Lyle Lovett – The Road to Ensenada
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Posted On September 1, 1996
The background: Lyle Lovett was married to Julia Roberts for a while, and now he’s not. The Road to Ensenada is Lovett’s first post-split effort.
It would be totally, gratuitously, fatuous to suggest that Lovett might use a CD, or any form of public expression, to make public his private life. And so of course every music critic in the country is using The Road to Ensenada as an excuse to print another round of fatuous speculation about the famous non-couple, using these songs as text. I’ve got no privileged line on the truth of the matter, but I betcha any “analysis” you see of The Road to Ensenada that ties several of these 12 tunes to The Big J. is a bunch of crap.
So, unfortunately, is the disk. Well, OK, it’s not that bad, but that’s not a thing a Lovett fan is overly happy to have to say. The music moves from the Latin-lite “Her First Mistake” to the pep-pill swing of “That’s Right (You’re Not From Texas)” to the ho-hum strum of “Who Loves You Better”, On “Long Tall Texan”, the backup vocalists save the tune, but not Lovett, who sounds all over like he’s trying too hard to claim (reclaim?) the birthright novelty of being Texan. The first track, “Don’t Touch My Hat”, sets the wit standard low from the start, and “That’s Right (You’re not From Texas)” isn’t much more clever than your remedial schoolyard nyah-nyah-nyah.
“Fiona” tries to create a poignant, grotesque “one-eyed Fiona”, but poor Fiona’s got nothing on Lovett’s older, seafaring Tonto, and the story’s over after the first of too many choruses. “Her First Mistake” is another Mose Allison-like mini-epic in the vein of Lovett’s own “Here I Am”, but not quite so sharp.
And that, really, is what the whole album feels like to me: Lyle Lovett, just as you’ve always known him, more or less, only not quite so sharp.
