But if Lovett’s mid-career albums found him adapting his singer-songwriter material for his Large Band, this new album is something different. For the first time, he seems to be writing with the band in mind. Of the fourteen songs on My Baby Don’t Tolerate, nine are energetic, uptempo numbers that demand snapping fingers and shuffling feet. This is dance music, and while the lyrics are witty and cleverly crafted, they are largely stripped of any metaphors or irony that might slow down the party. And what a party it is, for the band plays with an exuberance seldom glimpsed on Lovett’s studio efforts.
“These songs are groove-oriented,” he agrees. “They’re written to be fun to play live. When we’re onstage, one of the things I’ve always tried to do is let people play, to give everyone a highlighted section in the show. So many times, you do an arrangement in the studio and then go out on the road and expand it, and it always sounds better that way. This time I thought I would anticipate that process and come up with live arrangements in the studio.”
Like acts as diverse as Phish, Jimmy Buffett and Neil Young, Lovett connects with his audience not through radio but through live performance, drawing crowds out-of-proportion to his record sales. So it makes sense that his first album of new songs in seven years would try to capture the spirit of his shows.
Since winning a Grammy for the best album of his career, 1996’s The Road To Ensenada, Lovett has released a double-album of covers (1998’s Step Inside This House), a concert recording (1999’s Live In Texas), a mostly instrumental soundtrack (1999’s Dr. T & The Women), a greatest-hits collection (2001’s Anthology, Vol. 1: Cowboy Man), and a retrospective of his contributions to movie soundtracks (2002’s Smile: Songs From The Movies). But it took him seven years to assemble a batch of new material that he felt hung together as an album.
“Making up songs is something I do for fun,” he insists, “so I’m always writing. But I didn’t want to record until I had a group of songs that were representative of my life, that held together as a group. Which is why I included ‘The Truck Song’ and ‘San Antonio Girl’ on this album, even though they were on the Anthology that was released two years ago. To me, those two were an important part of this new group of songs.
“In the studio, I was working with the same bunch of guys I’ve been using for the past ten years — my co-producer Billy Williams, plus Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Viktor Krauss, Dean Parks, Russ Kunkel, Paul Franklin and Matt Rollings. Everyone has a real intuitive sense of working with one another now, so it feels like a band and not just guys who showed up for the session. When I encouraged them to develop the arrangements as if for a live show, the groove was there and the solos were really good, so I had them try two of my older songs — ‘Wallisville Road’ and ‘Nashville’ — as well as Blaze Foley’s ‘Election Day’.
“But it’s the eleven new songs that hold the album together. They represent this next part of my life. It’s not that I sat down and said I’m going to write songs about a specific theme. It’s more that I make up songs every day; they reflect the mundane reality of my life and so they inevitably relate to one another.”
It doesn’t matter if the songs are autobiographical or not, for fidelity to the facts is the least important part of songwriting. It’s unlikely that the wife Lovett addresses on “Working Too Hard” is his real-life ex-wife Julia Roberts, that the church service described in “I Am Going To Wait” is based on an actual funeral, or that he sleeps in his pickup truck, as he sings on “The Truck Song”. Only the most literal-minded critic would insist that Lovett had no right to pen the murder ballad “L.A. County” for his 1987 album Pontiac without actually killing anybody.
“As a songwriter, you have a responsibility to be faithful to the feeling but not to the facts,” Lovett says. “Clearly, I would never go out there and shoot somebody, but I have had an ex-girlfriend who married someone else, just like the woman in ‘L.A. County’. You take that feeling and follow it wherever it leads you. Something pushes you over the edge, pushes the idea down the hill and turns it into a song.
“I think it’s impossible to divorce yourself from the voice in the song, even if you set up another character as the narrator. Anyone who says different is not being honest. There’s always a lot of me in the narrator of the song. That’s the point, really.”
“The Truck Song” is a spry, fiddle-fueled two-step about a Texan who obsessively waxes his pickup, even though it’s barely held together by baling wire. The funniest lines are, “I’ve been to Paris/And I don’t mean Texas,” which turns the usual country-music chauvinism on its head, and then adds this kicker about the German director of the film Paris, Texas: “I met Wim Wenders/One time in London.”
But the most telling lines are these: “I went to high school/And I was not popular/Now I am older/And it don’t matter.” There was a time, he implies, when telling those Paris and London stories would have been a form of revenge against all the high-school cheerleaders who ignored him, but he’s past that now.
“‘The Truck Song’ is about a guy for whom, no matter what happens in his life, it all comes down to his truck,” Lovett elucidates. “I actually did meet Wim Wenders one time in London, backstage at a Ry Cooder concert. That’s cool, but ultimately you’re not responsible for Paris or London; you’re responsible for your own place in the world. Ultimately the most important thing in life is driving to see your girlfriend. That’s the thesis statement for the album — that when it comes down to it, we’re all just driving around this world in a truck.”
In “San Antonio Girl”, he drives his new girlfriend over every back road in Texas, from San Marcos to San Angelo, and “out Highway 16, we heard Robert Keen.” From the title’s echo of “San Antonio Rose” to the fiddle-and-steel riff that pushes along the chorus, it’s a near-perfect evocation of Bob Wills. “Big Dog” boasts the snappy big-band blues of Charles Brown or Percy Mayfield, but this time the front-seat passenger is the narrator’s daughter. He asks, “What did I do to deserve you?” and the answer is, “Nothing.”
