By Paul Freeman [February 2018 Interview]

An enduringly affecting singer-songwriter, multi-Grammy-winning artist Lyle Lovett continues to make music that charms and moves listeners. Carefully crafted and benefiting from intelligence, empathy and humor, his songs tell captivating stories.

The Texan has demonstrated distinctive vocal and songwriting styles. Among his most memorable tunes are “If I Had a Boat,” “Cowboy Man,” “You Can’t Resist It” and “The Road to Ensenada.” Whether touring with his Large Band or solo acoustic, Lovett is a great performer.

Lovett has also proved himself to be an appealing presence as an actor. He has appeared in numerous movies and TV shows, including several for the great director Robert Altman, such as “The Player” and “Short Cuts.”

Now 60, Lovett recently celebrated his first wedding anniversary with April Kimble. They have been together 20 years and reside outside Houston. A horse enthusiast, Lovett competes in reining competitions. But he continues to tour extensively, sharing his music with appreciative audiences.

He generously took time to chat with Pop Culture Classics.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
Do the current sets draw from throughout your career? Are you filtering in new material, as well?

LYLE LOVETT:
I’m getting ready to record, but that’s a real dilemma. Throughout my career, I’ve played new songs — as soon as I’ve wanted to. But these days, you play something and it’s on YouTube the next day. So I have not been playing new songs. And I probably won’t, until this next record comes out. But yeah, it’s a real dilemma, because I want to play them. And I just want them to be new, when they come out.

PCC:
What direction is the new album going to take?

LOVETT:
You know, just kind of more of my songs. And just more of my stuff. [Laughs] I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I’ve never really approached a record conceptually, musically. Years ago, I asked Guy Clark one time, we were sitting around, I said, “When are you going to make a new record?” He said, “Well, as soon as I get 10 songs I like.” And I always think about that. And it’s really that simple. If you pick songs that mean something to you, that you want people to hear and then do the arrangements based on whatever supports the songs, that’s sort of how the style of my records has always evolved.

I’ve never thought, “Oh, I want to make a jazz record” or “I want to make a blues record” or “I want to make a country record.” It’s always, “Well, what are the songs and what supports the song?”

PCC:
Do you think it’s because you’s always been true to yourself musically and not tried to guide it artificially towards what might be perceived as commercial, that you’ve had such longevity?

LOVETT:
[Chuckles] That suggests grand planning of some sort on either the business’ part or my own. But yeah, I’ve always worked with people who have supported me creatively and allowed me to be myself. And that’s the fun of life, sort of being able to be yourself — and get away with it. And I feel really lucky to have been able to do that.

I think some people may have the actual ability, physical gifts, either through their musicianship or their appearance, to be kind of molded into a character. But I think, in general, people always do better, when they’re allowed to be themselves. I’m not sure, if they told me to record a song that seemed out of character, I don’t know if it would be a hit.

PCC:
Did the industry ever try to nudge you into commercial directions?

LOVETT:
No. They really didn’t. I’ve worked with really supportive people, who were creatively supportive. Tony Brown in the early days at MCA Records. And before that, meeting Billy Williams, who was a producer on every recording I ever made, up until the last couple of records, when he decided he was too old to leave home. And he’s in his 80s now. Billy Williams was the bandleader of a band [J. David Sloan and the Rogues] I met in Phoenix in 1983, from Phoenix, in which Matt Rollings who has played piano on all of records played, and Ray Herndon, who plays guitar with me. J. David Sloan was the lead singer. Anyway, Billy was the music director of that band and produced my demos in 1984 that ended up becoming my first record.

Tony Brown was the only person in Nashville who was willing to work with the tracks that we had recorded, which I was kind of insistent about… or which I wanted to do. And Tony said, “Yeah, those tracks are fine. Do you mind if we remix them?” And that was music to my ears. We had done our mixes fast and down and dirty and I was really happy about the chance to go in and take time with mixes on those recordings. And those recordings became my first record. So Tony Brown at MCA, he was a person in the business who signed Steve Earle to his record deal at MCA, Nanci Griffith to hers at MCA, and was a sort of creative A&R person who was willing to be unconventional… in town that has a reputation for being highly conventional. And Tony’s a musician. Tony came up playing with Elvis, in Elvis’ gospel group, and then he took Glen Dee’s [Glen D. Hardin] place in Elvis band. And he took Glen Dee’s place in Emmylou’s band. So that was a real heyday, in terms of the recording business. Record companies were run by musicians. And it’s nice to see that trend kind of coming back, as well.

PCC:
You have this Greatest Hits album out now…

LOVETT:
I don’t. I mean I don’t have it out. Curb Records has it out. I didn’t select… I’m a little embarrassed that they called it “Greatest Hits,” because I never had a hit. And I did a compilation album during the course of my record deal, that we called “Anthology.” That was about as far as I would go. But, yeah, Curb, because they own those masters, Curb released that record on their own. I didn’t have anything to do with selecting any of the songs. I didn’t have anything to do with selecting the artwork. I actually didn’t even know about it until it was out. So anyway… I couldn’t tell you what’s on it.

PCC:
You’ve been doing some dates again with Robert Earl Keen. What impresses you most about him?

LOVETT:
Robert and I have been friends since 1976, when we met in school together. So we’re actual friends. [Chuckles] And you know, the songwriter-in-the-round tradition is an old one and prevalent in Nashville, where there are lots of great songwriters who don’t go on the road and perform. They stay in town and write songs and make a living doing that. And it’s enviable in a way. But they get together for these guitar pull nights where they’ll have three or four songwriters in a room and they take turns playing their songs.

In 1989, Bill Ivey, who was running the Country Music Foundation, put Guy Clark, Joe Ely, John Hiatt and me together to do that kind of show for the old Marlboro Country Music Festival. We did half a dozen of those kind of shows across the country over about a year-and-a-half period. So we’d get together just occasionally, every few months to do a show. And it was great fun, to sit there and wait your turn and kind of bounce off the song that was played just before you. And anyway, we would get together every so often and do those kind of shows in years after.

And in 2003, we decided to, instead of just doing those shows as a special occasions, why don’t we book a little tour and just go out and do them? And so we did. And we worked together, the four of us, from 2003 to 2008, doing that kind of in-the-round show. So from there, Guy Clark’s health began to not be as good. And so John Hiatt and I started going out together, just the two of us. And that’s how these types of shows have come to be. And so, in the summertime, I typically tour with my large band. And then, in other times of the year, I tour with a smaller configuration or, the last few years, I’ve been doing more of these kind of shows.

And I’ve continued to work with John Hiatt. I did this kind of tour with him this past fall. Last spring, I did dates like this with Vince Gill, which was great fun. And Robert and I have done these before. It’s been a couple of years, but we got back together for three-and-a-half or so weeks. It’s really fun. First of all, it’s fun to play your songs kind of the way you wrote ‘em, the way you sit on the edge of your bed and play them on your guitar, without any accompaniment. That’s fun. But it’s also great fun to sit that close to somebody you admire and to watch them do what they do from three feet away. And it ends up being a conversation. It ends up sort of being what you would do if you’d gone over to each other’s houses and sat around and played songs for each other. We’re playing for each other, it’s just that there are people out there watching.

PCC:
Is it inspirational to interact with other great writers in this way?

LOVETT:
Oh, for sure. So much of what you do… You get so insulated in your own business, your own world. And you don’t get to interact with other performers as much as one might think. And these kinds of tours, there’s a high level of interaction and depending on how well you know the person you’re working with, I mean, Robert and I are real friends. So we end up spending the day together. We kind of hang out. The first time we booked a tour together like this, we did it really so that we could spend some time together, because our other gigs take us in different directions and we would rarely see one another. We thought, “Well, maybe some people would show up and we’d get to spend some time together.”

PCC:
Your songwriting process — do you discipline yourself to sit down and try to come up with something? Or wait for the muse to give you a title or melody line?

LOVETT:
You know, it’s a little of everything, really. But I still play my guitar for fun, every day, because I love to pick up my guitar and noodle around on it and see what occurs to me. And so it’s not really a matter of sitting down and thinking, “Okay, I have to write a song.” It’s really more a matter of just kind of playing for fun the way I always have and things occur to you.

PCC:
So when you began playing for fun early on, who were some of the artists that inspired or influenced you?

LOVETT:
Oh, man… gosh, well, I started taking guitar lessons when I was in second grade. And I’ve loved music my whole life. But when I started learning songs to perform, when I thought, “Well, maybe it would be fun to play in front of people,” I was listening to Texas singer-songwriters who I could actually go and hear, when they came through town, when I was in high school, people like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, performers who made their homes in Texas in those days and who played the original music venues regularly. Those were the kinds of songwriters I was drawn to and I still consider them a huge influence in my writing and my thinking and my approach to life in general.

PCC:
So is it the honesty in that work what appeals to you?

LOVETT:
Well, certainly, yeah. And the poetry. The articulation of an idea. The imagery. The quality of writing something that’s good without any other consideration. Just working on something to be good, for the sake of being good. Without commercial consideration. Without any other consideration.

PCC:
So when you were at Texas A&M, getting your degrees [in journalism and German], were you toying with career possibilities other than music? Or were you just thinking of having a safety net at that point?

LOVETT:
It was important to me to finish school. But I started playing in my first summer home from school. The summer of 1976 was the summer that I first got paid for playing somewhere. And I worked all that summer playing music and never stopped. When I went back to school that fall, I started calling around and getting little gigs for myself. And I started playing somewhere every week, from the time I was 18 years old. So that’s what I really wanted to do.

But I wasn’t confident that it could turn into a job, much less my career. So I wanted to finish school — and was interested in school. But when my senior year rolled around, I didn’t go on job interviews. I didn’t go out and look for a job. I really hoped that I could do something with my songs. And my parents, who sent me to school, were okay with my taking the time after I graduated to try to figure out the music business. And that’s what I did.

PCC:
And were you getting encouragement from other artists at that point?

LOVETT:
Well, yes, certainly. For me, there was never a single breakthrough. There was just enough encouragement, at every kind of baby step level, to try to take the next one. But yeah, gosh, your whole existence and your whole progress becomes part of your relationship with other artists, people that run original music venues. And back in the early days, you booked yourself and you seek out gigs to play and you cultivate… You talk to your audience between sets. You do everything you can to get booked the next month in a really good club. The most important venue to me, early on, it was an original music venue in Houston called Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant. It opened in 1969 and it still exists today. It’s run all by volunteers. And it’s a room that holds about 75 people, packed to the max. And it’s a very discerning listening room.

There’s a film made about it a few years ago, called “For the Sake of the Song: The Story of Anderson Fair,” directed by Bruce Bryant, that does a good job of capturing the spirit of the place. It was a place where you played your own songs and they better be good enough to stand on that stage. And people like Nanci Griffith played there. Eric Taylor played there, whose songs I recorded. Lucinda Williams. I used to open for Lucinda Williams. Lucinda had a kind of a regular gig there on Thursday night, back when her first Folkways record was out and I would open for Lucinda occasionally. That was sort of entry level position. The place was open Thursday through Sunday. And entry level was an opening set on Thursday night or Sunday night. And then the next step up would be to get to open on a weekend night. And then the next step up would be to get your own Thursday or Sunday night. And then sort of the top rung on the ladder was to have your own weekend night or your own weekend there. So that was kind of the process.

There was a place in Dallas called Poor David’s Pub, that still exists. There was the Alamo Lounge and later Emma Joe’s in Austin and Cactus Cafe. Those were places that people played their own songs. And Robert and I were fans of songwriters and wanted to see what we could write ourselves. Robert and I became friends early on, since we met. We had lots in common, in terms of what we appreciated and what we were trying to do

PCC:
The singing, the songwriting ability, the performing — the showmanship element — do you see those more as natural gifts? Or crafts you had to hone?

LOVETT:
I think, gosh, it’s probably a combination of everything. I think wanting to do it brings out… you sort of give it your best. I don’t think of myself as a singer. And nobody’s going to hire me to play guitar in their band [laughs]. So it’s kind of everything having to work together to present what essentially is a personal point of view. If I have something unique to offer, it’s just my take on things. So it’s more about using music and a song form to present a point of view than it is… Going on stage, for me, I’ve never thought of as, “Gosh, I’m gonna knock their socks off with a vocal.” [Laughs] Or “I’m gonna play a hot guitar lick and everybody will think,’Oh, wow!’” That’s never been my approach. My approach is to just go out there and be myself and see if I can get away with it.

PCC:
So for you, what is the key to connecting with an audience?

LOVETT:
You know, the audience, to begin with the generosity of the audience, that’s a difficult thing to figure out. But I do think that, if it works, if you are able to connect with an audience, that’s a really cool thing. And sometimes it works better than others. But that is kind of the point, to make a human connection with people in the audience and for it to mean something to them. And if people in an audience can see a little bit of themselves in the things that you say or the things that you sing about, then, man, that’s huge. That’s really huge. That’s what you’re after. How you get there is a very imprecise sort of trial-and-error approach.

The nicest compliment that I ever get from somebody about one of my songs is when somebody says, “I remember exactly what I was doing the first time I heard that song.” And then they’ll tell me a story about what they were doing. They tell me a story about themselves. And that’s the best feeling, because at that point, you know that your song is a part of that person’s memory of an event that was important to that person. And that’s the best feeling in the world.

PCC:
So after all these years, you still enjoy performing live as much as ever?

LOVETT:
Oh, for sure. And it’s how I make a living. It’s an immense privilege to go to a cool theatre and have people show up. When people care enough about what you do to show up and sit there and support you, that’s a great feeling. I love it.

PCC:
And the acting, is that just the enjoyment of taking on different sorts of creative challenges?

LOVETT:
Yes. And, in the big picture, I’ve done very little acting. And I really have only acted, because somebody has thought of me, because I play music. And when Robert Altman asked me to be in “The Player,” it’s because he came to one of my shows and Robert Altman was a songwriter himself and loved music and loved having music around all his sets. So it was because Robert Altman was a fan of music that he ever cast me. And I’m absolutely sure that other acting jobs I got were because people were familiar with me from Altman’s films… because of Altman.

So I feel as though I owe any of the chances I’ve had to act to Robert Altman. And I really do enjoy it. It’s fun any time you get to sort of peek into somebody else’s windows and become a part of somebody else’s creative process and see how that works. I enjoy it from that standpoint. But I don’t pursue acting in the way an actor does. I concentrate on playing music and every now and then, somebody thinks of me for a part and it works into my touring schedule, my schedule otherwise, and I can do it. And I do always enjoy it.

PCC:
And what impressed you most about Altman’s artistry as a filmmaker?

LOVETT:
His confidence and his decisiveness, his clarity of mind. And his judgment. He was just a wonderful judge of character. He was such a genius at casting, I think. I’m not talking about me, of course [laughs]. But he knew who to cast and in what part. When you look at his films… he really was a great judge of character. He knew what he could get from somebody. And I loved watching him work. He was very open in his process, as well. He just made you feel welcome to watch him do whatever he was doing. And he was a great teacher in that way.

PCC:
Being on the “Toy Story” soundtrack [singing “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”], was that fun to be part of a whole new audience?

LOVETT:
Are you kidding? Yeah! That was strictly because of Randy Newman’s goodwill. Randy had come into the recording studio with me and done a vocal on one of my records. And a few weeks later, he called up and said, “Hey, I’m doing this song for an animated movie.” And that was Pixar’s first film. And he said, “It’s this new animated company. Come down and sing it with me.” And so I did. And that was it. And what fun it was. And Randy is one of my songwriting heroes, as well.

PCC:
Are you still doing the horse-reining competitions?

LOVETT:
Yeah, I am.

PCC:
That must take your mind to a totally different place.

LOVETT:
Well, it does and it doesn’t. It’s something you think about. Like playing music, it’s consuming, in that way that you don’t think about anything else, when you’re doing it. And it’s really fun.

PCC:
Do you find that having diverse interests in life feeds your creativity?

LOVETT:
Well, for sure. Yeah. Getting to do things you like to do. Just to underscore, it is an immense privilege just to do things in your daily life that you like to do. And I’m fortunate. I get to think about making stuff up. I get to sit around, play my guitar, think about making stuff up. I get to go ride a horse, if I want to. I get to go on the road with people that I’ve worked with for 20 and 30 years and see them for three or four weeks every two or three months. And it ends up being a fun reunion with your buddies. It’s a privilege to do things you like to do in your life. And after all these years of doing this, I still enjoy doing everything that I do. And I feel like I’m even more grateful… The fact that I can still do them makes me even more grateful.

PCC:
After all these years of recording and touring, after all this time in music, what do you find to be the most rewarding aspect of all of this?

LOVETT:
In terms of the process of writing songs, making a record, going on tour, they’re all just different facets of the same thing. And every one of them, every stage of development is gratifying in its own way… I’m sort of terrible about picking favorites of anything, because there’s something to be appreciated about everything you do. And when I finish a song that I’m happy with, I think to myself, “Well, there’s not a better feeling.” And then you go into the recording studio and you hear an arrangement come to life in the hands of musicians that you love and trust and you think, “Oh, that’s the best feeling ever.” And then you go out and you get to play it live and you think, “Well, it doesn’t get better than this.” And that’s truly how it goes. My favorite part of it all is what I’m getting to do at that moment.

PCC:
With all that you’ve achieved, are there still goals that you’re yearning to fulfill?

LOVETT:
Yes. I’d like to keep my job [laughs]. That’s always been my definition of success — being able to keep doing the things that you like to do. You have to pay attention to what you’re doing and you have to be thoughtful about it. It is a business. And I’m just grateful that people show up. I’m just glad to be able to do it.

For the latest news on this artist, visit www.lylelovett.com