Though Lyle Lovett has cut only two albums — 1986’s Lyle Lovett and the current Pontiac — the 30-year-old Texan has already established himself as perhaps the most important singer-songwriter to come out of the country-music scene in the past decade.
Lovett’s songs are powerful reminders that even cowboys get the blues (and that some cowboys can play the blues). And in His Large Band, which includes such uncountry touches as a cellist, a soulful horn section and a brilliant R& B female vocalist, he’s found a sympathetic backing unit capable of bringing those songs to life.
So far Lovett has done well on the country charts, and even has inched his way onto the pop charts, winning raves not only from the press but also from folks such as Steve Winwood, Huey Lewis, Rosanne Cash and Leo Kottke, whose assessment of Lovett is “Great music, great hair.”
But Lovett is a bit concerned that he may become infamous before he becomes famous. Recently, Lovett has been stung by critics’ charges that he is a misogynist — or, as he has come to call it, “the M word.”
In truth, his songs do contain an unusually high body count of casualties in the war between the sexes. For example, there’s the less-than-blissful view of marriage presented in She’s No Lady: The preacher asked her/And she said I do/ The preacher asked me/And she said yes he does too/And the preacher said/I pronounce you 99 to life/Son, she’s no lady, she’s your wife.
And there’s the narrator of the deceptively chipper-sounding L.A. County, who makes a special trip to attend the wedding of an old girlfriend in order to blow away the new bride and groom with his .45. It’s no wonder that Lovett seems to be on the verge of becoming to women what Randy Newman (who was an early influence) became to short people in the ’70s.
“Yeah,” Lovett says a bit glumly. “Lately I’ve been thinking about taking some time off from the music thing and opening up a chain of misogyny parlors.
“I’d like to think I’m not screwed up about women,” he says. “Relationships just seem to be things that start out great, then fall apart after two or three years. But I didn’t make them that way. I’m attracted to the mythology of the loner, but in practical terms I don’t want to be a Lonely Guy.” He stops and looks out at the highway. “See, it’s not that I hate women. I just hate it when they let me down.
“This is the only song I ever wrote about true love,” Lovett tells the crowd at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis while introducing God Will, the existential country-kiss-off number from his debut album. “I know that it’s about true love, because it’s the shortest song I ever wrote.”
When Lovett appeared on Hee Haw a few years back and saluted his home town of Klein, Texas, the show called the post office to find out its current population. (It was 41,000 then.) Lovett still lives in the small farming community just outside of Houston, in his grandparents’ old house, 150 yards away from his parents.
Asked how his high-school classmates might remember him, Lovett says with a grimace, “I think they’d use a lot of interrogative pronouns, like ‘Who?’ I was pretty forgettable — which in retrospect is most likely a blessing.”
Lovett, a shy, middle-class kid, developed his interest in music gradually. He grew up listening to both country and rock; Hank Williams and the Eagles were favorites, as were Texas singers such as Willie Nelson, Michael Martin Murphey, Guy Clark, B.W. Stevenson and Townes Van Zandt. In ninth grade, by virtue of the fact that he owned a guitar, Lovett was recruited by a few other teen-agers in the local chapter of the Future Farmers of America to play in a country band. “I played with the amp turned down real low,” he says of the experience.
It was while studying at Texas A&M; that he started playing coffeehouses and writing songs. Lovett describes his act as “an insensitive singer-songwriter thing.” In 1980, he finally graduated with a journalism degree and then briefly moved back to Klein to concentrate on his songwriting and playing.
He went back to Texas A&M; for a graduate degree in German and even studied in Germany. In 1983, Lovett was invited to play a four-week-long country-music festival in Luxembourg. “I was playing solo,” Lovett says. “Sort of a between-acts deal, and the crowd was not interested.”
Fortunately, Jay David Sloan and the Rogues, from Phoenix, Ariz., also were on the bill, and they took a liking to Lovett and started accompanying him onstage. A few years later, when he was signed to MCA, he decided to ask his Phoenix friends to record with him. The same players continue to form the core of his band today. “They were just incredible musicians,” he says fondly. “And more importantly, they had a fine-tuned sense of pity.”
A day before the Minneapolis show, Lovett is spending the cold, sunny morning pressing the flesh with some Chicago radio folk. At US99, the local country station, disc jockey Nancy Turner plugs Lovett’s sold-out show at the Park West Theater that night, but then explains to the singer that She’s No Lady caused such a commotion among US99’s female listeners that she decided to hold a contest.
She has challenged the ladies of the listening audience to come up with their own song in response to Lovett’s. Lovett, seeming game, encourages Turner to play him the contest’s winning entry. Within seconds Turner has cued up Kelly Kessler and Jean Sherbourne’s He’s No Cowboy, He’s My Spouse, which begins: He hates my cooking, he hates my apple pie/He loves to tell me/He hates my thunder thighs/He loves to ride herd on me to keep up the house/Son, he’s no cowboy, he’s my spouse.
As the interview draws to a close, Turner asks Lovett what he thinks about cowboys. During his concerts, Lovett often says, “I would have loved to have been a cowboy, but I was afraid of cows.” But he seems to want to answer the question seriously now. He pauses dramatically and tells her, “I think a lot about cowboys.”
Lovett seems amused by his first brush with parody. Asked if he worries a great deal about offending people, about being misunderstood and misinterpreted, he answers, “In some cases, I think people get the joke, but they just don’t like the joke. I realize my sense of humor is tacky sometimes, but I hope it comes across in the shows that it’s not malicious. Sure, I have psychopathic thoughts, but real psychopaths have nothing but those thoughts. And as far as offending people, I’ve occasionally worried about hurting the feelings of the people I know that I write about. But it really hasn’t been much of a problem. Believe it or not, the girl I wrote L.A. County for likes the song. I recently signed an album for her husband — “To Dave, Just Kidding.”
