Bass Performance Hall
Lyle Lovett
For nearly four decades, Texas native Lyle Lovett has been at the forefront of the singer/songwriting realm penning such iconic songs as “If I Had A Boat,” “Cowboy Man, and “Give Back My Heart,” to name a few. No stranger to the spotlight, Lovett seems like a reluctant ambassador of an ilk of songwriters that put the love of the craft above really anything else. This means taking cues from legends like Townes Van Zandt and John Prine.
Lovett's music itself, however introspective, encompasses several genres that include elements of country, swing, jazz, folk, gospel and blues in a convention-defying manner that breaks down barriers.
In 24 hours, Lovett will be taking the stage with his Large Band at Bass Performance Hall, a concert that has become an unofficial annual Cowtown tradition since opening in 1998.
For nearly a week I’d been emailing back and forth with Lovett’s PR team trying to pin him down to a 20-minute time slot per a phone interview, which I found out quickly is quite the process. Throughout my innate perseverance to try and make this interview happen, it dawned on me why Lovett would be so hard to pin down.
After all, this Lone Star State musician has completed 14 albums, released 25 singles, and won 4 Grammys to boot. In 2011, he was named the Texas State Artist Musician. In April, Lovett was named the Artist in Residence at the University of North Texas.
In other words, Lovett is a big deal.
It was with this notion in mind that I’d built up a persona for him before ever asking him a single question. However, all of my apprehension went away once I heard Lovett’s voice say hello on the other end of the phone. It was like I had reconnected with a long-lost mentor, who picked up the lesson exactly where we left off the last time we talked.
What gave this phone interview a bit more authenticity is the fact that I could hear Lovett’s family in the background mingling while someone played the chords to “Chopsticks” on an old piano.
I was pleasantly surprised to find Lovett was an open book who spoke about his Texas roots, his journey in collegiate studies, and what it takes to be an authentic songwriter.
Lyle Lovett
FWM: Your family has some longtime Texas roots. Is it true you can trace your family back to the 1840s?
LL: That's true. And my great, great grandfather's name was Adam Klein, and he was the original Klien to come down here to the Klein community, and it was an established community already, but the story is that he would go into Houston and pick up everybody's mail once a week or so, and so they started calling the area Klien after him because everybody rode to his place to get their mail. But yeah, we've been here for a long time and my life's work really has just been trying to hold onto my grandpa's farm in the face of urban suburban development all around us. All the old farmers really as I was growing up, rather than passing their farms on to their children who were less and less interested in agriculture, sold their farms and now the Klein area is full on suburbia, so it's changed a bunch, but we still have a rural property here.
FWM: I was going to ask you if your family’s farm was the last one in the area. Are you the last farm holdovers?
LL: There are a couple of others, but yeah, one of the few at this point, and we keep it going. My mom's younger brother, Calvin Klein is his name. He always claimed to be the original Calvin Klein. He's older than the clothes designer, but he's always been in agriculture and he still runs his cow/calf operation at our place, and so we make hay every year. It's still a productive place and it's kind of a family compound as well. My grandpa gave each one of his seven children an acre or two to build homes on, so I grew up just through the pasture from my grandparents and aunts and uncles. And it always felt like everybody's place. And now my mom and my uncle are the only two left in their family, but Uncle Calvin is still going strong at 90.
FWM: So, I take it you grew up doing all of this hard work as well, correct?
LL: I did enough of it to know that practicing my guitar might help, but yeah, my uncle had a dairy and my junior high years – high school years, and so there was always a job to do if you wanted it. And he grew vegetables as well, so you could do that kind of work or haul hay. I did enough of that to make me appreciate the hard work of farming. But it was a great atmosphere because there were people here all the time. And my grandmother's house, my grandmother lived until 1979, until I was 21; she passed away. Her house was the center of activity and my uncles and cousins, they'd work out in the field or work in the dairy barn and we'd all meet up for the noon meal at grandma's house, the noon meal, which was always referred to as dinner.
FWM: I didn’t realize this until doing some research on your background, but you have a degree in Journalism as well as German from Texas A&M. Did having a degree in journalism help you with your songwriting at all? The paper you worked for was The Battalion, right?
LL: Yeah, in those days, The Battalion was a print daily paper, and if you worked as a journalism student, you didn't have to work on The Battalion, anybody was welcome. There was plenty to do and The Battalion was used as kind of a lab for classes. But I was on staff at The Battalion for my last couple of years at school and I really enjoyed it. I mean, I worked with and I saw students there who were as consumed with their journalism, their writing and producing that paper as I was consumed with playing. I had already started playing two or three or four nights a week while I was in school there at College Station from 1976 on. But I saw their passion for writing and I really enjoyed it. I also enjoyed learning English. I mean, it was really the first time that I paid that much attention to language usage and really learned about it and just got familiar with the AP style book, which we used and all the books about writing.
I was on the city desk. I went to every Bryan Texas City Council meeting for two years, which was fascinating to me. I enjoyed learning about city government. I enjoyed learning, getting to know the councilman and the mayor, and it was all very interesting educational and learning how local politics worked. It was a great insight into what things were like right there in Bryan and College Station. But my city, I'd write up the meetings and I'd sit down with Jamie Aiken, who was a year ahead of me, and he would go through my stories and he would say, ‘what if you said this like this?’ And I would say, ‘that would be better.’ I learned as much from him as I did my professors, he was really bright and patient and taught me how to simplify my language, taught me how to write a lead and to write a good sentence.
And I enjoyed all of that. That sort of thinking about language has definitely impacted my songwriting, it's that same impulse that always made me want to make up songs. I think it's the same impulse that interested me in journalism as well. I wasn't the most directed student. I mean, it really was pretty early on in my college class of 75 in high school, and in 1976, I started playing out. I was 18 years old and I was just obsessed with booking my next gig, learning my next song, playing as much as I could. That really was my focus.
FWM: Do you think Texas can hang with Nashville as far as the music scene is concerned?
LL: Well, Nashville is definitely the epicenter of the country music business. But there are great musicians and songwriters who come from Texas to be sure, but from all over who go to Nashville for business. I mean, lots of people moved to Nashville for business. I’d rather be home, being where I felt inspired to write and in a place that I wanted to write about, which was my motivation to stay home. In those days, I went to Nashville quite often for business, but I never felt compelled to have to live there. And so I've always been able to live at home and be able to do my work from here and engage the business when it's necessary.
But so much of the music business has nothing to do with being creative. And I think it's really important to be in a place where your creativity can thrive. I mean, the business is something that you have to engage in, take care of and dutifully keep up with. But what drives everything is making something up, thinking of words, making something up that rhymes. And with any luck, it is insightful enough that it makes sense and is insightful enough that people can relate to it.
FWM: What are your thoughts about the local, Texas, music scene? Have you heard Leon Bridges’ new album? If so, what did you think?
LL: I have not heard Leon's new album yet, but I think Leon is terrific, and I've been around him a few times and what a gentleman he is and yeah, just what a talent. But yeah, I mean there are so many great young performers these days. I find them all inspiring.
FWM: What would you tell a musician moving from playing cover songs to playing original work? How did you do it and was it scary?
LL: I think in writing it's just important to write about things that are important to you. Write about things that you're interested in, write about things that move you to write. I think the thing that's most important, is you have to write for yourself. And if you get that right, if you can write to an idea that you're interested in yourself, write to yourself rather than think, 'oh gosh, what would people like to hear? What's going on right now in the business? What should I write to fit the market?' Don't even think about the market. Think about what you like. Write songs you like and write about subjects that interest you. Write about emotions that you, yourself feel. And if you get that right, whatever it is you're feeling in your song, other people will feel that too. So I think that it's important. Then you're writing a song. If you're writing something to set a market, you're writing a jingle.
