Lyle Lovett 
The Improbable Rise of Lyle Lovett
After a career singing his own sad, quirky songs, he's playing tribute to the eccentric bunch of redneck rockers who taught him all about Texas music more than twenty years ago.
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Lovett graduated from Klein High School and went to Texas A&M University because it was close to home. He lived in a dorm and fell in with others who spent the evenings trying to learn to play a guitar all the way through a song. He befriended an English major who also had a bright future in Texas music—Robert Earl Keen. Lovett served on a student union committee that booked performers into the campus coffeehouse. “The first time I saw Michael Murphey was in 1975,” he says. “He came out by himself, and the whole first half of the show, just stood there and told stories and played songs. I thought, ‘Man, I want to get to where I can do that someday.’”
His chance to learn wasn’t long in coming. “I was eighteen when I first started performing,” he says. “I came home from school the summer of 1976, and along with a buddy who played guitar, I got a job in the bar of a restaurant close to home, on Farm-to-Market 1960. As much as I liked Willie Nelson, we didn’t cover his songs. I wanted songs that were new to an audience, and Willie was on the radio all the time. We did a lot of Fromholz songs. ‘Bears’ and the trilogy were some of the first songs I learned. We did Murphey songs and Willis Alan Ramsey songs—I sang ‘Spider John’ more times than I could count.”
Lovett reminisces about majoring in journalism and writing for the campus newspaper, The Battalion. “The editors let me write stories about musicians who came through the area playing gigs. That’s when I realized I couldn’t ever be a journalist,” he says, smiling. “I could never be objective. I went to interview Eric Taylor [one of the songwriters covered on his new album] and got him to teach me to play ‘Memphis Midnight.’ I interviewed Fromholz, Murphey, Ramsey. Just about all of them.”
“How did it go with Willis?” I ask him. I tell him that because of perceived journalistic sins that I could never repent for fully enough, my relationship with Ramsey was troubled, deteriorating at one point into a shouting match at an Austin nightclub.
Lovett’s lips become long thin lines when he grins. “You know, he was so young then. Of course, you were young too. I’ll never forget my first conversation with Willis. He and his manager had gone to the fanciest restaurant in Bryan. While I interviewed him, he was eating a filet mignon—out of his hand.”
In 1972, on the day Ramsey turned 21, he had finished recording a debut album with the help of rock stars Leon Russell, Greg Allman, and J. J. Cale. Song after song (including the future Captain and Tennille mega-hit “Muskrat Love”) was coy, melodic, brilliant. But the second album failed to materialize, and Ramsey moved to Nashville as the Austin scene began to fade. He eventually wound up in Scotland, where he spent several years living in a lighthouse. “Willis taught me so much,” Lovett tells me. “Listening to his record showed me that you don’t have to play straight-ahead blues to have blues be a part of your music. He’s so soulful.”
“What do you mean? How did he teach you?”
“Well, just with his vocal style. He’s not playing the shuffle kind of stuff you hear in a bar on Sixth Street in Austin. He does it with narrative that’s not restricted to the sixteen-bar blues form.
“Willis and I have gotten really close,” Lovett continues. “I talk to him all the time now. But I didn’t really know him until he came back to Nashville from Scotland. I’d see him at Walter Hyatt’s house. I played ‘Sleepwalking’ a couple of years ago when I was touring. The crowds always loved it, laughed at the right spots. He’s got a bunch of good new songs.”
“So there’s going to be a second album?”
Lovett grins again and delicately pours more coffee. “Willis is a perfectionist. Everything’s got to be just right.”
BY 1983 LOVETT HAD TWO DEGREES from A&M—journalism and German. He has said he stayed in school for six years because it was easier to tell people he was a student than a little-known musician. “I was playing the same half-dozen clubs in Texas,” he says. “I’d come to realize I didn’t know anything about the business of music. I was in Luxembourg that September, playing an American-music tent at a fair, and met some musicians, Billy Williams and his band, from Phoenix. I’d never recorded with a band before and was curious what that would sound like. When I got back, they helped me make a demo tape, and in ’84 I went to Nashville.”
Lovett was not lacking in confidence. He went straight to the offices of the American Society of Composers and Publishers, a performing rights organization that represents songwriters, and left a tape. A membership representative was soon making calls and setting up appointments for him with publishers. Lovett left another copy of the tape with a brief note at the publishing company of Guy Clark, who had made a deep imprint on the Texas scene of the seventies with “L.A. Freeway” and other songs.
“I finally got around to listening to it, and it flipped me smooth out,” Clark says. “I was making everybody listen to it. I was just obsessed. Then one day I was walking through a restaurant and saw a friend, an Irish guitar player. He introduced me to this guy he was sitting with. I took one look at him and pegged him for a French blues singer. I went on and sat down and then finally lights and bells went off. That was the guy who left me all those incredible songs.”
Within a year, Lovett had publishing and recording deals. His first album, Lyle Lovett (1986), was the demo tape he had recorded in Arizona, dressed up with overdubbed vocals by Vince Gill and Rosanne Cash. Willie Nelson eventually covered two memorable songs from the record, “Farther Down the Line” and “If I Were the Man You Wanted.” In New York several years later, at a songwriters forum at the Bottom Line, Lovett once again jolted Guy Clark. “I was up there with John Hiatt, Joe Ely, and Lyle,” Clark says. “The moderator asked us all to play a song we wished we’d written. Lyle was two verses into his before the shock came to me what he was singing. ‘Step Inside This House’ was literally the first song I ever wrote. I’d put it on a couple of rough demos, but how did that ever get to him?”
Through the osmosis by which popular music moves and thrives: Lovett had learned it from songwriter Eric Taylor.
LOVETT’S DEBUT WAS A MOSTLY COUNTRY album, though he showed his willingness to stretch the form with “An Acceptable Level of Ecstacy (The Wedding Song),” an edgy glide through a big-band bash at Houston’s Warwick Hotel. Ever since, he has broadcast his eclectic songwriter’s schooling and put distance between himself and Nashville—with quirky humor, surreal story lines, and exotic arrangements. Even when his music sounded vaguely country, he couldn’t resist poking fun at the genre, composing songs such as “Creeps Like Me.” What country deejay was going to put that on the playlist?
In 1989 Lovett invoked shades of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw with Lyle Lovett and His Large Band, a supremely confident, deadpan smash. Behind all the tuxedos and brass, he showcased some of the best he had heard in Texas. Lovett used to open for Walter Hyatt, David Ball, and Champ Hood when they came together in the inventive, jazzy acoustic trio Uncle Walt’s Band—an act first championed by Willis Alan Ramsey. Now Lovett brought them back for a one-time reunion (they had broken up in 1983) in the record’s harmonic, doo-wah closer, “Once Is Enough.”
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