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

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. 

II. REVERSE INTERVIEWING

BLVR: What did you think you were going to do at that age?

LL: I was not the best student, not the most serious student. I tried to do well in the classes I took, but I just didn’t know what I wanted to major in. I was a history major for a while, and then I thought, Well, I don’t know that I’d make a good professor. So I started thinking, What can I do? I’d always gotten good grades on my papers and writing assignments, and I could type, so I went to the journalism department and took their typing test, which was thirty-five words a minute to pass. I did that and I walked into the newsroom of the school’s daily paper and I saw people. I saw a community there that reminded me of our Basement Coffeehouse community. I saw people who were as interested as I was in writing and pursuing stories and getting the daily paper out. I saw people working together. I saw how everyone was invested in what they were doing, and it was inspiring, really. So I signed up. I became a journalism major. I was on the city desk, and my beat was the city council in Bryan, Texas, the city right next to College Station. I covered every city council meeting for a couple of years and also wrote some entertainment stories. I was usually able to write about musicians, singers, and songwriters coming to town that I was interested in.

BLVR: Do you remember any artists you covered?

LL: Oh yeah, I remember everybody I covered. I tried to make a point to do in-person interviews, and the very first interview I did was with a singer-songwriter from Houston named Don Sanders, who had been booked by the Coffeehouse. At that point, I had left the Coffeehouse committee, so there was no conflict of interest. I went down to Houston to interview Don Sanders, and Don was lovely. I was supposed to talk with him for about an hour at the IHOP on Memorial Drive in Houston, and we sat there for about three hours on a Saturday afternoon.

BLVR: That is a lot of time in an IHOP.

LL: It was, but it was good. IHOP was sort of home in my student days. I pulled lots of all-nighters in IHOPs.

BLVR: Did you have a go-to IHOP order?

LL: Yeah, I would order eggs, bacon, and pancakes, just the usual. Where did you grow up?

BLVR: Portland, Oregon.

LL: Portland! The Pacific Northwest is a beautiful part of the country. I’ve always felt as though I’m not at home when I’m there. I feel far away from home—in a good way. I feel like I’m someplace different, which is a wonderful feeling to experience when you travel. So much of the world has shrunk, so many of the places and businesses you see feel the same these days. But when you go to the Pacific Northwest and you’re in that beautiful geography, you really do feel like you’re somewhere else. And if you’re there in the summertime, during the two weeks when the strawberries come in—oh man. I’ve never tasted better strawberries in the world than those.

BLVR: Oh, you should try to find Hood strawberries. They are really special.

LL: I bet. We usually go in the summertime. I’ve been to Bend many times. Bend is such an old cowboy town.

BLVR: You would know cowboy towns more than I would!

LL: Well, in terms of Western culture, the eastern parts of Oregon and Washington are more Western-feeling than the western parts. Bend, and some other towns like Walla Walla and Spokane, are in the eastern parts of those states, but you really feel that Western culture there. I’ve always been interested in Western culture. But anyway, I love Oregon. We always stay at [redacted].

BLVR: Oh, they used to have a café and bakery where you could get a cup of coffee for one dollar and a loaf of bread for about one dollar, and I would spend almost every single afternoon drinking black coffee and eating bread. And you don’t know this, because we’re on Zoom, but I’m pretty short, and I think it’s because I ate just coffee and bread for about four years.

LL: How tall are you?

BLVR: Five foot two.

LL: That’s plenty tall.

BLVR: Thank you.

I should not have been surprised that you majored in journalism, because when I was doing research for this interview, almost every interviewer mentioned the fact that you would start interviewing them; I feel like some of that journalism training has lingered.

LL: [Laughs] Well, doing an interview is blatantly self-­promotional, and if you just do it that way, it’s no fun. It’s always nice to know who you’re talking to. I appreciate any interview that is more of a conversation. I like to sort of feel that out, because it affects what I say and it affects where an interview might go, even though it’s a pretense. In a way, an interview really can be a human experience. I’ve always felt that way. When I talk to people, interview people, it’s nice to try to figure out what it is someone is wanting to put forward. What is their motivation behind it, you know? Why in the world would anybody choose to be onstage and, you know, have a bright light shine upon them?

BLVR: I agree, but I prefer being in the background. I always joke that I became a music journalist because I love music, but I cannot play and would hate being onstage. So being able to talk to people who do is fascinating.

LL: Yeah, well, I love music too. I started playing music because I was a fan. And, really, as enjoyable as those Bryan, Texas, city council meetings were… [Laughs] It really was fascinating, you know, the heated debates over whether the new McDonald’s would get one curb cut or two, that sort of thing.

BLVR: Wait, I’m on the edge of my seat. Did they get one curb cut or two?

LL: Well, ultimately two. It was on a corner and it was only right. But people can be so passionate about what they’re trying to accomplish. It’s fascinating. I think, in general, people are so much the same. So it’s the small differences among us that are what make us interesting to one another. I’ve always enjoyed engaging people and talking to people and finding out who they are. I have had the good fortune in my career to work with people who are really good at that. Like getting to sort of accidentally fall into working in film with Robert Altman, who—when I got to know him personally—seemed to be endlessly interested in people. Robert Altman had that ability to make you feel special and to zero in on you. In person, he was very much the way his films are, in that his films are always about stripping away the pretense in behavior and getting at someone’s real motivation. I appreciated him for that, and I’ve always been interested in people in that way too. You know, we all present ourselves in ways, so what’s real about that and what’s the presentation, and where’s the authenticity in any situation? The older I get, the easier I think it is to just be myself. I think you see over time that presentation really doesn’t make any difference ultimately, and you may as well just be who you are.

III. “MAY I SPEAK TO LYLE?”

BLVR: A lot of musicians want to be actors, and it doesn’t seem like you had any plans to become an actor, but you still found a career. How did you make that segue to being on camera?

LL: No, I didn’t have any plans—and to refer to it as a career is an overstatement.

BLVR: You have a long IMDb entry, so I think it counts.

LL: Well, I have gotten to do some acting that I’m really proud of and that I’ve enjoyed. But it really was Altman himself. Altman came to a show we did in 1990 at the Greek Theatre [in Los Angeles]. It was a summer tour with Rickie Lee Jones, a co-bill. So we played first, but we each had, like, seventy-five minutes to play a full set. And Altman and his wife, Kathryn, were there at the invitation of their granddaughter Signi, who brought them along to the show. I didn’t meet Altman that night, but he called me the next week and asked me if I wanted to be in a movie. So it was just like that. It really is thanks to him that I’ve had other opportunities as well.

BLVR: What was that first conversation like? Was he like, Hey, kid, want to be in pictures?

LL: Well, yeah. The phone rang and he said, Hi, it’s Bob Altman, may I speak to Lyle? I said, This is he, but who is this really? And he said, You want to be in a movie? And I said, Well, sure, but what should I do? Should I take some acting lessons? He said, Heavens, no, they’ll just mess you up. I appreciated how much free rein he gave—as much rope as he let out to great actors in that film, like Tim Robbins. He was very helpful to me. He gave me some great direction that I found reassuring. He knew I needed help or would appreciate his help, and he was perceptive enough to realize that. He was a great judge of character. Altman could just see right through you. He could see right through a lead wall. [Laughs] The first day I was on set on The Player, I was brand-new and I was just fascinated with everything that was going on. I was sort of shy about it, kind of trying to be discreet, but all of a sudden Altman saw me and I thought, Oh no, oh no. But he put his arm around me and said, Get in here where you can see. He was just very inclusive and open about his process. I worked for a couple of days in a row, went to dailies, didn’t work for a couple of days, so didn’t go to the dailies. The next time I was on set, he walked over to me and said, Where were you? And I said, Well, I didn’t work. He said, Come to dailies. So I went to dailies every day, whether I was in the scenes or not. That summer of 1991, doing The Player, was a great film school. I got to watch the entire film come together. I got to watch every take of every shot, and Robert Altman was sitting at the back of the screening room with David Brown, and Helen Gurley Brown would be there sometimes as well. And they would watch every take and then we ate pizza—so it was like an end-of-day party every day. Then, in 1994, doing Prêt-à-Porter—Ready to Wear, they call it here—he had the entire cast in Paris for twelve weeks. It was such an ensemble cast that nobody worked more than three or four days a week, so there was lots of downtime, and the hotels were near one another. We all had lunch. It was like being in school, but my classmates were people like Tracey Ullman and Richard Grant and, oh gosh, Danny Aiello and Lauren Bacall and Sam Robards, Bacall’s son. We all ran around together. It was an extraordinary experience. And so all of that came about for me because of Robert Altman.

BLVR: What do you think he saw in you that made him want to cast you in his movie?

LL: I don’t know. I’ve always made it a policy to never question good fortune. When he called, I just said yes. He was actually working on Short Cuts, the film that he did based on Raymond Carver’s short stories before he was working on The Player, but then The Player came up. So it was Short Cuts that he had originally called me about. But in the meantime, The Player presented itself and he included me in that, as well.

BLVR: You mentioned in passing that Helen Gurley Brown was hanging out on set. What was she like in real life?

LL: David Brown, the producer, was her husband. She would come to the set with him. She was lovely, you know, elegant and lovely. My mom was a forty-year career woman with Exxon. Spent the first twenty years of her career as a secretary and the last twenty years of her career there as a training specialist in HR, and then continued for another twenty-five years after she retired, working for Exxon as a consultant with her own business. She turned ninety-five two weeks ago. She was a great mom and she was always such an inspiration to me. She worked hard, she pursued her interest, and she worked in a world of men as I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s. She navigated all that successfully and in a real positive way. So I always appreciated the point of view that Helen Gurley Brown put forward in Cosmopolitan. Growing up in that world of, you know, women’s lib, as they called it in those days, with a working mom, I felt like I had a front-row seat to a lot of that.

IV. “PANTS ARE OVERRATED”

BLVR: How did you celebrate your mom’s ninety-fifth birthday?

LL: For about a week, we had different get-togethers with different parts of the family. We just all tried to be together. We went to one of her favorite restaurants and invited anyone in the family and her friends who could come. We just spent time together. Now, my mom’s kind of never, never made anything about herself.

BLVR: She sounds like a good mom!

LL: She was and is good to me and her grandchildren. My wife, April, and I have seven-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. My mom had given up on me so long ago in terms of providing grandchildren for her, so these last several years have been particularly joyful for all of us.

BLVR: Yes, you had kids later in life, and in almost every interview about your most recent album, you seem to talk more about your twins than the songs on your album. Most musicians would hate that, but you seem to love it.

LL: Yeah, I’ve never been more enthusiastic about anything and I’ve never enjoyed anything more in my life than being their dad. Of all the many things that I’ve gotten to do that I enjoy, there’s just nothing that compares. They have been my main focus since they were born.

BLVR: Do you think you’re going to end up making a children’s album?

LL: I know a lot of people do that, but it really is hard to resist. I appreciate how people are motivated to do children’s music because of having children—or to write a book or to start drawing, which I’ll never do. But, yeah, maybe. Probably some of the songs that have been inspired by them should be children’s songs. I’ve turned them into songs that we play onstage in the large band, songs like “Pants Is Overrated.”

BLVR: I like that song a lot, because pants are overrated. Would you want your kids to go into the music industry? I feel like it’s changed so much since, well, certainly since you started in the industry.

LL: Gosh, yeah, it has, hasn’t it? How long have you been writing about music?

BLVR: Since I was about fifteen.

LL: You’re twenty-five now [Editor’s note: I am not, in fact, twenty-five], so you would have seen it change quite a bit in these last ten years. It really is different, and I kind of feel like I’m outside the music business at this point. To answer your question, I would support them if they wanted to try to play music. I mean, they are taking piano lessons now. They seem to like music, but I would encourage them to do anything they wanted to do. I don’t require them to share my taste in anything, and I wouldn’t impose anything on them. But to see them kind of naturally be interested in some of the things that I’m interested in is really fun.

BLVR: You’ve been in the industry a long time, and a new generation may really appreciate what you have to tell them.

LL: I don’t know that they would. [Laughs] Do you have a TikTok account?

BLVR: I do. It’s fun because my algorithm has been perfectly trained to serve me cooking videos, dog rescue videos, book recommendations, and almost nothing else.

LL: I don’t have TikTok. I have Instagram and Facebook and the former Twitter, but I usually post to Instagram because it’s easiest for me to navigate. But everything that comes across my Instagram is usually parenting advice and health advice, at this point.

BLVR: Well, if you want to change the videos and posts you’re being served, may I suggest dog chiropractic videos? There are people out there who do chiropractic treatments on animals, and it is fascinating.

LL: That sounds worth watching, I’m sure. I’ve been involved with horses my whole life, and there are horse chiropractors that are very effective.

V. THE COWBOY HALL OF FAME

BLVR: I did notice you are a member of the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame. That’s a pretty big honor.

LL: Thank you very much. You know, it really is an honor. I grew up in the ’60s, watching Western television programs. I can’t remember ever not wanting to be a cowboy. So, years later, to be inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame was a big deal to me. Johnny Trotter, who was inducted around the same time—a great horseman from out in West Texas—said in his induction acceptance speech something that was just absolutely true. You don’t call yourself a cowboy. You’re not a cowboy until somebody else says you’re one. So being called a cowboy, being referred to as a cowboy by the Hall of Fame, by other people—it truly is a real compliment because it speaks not just to skills you might have in working on a farm or a ranch, but also to character and to a way of life, to values.

BLVR: How did you find out you were going to be inducted?

LL: They called me. It was actually a former inductee who put me forward, Dr. “Red” Duke from Houston. And Dr. Duke was very helpful to me in my life on many occasions. But he was a real character. He had gone to Texas A&M University and then went to medical school in the UT system. His daughter worked at a local hamburger joint in College Station. I had just graduated, but she was still an undergrad, and I got to know her and got to know him through her. He was important in the Medical Center in Houston, head of trauma at Hermann hospital for years, and he started the Life Flight program in Houston, which is a helicopter rescue ambulance system. He was important to me, and he was the one who put me up for the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame. 

BLVR: Further proof that you are a cowboy is that you were hurt by a bull at some point.

LL: Yes, in 2002. I got in a wreck with one of the bulls that we owned. Most cattle have the instinct to get away from people, but he was one that was orphaned by his mother and we bottle-raised him, so he was tame, really. We needed to figure out if a pecan tree in his pen needed to come out, and my uncle said, Let’s go look at it. I knew for a fact that a “tame” two-thousand-pound animal is something to be wary of, so I was always really careful with him and didn’t get in the pen. But I was with my uncle, a cattleman all his life, and so I thought, Well, it’ll be OK. Unc wouldn’t be going in here if it weren’t safe. And the bull was over on the other side of the pen, way away from us. But he came wandering up and got after us. I was lucky. I made it to the fence. He got my uncle down first, and then he came after me and I ran for the fence. My friend James Gilmer, who I started playing music with in 1978, and who has since passed away, had come over that day to go to lunch. So he was out there while we were in the pen, and I don’t quite remember how, but I made it to the fence, and I remember feeling James’s arm across my back. He grabbed me by my belt and lifted me with one arm over the fence to safety. It was a pretty bad deal, and could have turned out a lot worse. My uncle was banged up pretty good and had some broken ribs. And they got me to the hospital right away. And they brought me to Dr. Duke in the emergency room. I remember Dr. Duke asking somebody, How much morphine has he had? I had been keeping up with the amount of morphine, and when Dr. Duke asked, I said the number of milligrams of morphine I’d had, and he got real close to me, and he said, Shut. Up. Just like that. And that’s the last thing I remember.

BLVR: Do you think that experience kind of put you over the edge to be in the Cowboy Hall of Fame?

LL: Yeah, maybe.

BLVR: I want to be mindful of your time, but also to talk about your incredibly long and impressive music career, which we’re going to cram into the next five minutes. I’m sure it’s hard to tell, when you’re in the middle of it, but do you feel like your music has evolved over the years? Do you go back and listen to some of your earlier stuff and think, Oh, I would do that differently.

LL: I appreciate my recordings and my songs for what they are, but, yeah, I do think about how much fun it might be to go back and re-record things. I’d love to have a chance. The thing that moves work forward over the years is the people you meet and the people you get to associate with. They make it possible for your imagination to go places it might not have gone otherwise. I have been so fortunate to work with people in the business who are so deep in their experience and their knowledge and so accomplished. Like working with my first producer, Billy Williams, who was a part of all my records until he decided to retire, after my record Natural Forces. And to be signed by Tony Brown at MCA Records in Nashville, who played piano with Elvis and produced so many great gospel records and became one of the in-house producers at MCA Records. He, along with Billy Williams, produced my first three records. To work with people with that sort of knowledge and experience, to play, to record with great musicians like Matt Rollings and Leland Sklar and Russ Kunkel and Jim Cox and Stuart Duncan and Mark O’Connor and Paul Franklin. To be able to record with an A-team of studio musicians, who then would go out on the road with me and be part of my band. Wow. You know, it doesn’t get any better than that. I’ve been fortunate to be able to work with people that I was already a fan of from their previous work. So I guess the thing that’s helped me—or the thing that makes me still enjoy playing and singing after all these years—is that I get to do it with people that I have ultimate respect and admiration for.

BLVR: Do you pay your band in hamburgers?

LL: Well, hamburgers are definitely part of the deal.