“I’ve always made it a policy to never question good fortune.”
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Food items mentioned by Lyle Lovett:
- Summer strawberries from the Pacific Northwest
- Eggs, bacon, and pancakes from IHOP
- Two-thirds-of-a-pound burgers, served with chips and a jar of pickled jalapeños
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Lyle Lovett has been a mainstay of the American music scene since he was playing the bars and burger joints around College Station, Texas, in the 1980s. He learned to sing in his Lutheran school choir and started playing guitar while his age was still in the single digits. While Lovett always loved music, he didn’t start trying to make a go of it until he was attending college at Texas A&M and began playing around town. Eventually, the legendary Texas troubadour Guy Clark heard a demo tape of Lovett’s songs and helped him get a deal with MCA Records.
While Lovett’s self-titled debut makes a great country album, it’s his later work that’s earned him legions of devoted fans and industry accolades. Albums like 1987’s Pontiac and 1989’s Lyle Lovett and His Large Band start on a foundation of country and build a world out of blues, Western swing, and rock and roll, all expanded by Lovett’s uniquely gimlet-eyed lyrics. Lovett never quite fit into the Nashville mold, but found a home with alt-country listeners and open-minded rock fans.
He’s collected some of the music industry’s grandest accolades, including four Grammy Awards and the Americana Music Association’s inaugural Trailblazer Award, and he’s a member of the Texas Heritage Songwriters’ Association Hall of Fame. He also has an impressive list of film credits, after catching the eye of director Robert Altman.
Hollywood isn’t Lovett’s natural stomping ground, though. He was born and raised in a patch of Texas that is named for his great-great-grandfather who settled the region in the 1840s. He grew up riding horseback, is a proud inductee into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame, and is a lifelong member of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, where he still performs with the choir.
Perhaps due to his time on the range, he’s learned to be a patient man, a trait that spills over into his songwriting. He’s willing to wait for an album to fully coalesce before releasing it into the world. Guy Clark, who is a hero of Lovett’s, once told him that he won’t release an album until he gets ten songs he likes. “That always stuck with me,” Lovett explained. “And that’s sort of how I feel.” So, after a ten-year hiatus, Lovett eventually came up with enough songs he liked to return with an album. His twelfth studio album, 12th of June, was released, naturally, on the 13th of May 2022. Lovett kept himself busy during his time away, not only waiting for the muse to appear, but also getting married and becoming the father of twins, whose birth date is memorialized in the album title.
Lovett is a deeply curious person, who, during the course of our conversation, kept attempting to interview the interviewer. (“Where did you grow up, Melissa?,” “How many are in your family?,” and “How tall are you?” were all asked of me.) Topics discussed include bulls, burgers, and why you should always talk in the elevator.
—Melissa Locker
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I. DEAD SOLID PERFECT
LYLE LOVETT: Excuse me, but I’ll be right back. I have to get a coaster.
THE BELIEVER: Yes, please. I believe in protecting the furniture at all costs.
LL: I’m really protecting myself from those unsightly rings on the furniture that never go away.
BLVR: Glad we are starting this interview with some furniture safety tips. Feels right.
LL: I looked over the Jim Jarmusch interview you did, and it reminded me a little bit of the old Interview magazine interviews they would do. They had one personality interview another personality, and they were kind of all over the place—in a good way.
BLVR: Interview magazine is back, and they are doing those interviews again.
LL: Well, that’s great. I interviewed Josh Brolin once for that magazine, and, gosh, somebody interviewed me in 1994. I’d have to look that up. I think it was actually my friend Sam Robards. I knew Josh from kind of running into him in an elevator once in Austin, and he came to some of my shows and he put me up for the job.
BLVR: Do you often meet people in elevators?
LL: Yeah, you never know who you’re going to meet in an elevator. But there’s always that sort of awkward elevator etiquette of: Well, do I speak? Do I not speak? Do I just look at the numbers? Do I look up? Do I look down? All that? But I usually try to break through that and just say hi.
BLVR: Is that a good opening line for you?
LL: It usually starts something, yeah. I met Jack Black and his family once in an elevator. Well, waiting for an elevator. He was pushing a stroller, as I recall—this was years ago. Talking to him was delightful. It was sort of like doing a scene with him, in a way, because he was Jack Black, you know? And as we were talking, the door of the elevator I was waiting for opened, and we talked long enough that the door closed and the elevator went away, and he said, Oh, man, sorry. I didn’t mean to make you miss your ’vator. Just like that.
BLVR: Gotta love a ’vator reference! So what did you interview Josh Brolin about?
LL: It was a film that he had coming out. I think No Country for Old Men? Was he part of that?
BLVR: Josh Brolin was in No Country for Old Men, so you may have interviewed him about that film. Did you ever want to be a journalist?
LL: Well, I studied journalism in school. I have a degree in journalism from Texas A&M. But there was a point at which I stopped asking myself the question: What do I want to do? And I finally fell to asking myself: What can I do? My first couple of years, I took general studies courses, and I’d fallen in with a student organization through the Student Center that sponsored a coffeehouse. It was mainly a performance space for students, but we had enough of a budget to bring in professionals two or three times a year. I was a freshman when I got involved in this organization, the Basement Coffeehouse. It was built out of what had been the Student Center bicycle shop. They allowed us to build a stage and a balcony and some seats, and it held about a hundred people. We hosted student performances every Friday and Saturday night from eight to midnight, and each act did thirty-minute sets.
In the very first meeting I went to, they said, You’ll be in programming, and I said, Well, what’s that? And they handed me a sheet of paper with a list of names and phone numbers, and they said, You call people and ask them if they want to play. And so that’s what I started doing. As a result, I got to know all the students on campus who were interested in performing. It was what I was trying to do at home in my bedroom. I felt as though immediately I was a part of this community of performers on campus. Texas A&M was not known for its liberal arts in those days, and the only music—formal music education—that existed on campus was the marching band, the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band, a three-hundred-piece military marching band, and a music appreciation course where you learned to pick out, you know, instruments in classical compositions, recordings, and such. So, being a part of the music community there on campus was appealing. It was also a small, specialized group of people who were not like most of the other students on campus, and I enjoyed that distinction. And I really enjoyed getting to know all the people around town, around campus, who wanted to play and sing. It inspired me to practice. It inspired me to try to write songs. I started playing out the next year—I was just obsessed with wanting to play and sing—and was able to book myself two or three or four nights a week somewhere in town for fifty dollars a night. In one case, I had a two-year gig at a hamburger joint on Sunday evenings that paid me in hamburgers instead of money.
BLVR: Do you still order hamburgers? Or are you completely, permanently sick of them?
LL: No, no, I love them. It was really great, because it was a wonderful hamburger place called Dead Solid Perfect, named after the golf book. The owner of the place had a very basic menu. Didn’t serve french fries, didn’t serve any ice cream or ice cream drinks. It was just bottled beverages, beer, and soda water. And they had a big jar of pickled jalapeños on the counter, and you got either a hamburger or a cheeseburger, served with potato chips. Two-thirds of a pound of meat in each burger. For a two-hour gig, from six to eight, with a break in the middle, on Sunday evenings, he paid me eight burgers a week. I could never eat that many, so I had a tab of burgers built up. I could take anybody to lunch, anytime I wanted, for those two years. It was a great gig, and of course, I didn’t ever imagine it would work into something that I could do for a living.
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