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’s album sales reached a high mark with the 1992 release of Joshua Judges Ruth. Again he extended the lessons of his teachers. Michael Murphey and other songwriters of the seventies lifted lyrics and strains from hymnals; Lovett added to his band a black gospel group that sounded as if it came wailing out of Houston’s Fifth Ward. The ties that bound Joshua Judges Ruth were going to church and funerals. “Now my second cousin / His name was Callaway / He died when he’d barely turned two / It was peanut butter and jelly that did it / The help she didn’t know what to do / She just stood there and she watched him turn blue.”
Half a million to a million albums sold is paltry commerce in some quarters of the music industry, but the revenue Lovett generates is sufficient that his record company lets him do whatever he wants. He has a loyal base of fans who have a high opinion of their intelligence and believe they hear it echoed in his music. When did Lovett stop being merely a singer and songwriter and become an icon of the cool? Probably when the movies, the ultimate in American celebrity, came to him.
Director Robert Altman saw Lovett play a concert, called him, and asked if he was interested in acting. He was. Lovett fared well in small parts as a detective in Altman’s The Player (1992) and a baker in his Short Cuts (1993). Like Willie Nelson before him, Lovett was put onscreen essentially to play himself. During that period, he recorded “Creeps Like Me,” and while that is not exactly how Altman has typecast him, the director clearly sees in Lovett’s face and mannerisms an intriguing oddball. (Another Altman movie featuring Lovett, titled Cookie’s Fortune, is set for release next year.) Reaction to Lovett’s recent performance in a larger role as a straight-arrow sheriff in director Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex has been mixed, to put it mildly, but he’s not in the market for a career change. Music is still his meat and potatoes; acting is just gravy.
Sometime during his early romance with Hollywood, Lovett began his romance with Julia Roberts, forever solidifying his reputation as a ladies man—however shy and awkward. He played this role with his usual sly charm on a 1992 Austin City Limits. Stammering and cutting his eyes, he regaled the crowd with a lead-in routine: “I’d like to make a special dedication to anyone in the audience this evening who’s ever been involved in a romantic relationship of any kind.”
He clung to his guitar and squinted as the crowd tittered.
“And, and . . . who may have had that relationship not work out quite the way you’d hoped it would.”
More hoots as he ducked his head and squirmed.
“And, and . . . who may have tried to console himself or herself by rationalizing that the person who maybe initiated the breakup of the relationship would one day live to regret it.”
The song was called “She’s Leaving Me Because She Really Wants To.”
IT WAS DUSK WHEN WE STARTED TALKING, and now the sky outside the New York hotel is the hue of eggplant. I pick up the tape recorder to see if it’s still rolling and can’t tell. I can barely see the legal pad I’m writing on. The room is dark when Lovett jerks his chin, rises slowly from his chair, and turns on the lights.
We had been talking about the craft of songwriting. “There was a folk music scene in Houston in the late sixties,” he continues. “Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and Jerry Jeff Walker were all living there. I never got to see any of that, but when I came along, I’d be playing clubs there and hear the stories. Those guys had an artistic approach to songwriting. They didn’t talk about what buttons you had to punch to get a song on the radio. They talked about the merits of the song.”
Lovett’s close friend Walter Hyatt, one of the best-liked Austin musicians of the seventies, died in the ValueJet crash in the Florida Everglades two years ago. Then last year Townes Van Zandt succumbed to his demons and vices. “I’d been thinking,” he says, “about making this record for a while, and that helped me decide not to wait any longer. I had to set parameters for myself because there were so many possibilities. It was not my intention to represent Texas singer-songwriters—the whole scope of Texas music—in an academic way. That’s impossible. I decided to stick to songs that were really a part of my life. Starting with the ones I played in that restaurant on Farm-to-Market 1960 when I was eighteen years old.”
That said, it’s almost as if Lovett went out of his way on Step Inside This House to help the heirs of Hyatt and Van Zandt; each songwriter has four songs on the album. At first, the cuts I found myself playing over and over were Ramsey’s “Sleepwalking” and Fromholz’s droll “Bears.” But the one that grew on each hearing is a moody and complex love song called “Ballad of the Snow Leopard and the Tanqueray Cowboy,” written by musician and former practicing Austin lawyer David Rodriguez, a man who now lives in Holland. Rodriguez’s lyrics and melody carry Lovett about as far as he’s gone as a singer. Michael Murphey’s “West Texas Highway” stirs memories of his cosmic cowboy heyday in Austin. “Rollin’ By,” by Robert Earl Keen—Lovett’s friend from those days in what was then, musically, an Aggie backwater—explores the same theme with more drama and power. Most of the honky-tonking is old-fashioned and muted; the tracks seldom add more than a clean blending of mandolin, Dobro, cello, and guitar. Lovett wants you to hear the writers’ lines and what his lolling tenor voice brings to them.
“Not all of these songwriters got the recognition they deserve,” Lovett muses, “but in a way their work translated into an enduring part of mainstream music. Austin music in the seventies was about freedom and rebellion, and that wasn’t just happening in Texas. It was closely related to Southern rock. Now Southern rock comes packaged as mainstream country.”
“That’s right,” I say with a smile, thinking of all the loud, overproduced pap blaring forth now from kicker stations. “Nashville country is the genuine redneck rock.”
WE’VE FINISHED THE COFFEE AND talked until I’m no longer taking notes. “I can’t separate my reaction to your record from my affection for that time in my life,” I tell him. “What about people in your audience who’ve never heard of this material or these guys?”
“I can’t believe that people who like my music aren’t going to love these songs. For one thing, I’ve been performing them all along. At a party somebody hands me a guitar. I don’t want to sing one of my songs, so I sing one of these. They listen to it. They respond.”
“Was it hard to decide on the list?”
“Not really. I didn’t have to learn one new song. But it did force me to look twice as hard at myself as a singer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s really different from recording your own stuff. It’s a different responsibility. You want to respect the original version and the songwriter’s intent, and at the same time not do a straight cover. Recording your own song, you can chalk off a lot to personal interpretation—kind of make it up as you go along. But when you’re doing something that already exists, lots of people know how it goes, and you’ve got to get it right.”
Lovett rides down the elevator with me and says good-bye in the lobby. He has other appointments that will no doubt carry him deep into the pleasures of the New York night. As I watch him walk off, I think how success has changed him—it’s made him about as cosmopolitan as they come. But I also think how some things never change, like knowing a good song when you hear it. And knowing how to sing it.
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