just allowed us to say those things in a way that we might not be able to had we tried to write that ourselves. Us singing ‘Not Dark Yet’ is almost a meditation.”
Considering Not Dark Yet’s wide-ranging selection of tracks, it would be easy for the record to sound disjointed, but it doesn’t. Credit is due to Lynne and Moorer, neither of whom compromises her voice or vision throughout the album’s 10 tracks. But Moorer also attributes Not Dark Yet’s coherence to producer Teddy Thompson, whose experience with his own musical family was vital to his lending a guiding hand to the two sisters.
“As alike as we are, we’re very different personalities,” Moorer says of herself and Lynne. “That’s why we called [Thompson] in — we knew he’d be able to hang if there was a moment of tension.”
While Moorer says there currently aren’t any plans for a second release from the sister pair — she also isn’t ruling it out, she says — each will continue to be the other’s most crucial musical influence.
“She’s not going to get rid of me, no matter what,” she laughs. “And vice versa.”
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