Lyle Lovett: Nobody's Country

Taken song by song with lyric sheet in hand, Lyle Lovett's new The Road to Ensenada (MCA) proves that the famous singing Eraserhead is far more than the sum of his quirks. In the past, both his finely honed relationship songs and his fun-loving "large band" numbers have had little twists that skewed the music's sentiment out of whack. This time, a much larger proportion of the songs come on straight and true. Especially on the album's second half. "Christmas Morning," for one, is almost as wrenching as John Prine's great "Christmas in Prison." And "It Ought To Be Easier" is as fine a break-up song as you're likely to hear these days.

Credit the album's forthrightness to Lovett's failed marriage to Julia Roberts if you want, but at his Harborlights concert last Friday night (September 6), the man once again seemed unknowable, hidden behind his oddities. That sensation first hit when, early on, he sang Ensenada's lead track. A shuffling Texas blues called "Don't Touch My Hat," the friendly admonition was backed by the evening's only stage prop, a gleaming white Stetson carefully hung on a rack a couple of feet behind Lovett's mike. Somehow it didn't compute. To judge from the preppie attire favored by the audience and the tailored suits worn by Lovett and his band, the song would have been more logical if the prop had been changed and the lyrics rewritten to something like "Don't Touch My Polo Shirt" or "Leave My Armani Alone."

That strange moment pointed up the absurdity of calling Lyle Lovett any kind of country singer. Although he was originally marketed as a Nashville novelty, and the press continues to treat him as "country on wry" (the Boston Globe), Lovett's refined, ecumenical taste is in fact the mark of an ambitious singer-songwriter like his all but forgotten fellow Texan, Michelle Shocked. Both revel in the plethora of musical styles that have come from their Lone Star State, including country music, but both do so with a folkie heart. The difference is, Shocked wants to stretch her audience's horizons with an exploration of America's musical miscegenation; Lovett, for whatever reason, never lets on what he's up to. At face value, he's just indulging in samba or Western swing or Cajun music as a way to spice up his basic folkie strum and croak, much as his idol Paul Simon did when he hired Ladysmith Black Mambazo or the Dixie Hummingbirds.

The response of the older, prosperous-looking crowd at Harborlights suggested that his style-slumming also works almost as well as Paul Simon's. He started off the set backed only by a second guitarist on "Promises," a slow ballad about lies, sin, and severed fingers. On the next number, the swaggering blues jaunt "Long, Tall Texan," he augmented the guitarist with 15 more musicians, including four horn players, a cellist and fiddler, and four back-up singers. The show veered between theses two extremes for almost two hours as band members drifted on and off and Lovett moved from a 45-minute set of Ensenada numbers to old faves like "She's No Lady" and "If I Had a Boat."

The 3900 paying customers followed along happily with every shift in style from mainstream folk rock to pure gospel, but for me everything was so deadpan, the shifts started feeling arbitrary, slightly affect-less, maybe even tinged with minstrelsy. By the end of the evening I was set adrift with that old ennui. Lyle lovers blame Julia, Julia lovers blame Lyle, but I think it's a shame it didn't work out. Really, these two weirdos deserved each other.

-- Franklin Soults