By Gregg Shapiro

Contributing writer

With her voice in strong condition and the ability to “fit into a size six,” Bettye LaVette is back and better than ever. Picking up where her acclaimed groundbreaking 2004 comeback album “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise” left off, her latest disc “The Scene of the Crime” (Anti-) finds her in good company. Working with the band the Drive-by Truckers on a set of tunes by Willie Nelson, John Hiatt and others, as well as the not to be missed original “Before the Money Came Back (The Battle of Bettye LaVette),” LaVette rises to the occasion and them some. We spoke shortly before the release of the new album.

Gregg Shapiro: The cover material on “Scene of the Crime” has a self-reflective quality to it, as if you could have written most of them based on your own experience.

Bettye LaVette: That’s absolutely true! I couldn’t have written the songs, but my experiences are those songs (laughs).

GS: What was involved in the process of selecting the songs?

BL: I become very intimately involved with the songs, so it’s hard for anyone else to write me a song or choose a song for me. They choose it based strictly how they think I will sound singing it. More goes into to my choosing of it than that. So, no one chooses any songs for me. Patterson (Hood) has been telling everybody that he sent me 50 songs and I threw them back at him (laughs). I say, “That is not true! It was only 40! (laughs).

GS: So were the songs selected from those you’d been covering over the years?

BL: I’m really not much of a music enthusiast at all. But I’m married to a music historian and record collector and the whole bit. So he plays music all the time. Over the four years that we’ve been married, I’ve heard 30 songs that I like. …I sent (Anti-Records President) Andrew (Kaulkin) my 30 songs and he liked them all—I was so surprised. What I did was choose the 10 that identified the most with each other. I had been just choosing them randomly and sometimes I wouldn’t choose but one in a whole year. When they were going to become something, I had to pull them together a little tighter.

GS: They do fit together so beautifully. They tell a story.

BL: I’m very pleased with it. Most producers and musicians never think about what I’m going to be doing when I’m standing up there all by myself. So I have to choose the songs because I know what I want to do when I’m singing them. I always think of my show whenever I’m choosing songs. I just can’t look at it in one tone.

GS: I especially loved your reading of Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers.” It’s the kind of rendition that can bring listeners to tears. Why did you choose that song?

BL: The place that I’m singing about I am going to this evening. It’s a place that I used to hang and they picked up my tabs, and I got drunk and I cried, and I said, “They’re never gonna let me sing and I’m gonna just die at this bar being nobody,” and people were coming in and saying, “Didn’t you used to be Bettye LaVette?” (laughs). When I first heard the song, I guess maybe two or three years ago, my husband said, “Why don’t you sing that?” And I said, “Because I don’t drink beer and I’m no soldier.” I knew I couldn’t sing it as it was, but after I realized that what I did want to sing really meant the same thing, it was just told a little differently.

GS: “Before The Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette)” was co-written by you and Patterson. What was involved in the creation of that number?

BL: Patterson told me from day one that I could write. Because I didn’t like or didn’t want to sing the songs that he had sent me, he said, “Why don’t you write one?” And I said, “Because I can’t write.” He said, “You can!” I said, “I can’t!” He said, “But you didn’t like any of my songs” (laughs). I said, “I didn’t say that I didn’t like any of your songs, I just don’t want to sing them.” What he started doing was writing down different little things that I said, because I’m always making some crack. He would take the cracks and develop a song, and I didn’t want to sing those either. He got mad at me and said, “Well then you write it!” I took the first line, “Crow shooting don’t kill no birds,” which is something my mother used to say all the time, and I just thought about the other stuff that would go with that.

GS: For a whole generation of gay men, me included, you are a certified disco diva, an icon…

BL: Oh, stop yourself!

GS: No, really, the 12” West End single of “Doin’ The Best That I Can” is still one of the prides and joys of my dance music collection. Are you aware of the impact that you had?

BL: I know I didn’t get any money. I did not do one gig. And I’ve never sung that song live in my entire life (laughs). I know that.

GS: But I know it does have considerable meaning to many gay men who were going to discos in the late 1970s.

BL: I know that that was the situation in New York, but I thought that that was the only place that it became popular. I wasn’t aware of that at all.

GS: Believe me when I tell you that I spent many nights dancing to that song at a club called the Bistro in Chicago.

BL: I’m so glad to know that. It was worth it to hear that news about “Doin’ The Best That I Can” (laughs).

As part of Estrojam, Bettye LaVette performs at 9 p.m. at Metro, 3730 N. Clark.