The Emerald Lyle

Take a picture of this. Pigeon-toed. Dior-clad. Crooked smile (great teeth – an orthodontist’s dream). And an Eraserhead haircut that’d knock the socks off even David Lynch. He doesn’t like hippies, corn bread or fat babies. And he’s got skinny legs.
Now picture this. You’re greeted in the lobby by the most gracious, gentle, soft-spoken man whose presence renders you a blithering inarticulate wreck in 10 seconds flat. Heck, even his exchanges with the waitress (a deferent ‘Yes, ma’am’) and his tentative choice of a pear tart and mineral water (to ease the strain of an afternoon of marathon press interviews) bespeak a man with style and substance.
How can this be? Can it truly be one and the same person? Can this pigeon-toed antithesis of the gauche Texan cowpoke really be so disarming, so utterly enchanting?
Yes and, well, yes. That nerdy profile that’s been mocked and poked fun at ever since a certain knot was tied last year is far from nerdy and far from the greenhorn cardboard cut-out that fit the lazy headlines so well for so long.
Fact is, his dry wry wit and erudite meditations on life’s more essential elements, like penguins (who are sensitive to his needs), and Texan pride and prejudice pack a powerful punch to the jugular and the funny bone at one and the same time. And that’s probably why he got the girl. As he says himself, ‘Even a blind chicken finds a grain of corn every now and then’. And it’s hard to argue with that (unless you’re an authority on the effects of impaired visual acuity on the dietary intake of domestic fowl, that is. I can’t say that I am).
Although it could hardly be said that Lyle Lovett burst onto the country music scene in 1986 with his eponymous debut, he still managed to cause quite a stir with his discriminating collection of offbeat songs that refused to be readily corralled. And watching him in concert, no 20/20 vision is needed to see how he relishes this ambiguity that sets him apart from most of his Lone Star State compadres.
The man refuses to bask in even the most gossamer of illusions: ‘Creeps Like Me’ guffaws in the face of the tabloid snobbery over his less than classical visage; ‘She’s No Lady, She’s My Wife’ gives him the chance to take perverse pleasure in a double entendre-laden gem of the ‘aisle alter him’ variety, and ‘Fat Babies’ has the entire house inanely singing along to an absurd ode while he laughs right up his sleeve at our gullibility.
Forget the labels. The boxes he’s been crammed in are more of a hindrance than a help.
“I’m really more interested in being a singer/songwriter,” Lovett insists – quietly, “and doing my own songs, than I am in producing a string of albums to order. I do try to just make songwriting part of my everyday process. So far it hasn’t turned into a job and I don’t think I’d be able to continue if it did. I just write about small things that happen to me in everyday life and I think that the small things that happen are the important things and can reflect what’s really important to people.
“I write about human nature and how people are,” he continues, pausing at precise intervals to sample that pastry, the only thing that’s between him and starvation. He’s almost visibly embarrassed to be engaging in a conversation that’s zoned in on him alone. The egotistical nature of the exercise chafes at his sensibilities and stops him mid-sentence every now and again – terrified that he’s plunged his listener into a state of catatonia.
Take the media blitz that’s showered him with soundbytes and dodgy headlines since he and her indoors decided to defy the odds and swap a couple of vows. Is he resentful of all that attention, so much of it begrudging and smartassed?
“It really is such a separate thing from what I’m really up to,” he says. “It has so little to do with the reality of my life that I don’t find it offensive at all. And my audience has been really supportive over the years and has continued to grow, so I don’t think that this sort of thing would inspire someone who had never listened to my music to suddenly rush out in search of it. I think that just being married to someone isn’t reason enough for someone to spend $15 or $20 on a record.”
Conjugal matters being rapidly set aside then, Lovett ponders the phenomenon of the Texan songwriter, an ever-increasingly sighted species round these here parts, despite the fact that everyone in Texas is supposed to walk wide and talk in crude twisted sentences of not longer than 10 syllables. Why is it that there are so many original talents floating between Austin’s Antone’s and the Liberty Lunch?
“I don’t know but I think one thing is that there are places where people can go to play their songs. There’s no shortage of venues,” he notes. “Another thing is that the music business, as such doesn’t exist there. And that’s the best way to have things to my way of thinking. Before I went to Nashville in 1984 I just wrote songs to play in my shows. I knew nothing about the music business and it never occurred to me to try to get my songs played on the radio. So I wrote songs because I needed a new song in my show, and to be honest I think it makes for a different kind of song, where people are writing to play live, as opposed to aiming for airplay.”
Contrary to the paint roller that the likes of Garth Brooks would like to apply to everything musical south of the Mason Dixon line, Lovett’s musical background is as anomalous as his jawline. As well as th’Awl Bidness, Houston (his homeplace, Klein, is on the city outskirts) plays host to a rake of blues fiends, whose influence is readily heard on 1992’s Joshua Judges Ruth.
“Lightning Hopkins lives in Houston. ZZ Top came out of there,” Lovett says, “and there was a really healthy club scene there. And when I went to Austin they were really into what they called Progressive Country, singer/songwriters who were playing country songs that had a great narrative basis – more folk songs, I guess. It’s always been the song that’s interested me. I could buy someone’s records and then drive over to Austin, hear them play the song that I liked and learn the chords from watching them.”
So does he subscribe to the notion that there now exists a Lyle Lovett school of music, replete with relatives crammed inside dark closets, grannies who bequeath their gold teeth on their deathbeds and gospel preachers with a penchant for devouring the odd dove mid-sermon?
“I don’t know,” he offers, “but maybe how you fit into things is better seen by other people. Because when it comes time for me to make an album I just try to think what are the best songs I have available to record. I think more in terms of individual songs than I do groups of songs or overall style, and I don’t really approach my albums in a stylistic way. It’s really a matter of picking the best songs that I have and then musically, creating arrangement for them that best communicate what the song has to say. It’s not so complicated really! It’s actually a real simple approach.”
Lovett’s latest collection of not so much off-the-wall as
seriously over-the-balcony toons (ironically titled I Love Everybody) dates from 1977-’86, and despite some seriously misinformed reviews contains not a whit of a verse written since his departure from the singles ranks. Is there refuge to be taken behind a series of oldies that tickle the imagination no less vigorously than his later songs, but that stem from a period when life was (perhaps a tad) slower and less readily measured against every move his spouse makes?
“No, each of my records has been a combination of old songs and new songs,” he says, the truth always being simpler than the fiction we might like to create, “but this time when we went into the studio to pick out some of the old songs we fond that we had eight before we knew it and suddenly I got this idea to put the old songs together. It was a fun project, nothing more, nothing less!”
What of the gospel influences in his music? Is there a black soul lurking beneath that Caucasian cover, just itching to break free?
“I love that kind of music and I was brought up in a Lutheran church, went to a parochial school and I sang in the choir, though that was very different from black gospel music obviously! Then when I started to record I just thought how great it would be to have some of that church music on the album.”
Along with k.d. lang he’s been classified under ‘A’ for alternative ever since he stepped on stage alongside a cellist and a conga player. Does he have any misgivings that such predefined categories will limit his audience or that they might scare away potential punters put off by the tag?
“I think to want to classify something, to want to hang a label on it is a very natural thing,” he says, “and I’m not offended by that at all. My first records were released from the Nashville part of the record company and so I was considered a country singer – which was fine by me. People still see me as a country singer, I suppose, though my record company operates all my marketing out of the West Coast, but that’s okay too. I just make up these songs and record ’em! I write songs that draw from all sorts of musical styles and I really enjoy that flexibility.”
And what of the image? He dons Dior jackets for Vogue covers these days and wears stunningly cut suits onstage. Will his marketing team see to a metamorphosis from singer/songwriter to clothes horse-cum-celebrity spouse?
Lovett laughs at the absurdity of such a gameplan. “No, I just try to clean up and put on clean clothes before the show. I figure that if people are paying money, you know, I can always get dressed up a little bit for that!
Anyone who’s creased themselves at his blissfully bare and clean characters in Robert Altman’s The Player and Short Cuts may wonder at the man’s broad palette. Not only is he wont to write incomparable parables of love and all other things, he’s also a mighty fine face on screen, eyes darting, pigeon toes ever pointing inward and face all deadpan and bland, the perfect recipe for psychotic bakers or self-effacing sidekick to Whoopi Goldberg, or whatever Altman is having himself these days.
However the two (music and acting), though not incompatible, are far from level pegging on Lovett’s priority list – at the moment at least.
“In playing music, really, I get to go around and be myself,” he observes, “which is quite different from using yourself to be someone else. In playing music I can be as outgoing or as introverted as I feel like being, but in acting, when they turn the camera on you, you’ve just got to show your character. With me, I’m content to just stand there and do nothing when they turn the camera on and I don’t know whether that would work with other directors or on other films.”
Is he alarmed at all that his music might be stymied or thwarted by the global warming to Garth Brooks and other hat acts, who’ve opted for the singalong with two chords and a ticket to every football stadium in the universe?
“I don’t think so,” he says. “That form of popular success seems to exist always in one form or another. If it’s not Garth Brooks, it’s Michael Jackson. I think among the public in general, something has to fill that space.”
Yet country was so long maligned, isn’t he surprised at the enormity of its acceptance now, having spent so long languishing in the bargain bins, an embarrassing country bumpkin cousin to the pop sensations of the hour?
“I think it’s a combination of changing values,” he continues. “By and large people are searching for something and they’re as entitled to look towards country music as they are to pop or whatever. I don’t place myself in competition with that sort of commercial success anyway! My audience is not so diverse that I’m attracting people that I wouldn’t like – and I’m not sure that I want everyone to like me.
“I’m comfortable knowing that what I do is not going to appeal to everybody – and I’m just glad it appeals to somebody!”