A recent gossip item about the marriage of Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts referred to the singer as a country star, a designation that says more about tabloid hyperbole than about the commercial history of the singer's critically acclaimed albums. Through much of the 1980s, Lovett was sold as a country artist because in an increasingly compartmentalized record market, a songwriter from Texas was seen as having few options beyond Nashville. Yet if Lovett had emerged a decade or so earlier, he would have been more accurately seen as a distinctly original singer/songwriter along the lines of Randy Newman.
before he even had a record deal. Of equal significance, however, is Lovett's decision to trade the occasionally overripe accompaniment of his big band for the sparser style that worked so well on "Friend of the Devil," his contribution to the 1991 Grateful Dead tribute album,
Deadicated. With arrangements framed around Lovett's acoustic guitar and sweetened by strings, this supple strategy puts proper emphasis on songs cut from a very rare cloth.
Lovett shares Newman's talent for writing songs from the perspective of oddballs. Where Newman first raised eyebrows with "Davy the Fat Boy," Lovett similarly chronicles the calorically challenged with two songs, "Fat Babies" and "The Fat Girl." In the former, the crabby singer identifies with the tubby tyke, singing, "Fat babies have no pride, and that's OK, who needs pride?" Lovett's daring reaches a peak on the collection's highlight, "Creeps Like Me," in which the singer not only keeps an uncle stashed in a closet but wears a ring fashioned from his grandmother's gold tooth.
Love haunts the singers of these songs, with the musician in "Sonja" stuck performing a tune he'd written in hopes of picking up a waitress and the guy in "Just the Morning" afraid that the light of dawn will frighten last night's conquest. Lovett's songs sketch small moments with deft details, evoking the fear and excitement of moving ("Good-Bye to Carolina") or the false bravado of young lust ("Record Lady"). An album credit tracing a guitar riff on "Tve Got the Blues" through secondhand sources back to Lightnin' Hopkins suggests how close these songs strike to the roots of Lovett's singular style. Similarly, the artful intimacy of I Love Everybody exploits the qualities that confounded Nashville while establishing Lovett as one of our most distinctive songwriters. (RS 692)
JOHN MILWARD
