Songs From the Storyteller

Blurring the lines between genres with a clever amalgamation of country, folk, jazz, gospel, and blues, musician Lyle Lovett is a storyteller at heart. I had the pleasure of speaking with him prior to his visit to the Lobero, where his acoustic group — featuring Leland Sklar (whose Immediate Family band has graced that stage several times of late), Jim Cox, Stuart Duncan, and Jeff White — will play on Monday, March 25. 

A four-time Grammy Award winner and prolific singer-songwriter, Lovett shared a bit about his creative process. Rather than words first or music first, he said, “Writing a song for me is having the idea first … of something that you think might be interesting enough to talk about or worthy of commanding someone’s sitting still for three minutes. If you have a solid idea, the writing part for me, it depends on the idea. I’ve never written just lyrics and then applied music or vice versa. It’s always a lyrical idea or an idea as to a form of music.”

He has a degree in journalism from Texas A&M and was on staff at the student newspaper for a bit, covering the city council in Bryan, Texas, where he said it was interesting to learn how “heated a debate could be about how many curb cuts the new Exxon station was going to get, that sort of thing.” 

Though he knew he wanted to be a musician, “Going to school was important to me, and it was really important to my folks. My parents both worked and put themselves through high school, it took them a long time to finish school. I got to go to both of their graduations.”

While in college Lovett was a part of a coffeehouse where they would bring in professional musicians a few times a year. “I was involved in booking and that was a great part of my education on how the business worked.” He also did a bit of entertainment journalism then. “I got to interview people that I really admired who came to the original music clubs around Houston. That was great.”

He was not just performing but writing songs by then. “It took me a couple years to have enough songs where I could do a full set,” said Lovett. He met Nanci Griffith and Eric Taylor through the coffeehouse, and they invited him to come to “the premier original music club in Houston, a place called Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant started by hippies in the 60s. And it still goes on today.” Lovett described it as “really the next generation music scene. … It was really about how good your song is, is your song good?” He continues, “Commercial success was not the point. The idea was to do it because you have to do it. Because you have something to say. … it was a place that fostered that kind of creativity and supported people trying to provide it.”

By 1984, he had met many of the people who became the core of his Large Band (the acoustic group he’s bringing to Santa Barbara is a subset of that) and established a solid fan following with his first album in 1986. He’s been on the road as a touring musician ever since. 

After that first self-named album, those that followed — Pontiac (1987); Grammy winning Lyle Lovett and His Large Band (1989); Joshua Judges Ruth (1992); I Love Everybody (1994); and Grammy winning The Road to Ensenada (1996) — were uniquely hard to categorize. Later albums included Step Inside This House (1998), covering artists like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt who inspired him; Live in Texas (1999), Dr. T & The Women (a 2000 collaboration with director Robert Altman who also gave Lovett several acting roles, a side gig that continues to this day); Anthology Volume One: Cowboy Man (2001); My Baby Don’t Tolerate (2003); Smile – Songs From the Movies (2003); It’s Not Big It’s Large (2007); Natural Forces (2009); and Release Me (2012). In 2022 Lovett — now the father of 6-year-old twins, a boy and a girl — released 12th of July, his first studio album in 10 years. 

“Most people don’t make records for money, most people, the real lucky ones, get away with doing this and make their living from playing live. Not publishing, not unless you have some sort of mega hit, you know, you make a living going live. And that’s what I do. And I always have,” said Lovett. “And so I’m just grateful to the people that keep showing up.” 

While the country music scene has broadened and changed over the years, Lovett said his audiences have not. “I’ve just been lucky to be able to play, you know, whatever kind of music I think of. I really feel lucky that I haven’t been limited to a certain point.”

As for his return to the Lobero next week, “It’s really fun to play a room that size. To be able to, you just feel like you’re talking individually to everyone in the audience. … You’re not trying to reach the back row in the Santa Barbara Bowl. You’re just talking to folks. And I enjoy that.”

Lyle Lovett and his Acoustic Band will be at the Lobero Theatre on Monday, March 25 at 7:30 p.m. See lobero.org/events/lyle-lovett-acoustic-band.