Photo: Rollin Riggs, NYT
For most of my life, I hated country music. I owned a Johnny Cash greatest hits collection I’d picked up at a truckstop back in high school, but beyond that I knew nothing of the genre except for the polished, twangy crap I’d encounter on the upper ends of the FM dial, and that never did it for me, and still doesn’t. Eventually I got turned on to Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, and some other classics, but even those I saw as something separate from "Country" as I perceived it. Then I saw Lyle Lovett and His Large Band on Conan O’Brien one night just about ten years ago. I bought Cowboy Man a few days later, and have slowly been converted.
You still won’t find me tuned in to Froggy for more than a song or two at a time, and I still can’t stand most of what I hear when I flip past CMT, but—as with most genres of modern music—some of the best stuff misses the mainstream, and Lyle Lovett is no exception.
His songs are what I want American music to be. They speak truths to the suppressed vagabond in me, as if molded out of Texan clay and carried across prairies by horseback before being dusted off and presented with a crooked smile in a soulful timbre. He can write them funny or sad, shallow or deep, folk or western... he can write them as well as or better than anyone else trying their pen at country music these days.
It is perhaps the fact that his songs grow from something more than straight country roots that separates his music from that of his contemporaries who sell millions more records and hear endless airtime across most of the nation. Lovett draws on gospel, rockabilly, mariachi and more. When backed by his Large Band, his songs could hardly be called unpolished, yet there is something much rawer in them than you’re likely to find on a Kenny Chesney record. When accompanied only by a guitar, his songs at first sound simple, but develop into compositions far more complex than the ballads of the Keith Urbans and Brad Paisleys out there.
Sure, I paid to see Urban in concert last summer, and I’ve been known at times to slip a Toby Keith track into a jukebox lineup. But those songs don’t hold a farmhouse candle to Lyle’s, and it bears repeating that I would never have opened my ears to them at all had I not purchased Cowboy Man a decade ago.
When Lovett came to town on Valentine’s Day three years ago with Guy Clark, John Hiatt, and Joe Ely at his side, he swiftly stole the hearts of a few in the audience (possibly including my fiancé's) with his desert-dry wit and a heartfelt rendition of “In My Own Mind” that shook the air. So it is against all reason that tickets are still available for Thursday’s show at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland, but it's with good reason that I'll be there.
(And don’t think I’ve forgotten that the masterful John Hiatt will once again be at Lovett’s side tomorrow night. The New York Times had a great piece on him a few months back, which you can read here.)
Downloads:
Lyle Lovett – “I’ve Been to Memphis” (Live in Vienna, VA, 7/7/97) (Mediafire link)
Lyle Lovett – “This Old Porch” (Live in Vienna, VA, 7/7/97 w/ Robert Earl Keen) (Mediafire link)
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