Texas Monthly Talks

Lyle Lovett

Interview by Evan Smith

May 2006

(Page 2 of 2)

It’s all still exciting to you, twenty years after the release of your first record?
Sure it is. I get even more excited about a good idea now than I used to, maybe because they’re fewer and farther between. I get very excited about something new and hearing it come to life.

How did you know how to do this?
I don’t know. I still don’t know how to do this! You know, it’s like all of life. It’s a constant process of trying to figure it out every day.

Did it ever occur to you as a kid—growing up in Klein, in the Lutheran church, in that very nurturing environment—that you might one day become this guy?
No, but I didn’t have a better idea. I always knew growing up that I loved home. I identified very strongly with my relatives. I have eleven first cousins on my mom’s side of the family; they’re like brothers and sisters.

Many of them lived right there with you.
Yeah. Grandma and Grandpa gave each of their seven children a couple acres, a corner of the place to build on, which was not an unusual thing. It still happens in rural communities.

The family was not only emotionally close—
But physically close. And so I always felt very strongly about the place and always dreamed of trying to hang on to it, of living there. And that actually came to pass.

How big was the original piece of land?My grandpa’s place is about 250 acres, and we have about 200 acres of it left. More than 160 acres of it were sold out of the family after my grandmother died, in 1980. It was about the time the oil bust happened. Development had been going crazy in the late seventies, but then it ground to a halt, and the investment firm that had bought the land didn’t do anything with it. They didn’t sell it to a developer like they had planned to. It was in 1995—and I’m serious, it’s the thing I’m most proud of—that I was able to buy it back.

You still have other family on the land.
Yes.

And you’re still close, physically as well as emotionally.
Exactly. My parents lived next door to my grandparents, and now I live in my grandparents’ house, so my mom is my neighbor through the pasture to the west.

You probably see her a little bit.
Not as much as you’d think. My mom is 76 years old.

Good health?
Good health and very active.

It was her brother who was at the center of that accident with the bull a few years back.
Of the seven in their family, they’re the only two left. He’s 71 now, and his name is Calvin. Calvin Klein.

I’m sure he’s heard of the other one.
Oh, he loves it. He always points out that he’s older—he’s the original—and that he’s not going to sue the guy. My uncle Calvin is an outgoing character who never meets a stranger. He’s always made a living in agriculture. When I was growing up, my grandfather was a vegetable farmer, but Uncle Calvin had a dairy, and after his dairy business, he started running beef cows on the place. And he still has his cow operation. He runs about eighty mama cows right there at home. He’s worked that place, our place, and made his living from it his entire life.

You could live anywhere. You’ve got a reason to be in any big city in the world. You’re successful enough, and the work that you do takes you to those places. And yet at the end of the day, you return to Klein.
What makes home are the people in your life, the people you love and care about and want to be near. I don’t get to spend as much time at home as I’d like. I’m fortunate in my work to be able to satisfy any sort of travel urges that I might have. Getting to play music and ride around on the bus and see the country or go to other countries goes a long way in satisfying your wanderlust.

I’d imagine it would get old after a while.
I’m immensely grateful to the people who support us, who come to our shows and allow me to travel in the way that I like. It’s beyond belief. In the old days, we all made less money, and we all shared a room with somebody else in the band. Now we can stay in places where you can go to your room and get a great few hours of sleep because the linens are really nice. You know, the thread count of the sheets at the Four Seasons is really good. It’s like a vacation.

How much time do you spend on the road?
We typically do about ten weeks. This summer we’ll play some of our favorite outdoor-type venues.

Tell me two or three of your favorites.
Oh, gosh. Anywhere there’s a good crowd. I’ve always enjoyed doing shows at the Backyard, in Austin. It’s just such a nice feeling in the audience.

Good-sized crowd.
Really nice-sized crowd. And appropriate press. There are a few markets in the country that have great radio support for my kind of music, in the way that KGSR and KUT operate here in Austin. Places like Seattle, with a station called the Mountain. The Bay Area, with KFOG. KCRW, in Los Angeles, does a great job of supporting us, but you don’t feel the impact quite as much in a city that big.

It’s the most mass of the mass-media markets.
Right. In Los Angeles, as I said earlier, we’ll play the Greek Theatre, which is a nice place. And if we have 3,500 or 4,000 people, I’ll be thrilled.

Is that the biggest crowd you play for these days?
The last few years at Red Rocks, which is another one of my favorite places, near Denver—due in large part to KBCO, which is very much like KGSR—we’ve had 6,000 to 8,000 people. At Wolf Trap, in Vienna, Virginia, we’ve been lucky to have 7,500 the last several years. It’s really nice to be able to do that. We can’t do it everywhere, but those markets have been consistently strong over the years. Minneapolis—St. Paul is a really strong area. Chicago, because of WXRT, is really, really strong.

You know these markets intimately, and you know those stations. You obviously take a great interest in this aspect of the business.
It’s interesting to me. Those are relationships that you develop over the years. There are people that you get to know and relationships that you value, and even if it’s not always a social relationship, even if it’s strictly a business relationship, you have to appreciate people. I know folks from all of those radio stations. One of the on-air personalities at WXRT is a guy named Tom Marker, and he announced our very first Large Band show that we did in Chicago, back in 1988. And he’s announced every show we’ve done there since. He’s just great to us. After a while, we get to know their families and watch their kids grow up. It’s nice to get to go around every year and check in with them.

Are you recording now, or are you working on anything new?
I’m not recording, but I have some new songs.

What’s the plan?
The plan, up until this morning, was to get enough songs together and then go in and record, but I might go in before. I’m tempted to try to record some before we go out on the road this summer, just to get started, partly because of going to hear Neil Young speak at South by Southwest.

Explain.
He talked about his latest record, Prairie Wind, and how he had gone to Nashville. One of his friends had said, “Well, come on down,” and he said, “But I’ve got one song.” And his friend said, “Well, come on down and record it. You’ve got to start somewhere.” So he went down there to record, and while he was there, he wrote seven songs in seven days.

So it’s possible that you’ll go in, earlier than you expected, and have this creative burst.
It could happen. The idea of just getting started is motivating.

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