Today on the show, we're welcoming Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter, Lyle Lovett. Lovett follows in the footsteps of Texas troubadours like Guy Clark, Walter Hyatt, and Townes Van Zandt.
In 1986, Lovett helped lay the foundation for the alternative country and Americana movements with his debut, self-titled album. Since then, he has continued to light up country music with a rich blend of country, big band, blues, folk, and jazz. All of those sounds are on display in 12th of June—his first new album in a decade.
On today’s episode Lovett speaks to Bruce Headlam about his new album, a project rooted in home and family, which makes sense considering at 64 years-old, he's a new dad to twins. Lovett also shares stories of his early days playing gigs around Texas A&M.
Hear a playlist of all of our favorite Lyle Lovett songs HERE.
Pushkin. Hey, it's justin Richmond. Today on the show we have Grammy Award winning singer songwriter Lyle love It. Love It follows in the footsteps of Texas troubadours like Gary Clark, Walter Hyatt, and my personal favorite textan of all time, towns Van Zandt. In nineteen eighty six, he laid the foundation for alternative country in Americana movements with his debut self titled album. The album shot up to number fourteen on the Billboard Country Charts, and the rest, as they say, is history. Since that time, Love It has continued to light up country music with a rich blend of country, big band, blues, folk, and jazz. All of those sounds are on display in twelfth of June, his first new album in a decade. On today's episode, Lovett speaks to Bruce Headlam about his new album, a project rooted in home and family, which makes sense considering his role as a newly minted dad to twins at sixty four. Love It also shares stories of his early days playing gigs around Texas A and M University. This is broken record, Liner notes for the digital age. I'm just a mission. Here's Bruce Headlam with Lyle Love It. You have a new album. You're first in ten years. It would have been eight years had it not been for the pandemic, but that was the idea. We cut tracks in November twenty nineteen with the idea of finishing in March, maybe into April of twenty twenty. I did a tour from the end of January into the seventh of March. Seventh of March was the last live date I played on that tour. It was the last live date I played until after The Serious Isolation. You've always had a heavy tour schedule. I assume that means you like touring. What was it like to just be forced off the road. It was, you know, anxious, and it was fraught with worry and figuring things out constantly. But the flip side of that was being home. I hadn't been at home that much, you know, since since I started, and I really enjoyed that, you know. I like getting to be in the room with smart and talented people, and I've been fortunate to be blessed in that way my whole life and my career. And I get to work with some of the best and most known musicians in the world, and that's uplifting and inspiring. I missed my association with my friends, but I love being home. Now. Are you the kind of writer who needs to write every day? I wish I were the kind of writer that needed to write every day, or that could write every day. I lack the skills to approach it as a craft. I think my songs come more from feelings than they do from thought, and so that's something I think about, that's something I work towards still. But writing for me is not a thought about kind of thing. It's more of an emotional reaction. So are you the kind that do you have a notebook with you all the time right now? No. When I was a boy, my parents both worked and I come home from school and have three or four hours by myself at home, and I would watch afternoon TV. And one of the shows that I would watch the afternoon was the old Mike Douglas Show. One time I saw Buck Owens on the Mike Douglas Show, and you know, years later I got to meet Buck. He was really sweet to me, really kind and funny, and reminded me of my uncle's. You know, I kind of get tease you and give you a hard time. Mike Douglas asked him that do you, well, how do you write songs? How do you And Buck said no, he said, I figure if it's good enough, I'll remember it. I just always thought of that, and so that's might see us anyway. I blame it on. But it surprises me when you say all your songs come out of feelings, because I think most people would think of you as a pretty cerebral song writer. There's a lot of wordplay, there's a lot of images. You know, if I had a boat, has that image of someone on a pony on a boat, which I think probably everybody who knows and loves that song keeps in their mind. It almost does a kind of Buster Keaton quality. I mean my songwriting process, yeah, it starts always with some sort of feeling and then thinking about how to express that and thinking about you know what am I trying to say here? I mean, it's always a puzzle and it's always a challenge. And I don't know how other writers approach writing any kind of writing, but I always feel as though I'm lost and just trying to find my way through the darkness. Having the complete idea is the hardest part, and then writing words to that idea is still hard for me, but it's easier once you have something to write too. And when you say right two, does that mean like an image or a turn of phrase, an image or just what you want the song to? Ultimately say? What am I trying to communicate? Music's impact on us as people, in my opinion, is an emotional impact. It makes you feel something. You can take in a work of music and not have to hit the pause button on your life. You know, to stand in front of a painting, you have to stand still and look at it. To go to a film, you sit in a dark theater and you watch a film. To read a book, you stay in one place and you read. You can fix supper, you can drive somewhere you know, you can carry on with your life and listen to music. And you can either listen to it intently as though it's a film, as though it's a play, as though it's a book, or you can have it be background music and it can still make you feel something. And the nicest compliment that I feel like I ever get paid it's when they say I remember exactly what I was doing the first time I heard that song for me. When my song reminds somebody of his own life, his or her own life, I feel like that's the most I can ask for. So, what were the feelings you're trying to capture going into this album? To answer your question the way you ask it would make it seem more deliberate than it is. I feel somehow compelled to write about my feelings just for myself, and I evaluate later if what I've made up could be a song in my show or a song I'm worth playing to somebody. And so in these last years, I mean, the thing that's been my life, the thing that's consumed my life gladly, has been wanting to have a family and then having a family. My original songs are about family, or are inspired by family and those kinds of close relationships that evolve over a person's life. These songs range from being in the moment, but also to looking back and talking about the shift in perspective, from being a eighteen year old kid trying to play a gig anywhere he could, to being a twenty eight year old recording act with his first album out, you know, to being sixty four years old and trying to be relevant in my own time, not trying to fit into what's going on currently, what's necessarily popular, but just trying to be accurate and trying to be where I am at this point in my life. You also look ahead in the song June the twelfth, which is your children's birthday. Is that right? It is? Yes, okay, looking ahead wondering how long you're going to be there. I never considered my age really or didn't think about it in the same way until they were born. I started doing the math. I thought, you know, gosh, I hope I can make it until they start school. I hope I make it until they graduate from eighth grade or high school. You know, if I can see him go to college, wouldn't that be wonderful? If I see I'm getting married, if I see them have children, wouldn't that would be miraculous? And so I started, you know, thinking in those terms. I don't know if the best description is there's songs about knowing you're out of love or just incompatibility or fate. You've got some beautiful songs in that vein on this album i'd like you to talk about. Which is the first is the mocking Ones? Thank you? Once again. It's a kind of an age perspective and that when you're younger, you imagine being close always to people you're close to, and it doesn't necessarily work out that way. I mean, you just don't stay close to everyone you'd like to stay close to you. So it's really a song about friendship, and it's a song about lives growing apart, and how you know when you might run into somebody that you knew from who was important to you from before, it affects you, that doesn't affect you. It's mixed, isn't it. In a way, it's a wonderful bringing of that time back immediately, and it also brings up a feeling of loss, and ultimately in that song resolves in hey, it's great to see you. Before we pause for a break, let's hear Lyle Lovett plays new song mocking Ones from the album twelfth of June. My old friend, you know you're good to see. How have missed the way you look at me? You bring a man of many memory of how things were and how they couldn't be because we never did see id eye STEI loved each other. God knows why. Now it's light aids in the western sky, all that chances esteem to pass us by. Nor I've always wished for you good luck. But as I rummaged to the rest and us to save myself, I said it and did us and thought of you and me no more. Oh we never did see add eye stew We love each other. God knows why. Naw, it's light's in the residence sky. Oh my chances steamed the beast less by, I said before, and now the long times come to wait, to get and still remember some the whole my heads above laughing ungs bawling from faces of the mocking ones. So, my old friend, you know you could disease. You bring a man such lovely memories. Oh, I missed the way you look at me. We're back with Bruce Hellam's conversation with Lyle love It. You mentioned growing up coming home, your parents both working. Was their music in your house? Growing up? My parents subscribe to the Old Columbia Record Club and they get a new album every month, and they were really nice about letting me play their records when they were away from home, and I was very particular about them anyway, So I listened to their records a lot, and there was quite a variety of artists that the record club would send them, and they would buy records too. Their record collection had country records. I remember a great sampler record with Carl Smith and Lefty Frizelle. You know, they had Ray Charles Records, they had Ray Price Records, they had Nat King Cole Records, Perry Como Records, had Glenn Miller Records. And growing up in a city like Houston that Cosmo falls in a place radio was well represented pop radio, country radio. I would go from channel the channel and listen to all kinds of music. I wanted to ask you about Nat King Cole because you cover two songs of his two songs he made famous on this album, and in fact, two songs he recorded in the same session. I think I didn't know that. Yeah, in the same session he recorded Straighten Up and Fly Right, which he rode, and Gee Baby and I Good to You. I was just a boy when his television show was on the air, and I used to love watching him. He was such an elegant host and so gracious with his guests. Both of the songs I wouldn't have thought to approach, But in nineteen ninety three, Matt Rawlings, who has played piano and keyboards with me from the very beginning. Matt was doing a solo, his first solo record for the MCA Master Series, which was an instrumental label that MCA Nashville was doing, and Matt asked me if I would sing g Babiana Good to You with him, and it was more about the piano, and there were extended piano breaks, and it was his playing was brilliant as always, you know, it was a really fun session. David Hungate played guitar. A few years later, Gary Marshall asked me to record Straighten Up and Flywright for his film Dear God, and so I got the guys together when we recorded that. Getting a specific request from someone else always felt gave me permission to do a song that I would otherwise maybe have just learned and played the edge of my bed in my bedroom for the fun of it. Approaching a classic where there's absolutely no reason for my version of it to exist except that someone like Gary Marshall or like Matt Rawlings has asked me to do it. That's reason enough to say yes. And it's great fun to sing a great song, to sing a standard, sing a classic beautifully written song like that, it's like being in the greatest garage band in the world. So we recorded those songs then and would occasionally play them. They became part of the set list, and in the last few years, as a way to feature Francine Reid, who I've started with since nineteen eighty four, we made duets out of g Baby, Annaga, do You and Straighten Up and Fly Right, And so we've the last few tours we've done those live. Our versions of the songs developed into something that seemed unique to the large band after you know, an eight or ten year break. I wanted this album to in a way be an overview. I wanted it to represent the different styles that I've worked in over the years and kind of represent the spectrum of things that somebody might expect to hear if they come to see me live. I thought those arrangements would represent the large band. That's why I picked those to be on the record. If those songs hadn't become part of my work over the years, I probably wouldn't have just selected the mattathin air. We're talking about your large band songs, which is, you know, one of the buckets of the kind of wild love it repertoire. Do you put any of your own songs up with those songs like Straighten Up and fly Right and G Baby? In terms of arrangement, yes, you know. We arranged one of my songs, pants is Overrated with the horn section and the vocal group, So I think of that as a large band arrangement on this album. But I didn't have other songs that I felt would represent the band as well to record on this record. And because we'd been playing G Baby, Annaga do You and straight Up and Flywright live the last couple of tours, I wanted to be on the record so people who had heard them live would have recordings of them. I guess I'm looking back over your career. I'm thinking there are songs of yours She's an a Lady, That's right, that have kind of entered the consciousness that sort of American songbook River. Well, that's nice to say. The idea of the large band really came about because of one generous, supportive, consistently involved person, Billy Williams from Phoenix, Arizona. Billy was the music director for Javid Sloane and The Rogues. Jay David Sloane was the lead singer and as a wonderful man and a wonderful singer. He and Billy were about the same age. I met them in nineteen eighty three in Luxembourg my friend Claude Weber, who was a country music fan, and his stage name was Buffalo Wayne. He said he named himself after his two favorite American cowboy heroes, Buffalo Bill and John Wayne. My friend Claude he had something to do with the city fair in Luxembourg called the Schuber four, and he asked me if I wanted to play between sets of the two main bands that were playing this American music tent at the schuberfour. One band was a top forty cover band from Orlando that billed itself as a Las Vegas show band, and they were called Body and Soul. I still know some of those folks as well. And the other band was Jay David Sloan and the Rogues, who were the house band at the Just Most Happening Country music nightclub in Phoenix, a place called Mister Lucky's. For years and years they were a house band. Billy Williams was originally from Michigan and then ended up in Phoenix. But he would produce demos for Buddy Cannon started working with Jay David Sloan, who he knew already, and they would look for talented musicians in the area. And they were the swingingest jazzist country band that I'd ever heard. Matt Rawlings would play a solo in a country song and I think, my goodness, I've never heard anything like that before in my life. Meeting up with them at the schuberfour was serendipitous, to say the least. But what made it so important was that we were there together for a month, playing five nights a week. My first day there, first time I played, I could see that my performance was unnecessary and superfluous. I played the set change between the two bands, and I wasn't they'd even set me up on stage. I was on the little dance floor in front of the stage while they changed the stage. People that came to this event because of Jay David Sloan and the Rogues being an American country band, you know, would come in their best cowboy stuff or best fact similear cowboy Steff, kind of messed up hats and cowboy clothes and some wearing wooly shafts with saddle Oxfords instead of boots, that sort of thing. The event was sponsored by Cargo Airline, and my friend Claude designed a poster of a cowgirl with Cisco Kid kind of gun belts criss crossed across her bare breasts. Didn't go over great with Cargo Lucks. Claude was dismissed and as a result, I was also, you know, on the bubble. Claude spoke for me and they kept me on the gig. My pay at that point had been a one way ticket to Luxembourg. I went to Jay David Sloan and to Billy Williams and I said, yeah, I'm a little worried about this, you know, I really I'm playing this gig for airfare and I'm a little worried that i might not get my return ticket and that would be important to me. And they said, we'll learn some of your songs, and why don't you sit in with us during our sets every night, and you know that way you will have worked and they'll have to pay you. So that's what we did. Jay and Billy negotiated my ticket home and at the end of that month they said, if you ever want to do any recording, come out here to Phoenix and we'll give you the first day in the studio for free. And so in early June of nineteen eighty four, I called Billy and I said, Hey, it's your offer still good? Can I come out? And he said, sure, coming out. He booked us time at a really nice little studio in Scott's Dalely, Arizona, in the backyard of Ed and Marie Ravenscroft. They called their place Chatan Recordings, and an engineer named Steve Moore recorded us to twenty four track analog two inch tape, and we recorded four songs that first day, complete with harmony vocals and Billy overdubbing solos with his guitars less Paul plugs straight into the board. And those four songs were the first four songs that I took with me on my first trip to Nashville. A couple of weeks later, Well what are those songs? They were if I were the man you wanted, Cowboy Man, closing Time and give Back My Heart, Well, those are some pretty good songs. Well, thank you, thank you. And recording with that band was just a revelation to me. I loved their playing, and I loved their take on well just their feel, and I was just grateful that they would let me play with him. We'll be right back with more from Bruce Headlam and Lou Love It after quick Break, but before we go enjoyed Love It's live performance of one of his greatest hits. If I had a boat, if I had able, I'd got out on the ocean, and if I had a bony, I'd ride him on my book, and we good all together and go out hut on the ocean, I said me, upon my bony on my book. If I will Roy Rogers, I shall enough this angle. I couldn't bring myself to marry in the old day. Let just be me intured. We go right and do them movies. Then we buy a boat and on to see leeds to see it. And if I had a boat, I go out on the ocean, and if I had a pony, I'd ride him on my boat, and we good all together, go out put on the ocean. I setting me up on my pony on my boot. But now the mysterymaged man was smart. He got himself Badanto. Cassanto did the dirty work for Breath. Badanto. He was smarted, and one had beamis ibby because my eyes. I bought a book. I'm pulling out to see. And if I had a book, I go out on the ocean. And if I had a pony, I'd rightly won my pool and we good all agether, go out hut on the ocean. I send me up on my pony on my book. And if I were like a lightning, I wouldn't need those stingers. Would I come in go whenever I would please? And I scare remand the shame dree and I'm scaring by the light boot. But when I scared my pony on my boot out on see. But if I had a book, I'd go out on the ocean. And if I had a pony, I ride on my boat and we good all the day, go out put on the ocean. I setting me up on my pony on my boat. I setting me upon my oy on my boot. We're back to the us of Bruce's conversation with Lyle love It, starting with how love It got his start in the music business. My dad's boss in nineteen eighty four was a man named mister Bress. Joe Bress and his son liked the idea of being in the music business. So he went to school at Middle Tennessee State University in Murphysboro, Tennessee to really get into the business. Dad knew that and talked to him, mister Bress, and we called his son Bow and both said, hey, I'll make some calls for you. He said, are you affiliated with you performing rights organizations? And I said, well, I've joined ASCAP six years ago or so when i started copywriting my songs. I joined as I'm a member of ASKAT. He said, well, he said, let me call ASCAP for you, set you up a meeting with a membership rep. And I said, do you think they do it? He said, well, that's what they do. It's their job to talk to their songwriters. That was my first meeting with a man named Merlin Littlefield. He was just enthusiasm, soonified and started making calls from me and set up meetings for me all over town that week. And Jim Rooney, if you know about Jim, is just an amazing, incredible human being on the planet. I think he's eighty two now lives up in Vermont, but he was part of the whole Cambridge folks scene and part of the new York folks scene in those days. Used to play music with Bill Keith. He's, you know, written books and I mean he's you know, deep and just you know, makes the world a better place. He would let me sleep on his couch when I'd come to Nashville, you know, in those days, I'd go to Nashville every four to five to six weeks and make the rounds again. He'd say, yeah, if you need a place to say, come over here, and so I took him up on that occasionally. He was emotionally supportive and saved me some money. Were you writing songs? Always try to be working on something. Was still playing the same eight places once every couple of months. That's sort of my usual rotation. Not making enough money to make a legitimate living as an adult, and so I was living back at home, you know, in my room with my parents' house. Jim Rooney helped me and ultimately took me over. He said, you know, he said, have you met any of the folks over at Criterion Music? I said, no, I haven't, and he took me to Criterion's Nashville office on seventeenth Avenue. That the guy that was running his name was Ted Criterion shared an office with Rodney Crow and Rosanne Cash, and I met Rodney and Rosanne at that same same meeting, and I was thrilled, you know, to meet them. Ted listened to my tape and he said, well, sent, He said, our headquarters out in Los Angeles. I'll send it out there to them. And I thanked him and that was it and didn't hear anything from him. That was in February of nineteen eighty five. In July nineteen eighty five, I got a phone call and the person said, it's a bow Golson from Criterion Music. Ted and Nashville just sent me your tape and I just listened to it. Would you like a publishing deal like that? Now? Every publisher I had talked to up to that point was encouraging to me, but no one had said, would you like a publishing deal? Would you like to write for us? People said things like, gosh, you know, I like this personally, but I just don't know what we'd do with it. Nobody expressed any kind of commitment until bow Golson and Bo said that in the you before I even said hello back, and he and he added, if you signed with us, I think we have a record deal for you, And I said, really, I said with who? He said, signed with us, and I'll tell you. So he invited me to come out to Los Angeles to see their offices out there and to meet him. I went, and he couldn't have been nicer. And they had an incredible catalog. I mean, they owned all of Charlie Parker's stuff. Lee Hazelwood was one of their writers. Rodney Kroll had been one of their writers, so Tom Kimmel was one of their writers. I just couldn't believe the titles that they had at that point. Did you still think you were going to be a performer or did you want to write for other people? I enjoyed performing and I had no intention of stopping performing. But I didn't have any expectation of performing beyond the gigs that I was already doing, you know, playing to places that held seventy five or a hundred people. Now, before you did that, you were at Texas A and M. That's true, and you met a lot of your songwriting heroes writing for the paper there. I did, were you really interviewing them? Were you just hitting them up for ideas? I started playing out when I was eighteen, So by the time I got into the School of Journalism, my main focus was performing. I didn't think performing was a realistic expectation for my life. Going to school was important to me because it was important to my parents. I've always been close to my parents and have always in any situation I've ever been in, if my parents would show up, I would always feel better. That's how supportive they always were. They were giving me the chance to do things they didn't get to do. That all seemed clear to me. You know. Halfway through, when I'd gotten my prerecorsites out of the way, I stopped thinking about, well, what do I want to study. I want a degree in, and I started thinking what can I get a degree in? And I'd always done well on papers, so I thought, let me just check into this. And when I got to the College of Journalism, when I went and met professors there and looked around and saw the students working at our daily paper, the Battalion, they were as as interested in writing and in getting that paper out and publishing as I was in booking my next gig. It was an electric atmosphere and I was drawn to it immediately. I was on the city desk. I went to every city council meeting for a year and a half and enjoyed learning about the local politics, enjoyed getting to know the councilman. But entertainment stories we would kind of draw straws for the entertainment stories were fun to do, you know, to be able to talk to two artists. I always put my name in the hat for the kinds of performers that I like to go and hear and often got to write about them. I mean it was certainly personally enriching, and I was I was just honored and excited to be in the room talking to somebody I was a fan of. But my objective in writing those stories was to, you know, to spread the gospel of Nancy Griffith, of Eric Taylor, of Don Sanders, of Stephen Fromhol's Michael Martin Murphy. And although Murphy was really well known and it was a big hit in those days, he did a concert in nineteen seventy five at Texas and m that I attended that was just pivotal in my growing up because he had a number one pop hit on the radio at that time wildfire, I mean pop hit, and there he was filled up the basketball arena and he did a two hour show, the first hour of which was him and his guitar, and he had, you know, seven thousand people at Gee Riley White Coliseum. Just made it seem like he was in a room of a hundred people. It was so quiet and such an intimate performance. And I saw the power of that, and I just thought, wouldn't that be amazing to do something like that? And when had you started playing guitar. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I've started taking guitar lessons in second grade. I'm not a guitar player. I play well enough to accompany my songs, but nobody would hire me to play guitar in their band, you know. But I always loved playing. And my guitar teacher in those days was a man named Chuck Woods who was a session player around Houston. Our lessons were exercises and enjoyment. Really. He taught me to read treble Cleff taught me to count. Sometimes I would practice a little bit during the week, and other times I wouldn't practice at all, but I always looked forward to that that Monday night and later Thursday night lessons with him guitar with something in my life that it was just just always a positive. It was always something that I enjoyed. I don't feel like I'm really a competitive kind of person, so I didn't really have any kind of you know, anybody to play guitar with in school? Did he teach you fingerpicking a little bit? But my fingerpicking came from in my high school years. I took lessons at H and H Music Company on Caroline Street in downtown Houston. My buddy Bruce Lyon, who was a year older than I in high school and had his driver's license a year ahead of me. He would drive us in those days, totar a lesson and Freddie was his teacher. That's how I met Freddie. Freddie was a graduate student at University of Houston. He had this gorgeous read Gibson ES three fifty five stereo guitar and they played through a Fender amp and Freddie loved chet atkins. We learned chet arrangements of songs. He taught me how to alternate my thumb, so I owe that to Fred Foss. And then listening to Texas singer songwriters like Murphy. If you listen to Murphy's first album, in particular with a song like Boyfriend the Country, it's all about alternating that thumb. I asked, because there's something very distinctive about your finger picking on some songs. I must not be the only one who thinks this, because if you go on YouTube, there are about a thousand instructional videos to play If I Had a Boat to me, it's very snipped. A skinny Legs is another one that has that sound. You know, typically with fingerpicking, you know, people get the bass going and then they add a little right off the top. Particularly on If I Had a Boat, it's full of notes. You've got like sixteen notes right at the top of that, and not many people play that way. It's very it's very distinctive. Well, thank you. It's not unique and it's not even that unusual. John Hyatt and I are friends and have worked together for years doing songs, swap kinds of shows, and sometimes John will throw in one of those forward roles just to go, hey, I'm Auntie, I know what you're doing. And one of his songs which he gives he'll give me a grind. But that style alternating bass, that style of fingerpicking was prevalent among songwriters I would hear around Houston, like Eric Taylor, like Nancy Griffith, like Don Sanders, like Vince Bill. Because the performers I was drawn to were playing original music clubs and they're usually laying solo, that kind of fingerpicking, that those kinds of arrangements were a way to to have kind of a complete accompaniment, you know, without having to have a band. You know, there was something complete about that style of playing to my ear as I saw other people do it, That's why I did it. You know, you can express the song with just your guitar, but now you're playing. It's a little bit like your singing in a way. When I listened to you, you're very forward in the pocket the way you sing. Even when you sing blues gut you know, my baby, don't tolerate it's it's this big bluesy album of yours, but you're very at the top of each bar. I think, do you think? I think maybe because I worry about laying it back too much, I do think about that. I do you find that in the in the towards the end of the phrases. Sometimes I'll try I try not to lay it back too much. We're talking to Paul Simon. You know, he talked about when he was singing with Garfunkel, everything was very upfront, and when he became a solo arts and he really had to rethink, he found himself moving further and further back in the pocket. And you know he's got that now. I've had the good fortune of being around Paul Simon a few times. You know, I wouldn't say we're you know, I know, I know him well, but I've gotten to be part of some special events with him, and I know Edie and he's such a lovely, you know, brilliant person. Gosh, you know what a wonderful combination of feeling and thinking the impact of his music feels purely emotional. But then you know it's all thought out. I mean, there's not a word or a note that hasn't been considered. There's so much going on in those songs. Two beautiful albums to listen to. Amen Back in the old days, you know, and I made my first demos and really only my first record that we mix on an analog board. But mixes were as much of a performance as tracking was. Sometimes you'd have three or four people on a board making their moves at the right time. And the question at the end of a mix wasn't well, show we mix it again? It was always well you think we can beat that one? I mean it was a performance. Well, now I'm mixing. Isn't like that? Because everything's automated, You can recall mixes ten back if you want to, and go back to something if you feel like if you've gotten away from what was good. The ability to be detailed is endless, and artists like Paul Simon are they realize everything is important. Every sound has an impact. How detailed are you in the studio? I'm detailed? My mom her last secret Joe's job was in the publications department at X which which is really part of the reason that I was interested in journalism. The publications department would allow my mom to check out cameras. Ended up writing for Local Motorcycle publication. The art director for Xon Publications is a really sweet man named Richard Paint. He agreed. I asked him if he would paint a helmet for me, because all the you know, how you looked was almost as important as how fast you went. He drew up several designs which I rejected, and then finally he came with the design that I liked, and he scrawled a note across his drawing of it, and he said, Burnell, that's my mom's name, Burnell. See if this does anything for that piggy kid. Now I was thirteen, you know I'm thirteen. I have that framed in my office. You know, I've been accused of being I don't think I'm picky. I just want to get things the way they sound good to me. But you know, I've been fortunate to work with generous people in my life that tolerate my preferences and help me, you know, ultimately, just help me get something to where I like it. Tony Brown, Billy Williams and Chuck Anley, who engineered the Large Band record, and George Massenberg, Nathaniel Kuncle, who I met together in nineteen ninety one to record Joshua Joe's Ruth and then recorded everything since that with Nathaniel Kuncle. Before we get off the subject of that great wave of Texas songwriters, I want to talk to you more about how they influenced you. I do want to ask you about one, and that's willis Allan Ramsay who's this sort of singular figure, maybe because he put out one album, But can you tell me a bit about about him and your relationship with him. I've discovered his first record through my friend Bruce lyon gosh it was nineteen seventy four, and bought it and just you know, immediately started trying to learn every song on it. The thing that really drew me into Willis, besides his melody and use of language, was his blues influence. All of those songs, you hear blues in all of them, and I loved his voice, and I just thought, gosh, this is amazing. I mean, this is old blues and new music. Could you just a couple bars of a Willis Alan Ramsey song? True, yeah, I wish it was a millionaire. I play rocking music and grow along. Tell you boy, I buy new roads, bringing women come to me. I give mall the third degree. You can send Jeeves to keep Martha's streeting to do Halleluia, let me zaga due, praise the Lord Pas and Mascal lad and grate your whole Oh you come as soon as him and blen my glab. Willis is a major influence on me. I got to know Willis personally, and he's, you know, one of my closest friends. I just admire his He's now talk about detailed Willis Is. I'm convinced that Willis allan Ramsay, can hear things that I can't hear. He perceives things sonically that other people are imperceptible. I got to interview him in nineteen seventy nine because the Basement booked me to open for him, and I thought, well, I'll ask the Battalion if I can write about it. And I said yes, And so I'm interviewing him in between sets. And I asked him in nineteen seventy nine the obvious question. The first thing I said to him was when you know, meaning the second album? And I asked him a one word question. When he gave me a one word answer, he said soon. And that was in nineteen seventy nine. I asked friend of mine who teaches journalism in Austin, now, what is your most Texas song? And he said, this old porch Ah very nice and which is a which was a you know, a collaboration, which is an unintended co write with my friend Robert O'Keane. And he said Robert enjoys saying son of a bitch a little more than you do in that song, and I and I put it in, Yeah, Robert. It was the spring of nineteen eighty and Robert and I had stretched our undergraduate career as long as we could at tex AM. Robert was class of seventy eight. I was class of seventy nine. We graduated in August of nineteen eighty on the same day. We were two of just a few students from the college with Liberal Arts who graduated that day. His name started with a K, mine with an L. We sat right next to each other. It was it was perfect, but we were both thinking, well, what are we going to do? You know, neither one of us had been interviewing for jobs. We wanted to play music. And Robert played for me that spring a new song and it was the first three verses of what he called the front Ports song, and it was, you know, a different tempo than I play it, and it had some spoken word connections between the verses, which suited Robert's personality great. And I said, well, I want to learn that right now. Teach it to me. So he did, and I went back to my apartment and kept played it and played it, played it, and I started thinking to myself, Robert painted these beautiful pictures of places that we would go to, of places we loved, in places we would miss, but he left himself out of the song. And Robert had a wonderful relationship with his landlord, man named Jack Boyett, who was in his seventies. He seemed ancient, but he was just in his seventies. And that area of town had been the Boyett family farm years before and been sold off subvided a dilapidated old farmhouse with a front porch that was always in need of propping up, and Robert and his roommate Brian Duckworth were always working on it and we'd all help, and it was just the place where we all hung out. I learned Robert's song, played it over and over, and I started thinking about the tenderness Robert showed to mister Boyett, who was regarded by his other tenants as being a slum lord insensitive. And one thing that mister Boyett was sort of famous for was he would just walk into those rent houses as though they were his, as though somebody else wasn't living there. And most of his tenants. I mean some people moved out. Most of his tenants were upset by that. And Robert when mister Boyett would just walk in the front door and walk into the kitchen and look into the refrigerator and say, hey, mister Boyett, come on in. And I just always admired Robert's relationship with him. I admired how Robert looked out for mister Boyett, how he would go down to his mister Boyett's farm place in Millican, Texas and help him with his cows and help him patch the fence and just whatever he needed to do, or go to lunch with mister Boyett. And so I started thinking about that, and I wrote the last three verses of that song and then went to Robert and said, look, I'm not trying to meddle, but can play this for you. And he really meant a lot to me. He said, oh, I love that. Let's keep it. We didn't really write the song together. We wrote it separately in two parts, and I played it the way I play it, and I left out Robert's spoken word parts because I thought those who should be unique to him. It's interesting that he had spoken word parts that you say, sort of connected some of the images. Yes, you know a lot of your writing I think of back then as being very impressionistic. Don't spell everything out, leave room for people to connect the dots themselves, don't tell them how to connect the dots. That kind of writing appeals to me. Is it something where you have the idea and then you strip away the connections or does it come out of the language. I think it's more fun to drop breadcrumbs than it is to pave the path. So a song like Pontiac, for example, Yes, did that start with a character? Or did that it did start with character? Was that something you observed Before everybody became a songwriter. People sometimes would suggest topics to write about, and my girlfriend at the time said, you know what, you should write a song about it? You know, My first thought was, yes, anything except for what you're about to say. And she said. She told me where she lived, and there was a there was an art gallery next door, and she said, there's a you know, there's a man that parks here every afternoon. He says you should go talk to him, and so I paid attention, and sure enough, he had one of those old kind of faded GM blue that that they had in those in those days. This was in the mid eighties and I can't I can't remember if it was a Vonneville, but what it was, it was a sedan. He would open the door and Jack's leg at the side, and he would smoke a cigarette and there would be a can of coke on the dashboard and he would It was just kind of on a hill that went down to Shoal Creek in Austin, and I thought, I don't want to talk to him. It's like it seemed like such a ritual to him that I wouldn't want to disturb it. I just imagined what his story might be. But the idea was you just don't know everything that's behind that face that you're seeing. It's an experience that's common to all of us. That's why in the music video, it is the very first music video I ever did. I wanted to just have portraits of people in a way to say this story could belong to any of these people, or conversely, to say the story that you're hearing about, each of these people have their own story as well. And I'm in the very last shot of that, and the record company just you know, had very little reaction to the video except you're not in it. And I said, well, yeah, I'm there there, I am right there. It's just at the very end. I said, well, yeah, it's a song like a simple song. It's the same way. There's no chorus to it. It goes right through. Was that something Guy Clark or another songwriter had done that you admired. It was just how it came out, and it was, you know, simple song was earlier. You know, I made up simple song. I think when I was eighteen. I was a freshman and we were studying in English class. We were studying the five paragraph paper. So I was I thought, okay, I'm going to try to make up a five verse song, you know, with the introductory verse, three verses in the body, and then a conclusion verse. That was a simple song. But but I don't I didn't feel as though songs needed, you know, necessarily needed a chorus. Funny thinking about that album, maybe one of the most conventional songs is La County, which is actually the most violent song, but it has the most um immediately grasped kind of feel and structure. It's a story song and you've got the chorus, but it's got the most surprising ending and musically. But musically it's really unconventional in that, you know, there are only two chords in the song. Playing that for the first time to Tony Brown, he raised his eyebrows. He said, really, really, it's just two chords. I said, let's just try it. Let's try it. So it was very order. All right, I've taken up to the norms fount of your time, but it's been hugely enjoyed. I'm sorry I talked so much. We're not using tape anymore, so it's not like we're seeing the real Thanks allow love It for coming on Broken Record to talk about his life, career and a new level. You can hear all of our favorite Lyle Lovett songs on my playlist at Broken record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where we can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced help from the Arose Jason Gambrel, Bent Holiday, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez the engineer, and help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Neil be Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four na. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. For the music, spyt Candy Beats, I'm justin Richmond,