Lyle’s Style
He’s not handsome. He can’t sing like Willie. He’s too smart and too shy. So why is Lyle Lovett a star?
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Lovett delivers these sentiments with a vocal style that on the one hand is familiarly high, nasal, smooth, and tuneful yet on the other is detached and often caustic. Lovett is not one of those singer-songwriters whose singing conveys some wailing burden: He isn’t much for confessing or wallowing. But from a remove, his voice implies great disappointment, loss, bitterness, and despair, as when he somberly intones the lyrics to “She’s Already Made Up Her Mind”: “So now she is sitting at one end of the kitchen table/And she is staring without an expression/And she is talking to me without moving her eyes/Because she’s already made up her mind.” You can hear Lyle Lovett holding back, receding into the shadows. The effect is at times overwhelming.
Despite all this, it takes no effort at all to enjoy Lovett. Like the best of American pop craftsmen, he has a great ear for the persistent rhythm, the memorable chorus, and the melody that can rattle around in one’s head for weeks. His songwriting style owes much to the Texas solo artists whose albums he bought as a teenager and whom he later would interview as a Texas A&M journalism student—Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and Willis Alan Ramsey—just as his smirky romantic outlook recalls two non-Texas influences, Randy Newman and Tom Waits. What has allowed Lovett to surpass his Texas mentors is the quality Robert Altman obviously saw in him: Unlike most singer-songwriters, Lovett possesses a sense of drama, a quality he never overplays. He’s neither classically handsome nor classically talented. But he’s a marvel of obscurity, and simply to look at him is to become lost in the many shades that define him.
OFFSTAGE, LYLE LOVETT IS SOMEHOW the same man who stands onstage in his Armani suit offering up a few darkly romantic insights into the human character. And yet here, on the touring bus that conveys us to the next arena four hours away, he is sweeter, smiling almost constantly, as if these private hours pose some relief, a light moment before he wades into the evening and sings about all those dead relatives and all those women who, despite his coy put-downs, have every ability to reduce him to emotional rubble. On the bus, he wears a denim work shirt and jeans with boots (the only footwear he apparently owns). He’s slender but not bony, and combined with his soft and mannered voice, he has a pacifist air. Still, he sits very close to me, leaning forward, his stare calm but unrelenting, his mouth slightly open, anticipating. If in Lovett’s music everything comes at a distance and from the hip—his imagination tilted, his sentiments askew—in his own life he leaves himself very much open to frontal assaults.
“It was always very mysterious to me how a musician made it, and I guess it still is,” he says. “When I was going to school at A&M and starting to play clubs, I just couldn’t figure out the process. I’d find myself wondering just how long a person had to stay at that level and how one broke out. I’d meet these people like Willis Alan Ramsey and Nanci Griffith who had somehow figured it out, and though that was the burning question for me, I didn’t want to be an imposition by asking. Maybe I asked a little bit.”
Lovett’s face widens and he laughs. He has always enjoyed jokes, and his music is filled with them. Oftentimes his audience doesn’t get the punch line, and he is criticized for his sacrilegious, woman-bashing lyrics. In fact, Lovett is both deeply (if privately) spiritual and intensely (if very privately) romantic. But being misunderstood seems to be something he can handle and occasionally even relish. Respect, however, is another matter.
“I really stayed in school as long as I did partly so I’d have something to tell people when they asked what I did,” says Lovett, who enrolled at A&M in 1975 and left seven years later with degrees in journalism and German. “I could say, ‘I’m a student,’ instead of saying I was a musician they obviously hadn’t heard of—though that got a little less uncomfortable when I started get ting more gigs. I had always loved music, but I had no illusions about making a career out of it. I wanted to feel like I was on the path to something, so I chose journalism, which I really loved. Though looking back on it, I just didn’t have the drive some of the other guys in my journalism classes did. My drive was to be a musician … and to stay away from anything resembling a full-time job.”
Lovett’s musical ambitions were his own: His mother and his father (both Exxon employees) were tolerant of whatever their only child wanted to do with himself, but they didn’t push in any particular direction. Contemporary music and literature weren’t predominant staples. Nor was Klein itself anything approaching an artistic oasis. It was at A&M that Lyle Lovett slowly succumbed to his dreams. On campus, he assisted in booking some of his favorite regional musicians. As a journalism student, he would subject these musicians to interviews that more closely resembled seminars, with Lovett the eager pupil. Lovett himself began playing shows in College Station and San Marcos. Later he graduated to the Kerrville Folk Festival and Houston’s Anderson Fair. But his big break came overseas. “I took some graduate courses in German,” says Lovett, whose interest in the language stems from his German ancestors who settled in Texas in the 1840’s, “and as a part of my foreign studies I lived in Rothenburg for part of 1979. I met a few musicians in Luxembourg and stayed in touch with them over the years. Through that, I got booked to play at this month-long music festival in Luxembourg in 1983. There was this country band from Phoenix there, J. David Sloan and the Rogues; they took pity on me and offered to back me up.”
The pairing proved fortuitous, as Lovett convinced the band to help him record a four-song demo tape. Once back in the States, Lovett took the tape with him to Nashville, a town that for the first time made him feel as if he possessed professional integrity. “Songwriters had respect there,” he says. “It was considered a legitimate career: You could tell a loan officer you wrote songs for a living and be taken seriously.” In a week’s time, ASCAP executives were moved to lobby the record labels on Lovett’s behalf.
So it was that in 1984 Lovett returned to Klein, a flat but verdant rural community some twenty miles northwest of Houston founded by his ancestors. It is fair to say that not many wealthy young musicians choose to live in the South Texas boondocks, in their grandparents’ house, on the same forty-acre property where their parents live. But Lyle Lovett is the kind of songwriter who needs something he can count on, something that will be there for him.
Klein isn’t as somnolent as it once was (though it still has little to stay up for), but many of Lovett’s old classmates remain there, as do the teachers from the parochial school where he received his first eight years of education. Lovett is a man at home with his past. The memories come out in fond torrents: “Church was the center of our community. Every Sunday after the service, we’d drive back home with Grandpa and listen to him critique the sermon. It was my signal early on that you could challenge things. I had the same twelve kids in my first eight grades of parochial school. Every day we’d have to memorize a new scripture. Memorize them and then forget them. For my parents, life was in the yard. They spent all their time planting and watering and cutting.” Lovett adds, snickering, “Yard work is what drove me out of Klein.”
“To Texas A&M?” I ask.
“Right.”
“Why A&M?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Because it was close to home,” he says.
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