When his truck is totaled by a drunk driver on the I-610 loop around Houston, he is compensated by a glimpse of a rubbernecking woman who’s “Cute As A Bug”. When Highway 9 is closed, he takes the shortcut down “Wallisville Road”, driving 90 miles an hour to the tempo of a rollicking country-rock backing track. On “Nothing But A Good Ride”, the singer is driving a tractor-trailer from Reno to Albuquerque, and though the weariness of the long, lonely miles is evident in the vocal, Lovett’s voice also radiates a satisfaction in a job well done.
Even when the songs climb out of the cab and into the house, Lovett is still addressing daily life with affectionate humor. On the album’s title tune, he describes coming home late at night to face the riot act delivered by an angry wife. Over a stomping blues-rock arrangement reminiscent of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, he sings, “When I puckered up, she puckered down/Because there are some things my baby don’t tolerate.” On the midtempo country-folk song “In My Own Mind”, he applies the country cliches about open spaces — “I live where I can breathe/Ain’t nothin’ but a cool breeze” — to the internal workings of his own brain as he drinks coffee and looks out the window.
“A lot of the time, the songs that I end up liking the most are a reaction to the songs I’m trying to write,” Lovett confesses. “You push in one direction with your mind and then you say, ‘The heck with this,’ and a song about a truck falls out. But even though a song like ‘The Truck Song’ is real simple on the surface, it talks about your whole life.
“Over and over, the theme of this album is that whatever experiences you’ve come through, this is what life is all about. It’s a wife or girlfriend that cares when you come home late at night, because that’s what you want, someone who cares. It’s drinking a cup of coffee, looking out the window and considering what the day may bring. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
When Lovett looks out the window of his home at the cattle grazing amid the cottonwood trees, it’s the same window his grandfather looked out in 1911. That’s when this white, clapboard house was first built. Even further back, in 1848, a Bavarian weaver named Adam Klein drove his wagon 25 miles north from Houston’s docks and bought a large spread of land. By the time Adam had built a Lutheran church, a Lutheran parochial school and several sturdy farmhouses for his arriving kin, he had named the fledgling village Klein, Texas.
Lovett’s mother was a Klein, and he grew up in the town of Klein. Little Lyle attended that Lutheran church and that Lutheran school, and while his parents commuted to work for Standard Oil in Houston, he spent the hours after school at his grandfather’s house down the road. His connection to land and family runs just that deep, and this explains why his singing and songwriting have always contained a strong current of country fundamentals beneath the hip irony.
“I’ve always wanted to live at home because of my family and heritage there,” Lovett says. “It never seemed essential to live somewhere else. Even in 1984-85 when I didn’t have a deal, when I was just trying to meet people in Nashville, it made more sense to set up a bunch of appointments ahead of time, have a successful three-or-four-day trip, and then come back home. That seemed more productive to me than moving and being there all the time.
“Now, obviously, Guy [Clark,] Steve [Earle] and Rodney [Crowell] moved to Nashville and made it work for themselves, but I never saw how it could work for me. For me, it was more important to play those $100 shows around home, because that’s where the songs came from, that’s where my folks lived. I figured that’s what’s important in life — to be close to your family, to be engaged in those relationships. For me, the sheer physicality of being there is crucial.”
Just how crucial is revealed by one of his starkest ballads, “Baltimore”, from the 1992 album Joshua Judges Ruth. It’s based on an actual event in 1978, when a 21-year-old Lyle said goodbye to his grandmother before flying to Baltimore and then on to Germany, where he would spend the summer studying. As he slowly, reluctantly sings over Leo Kottke’s guitar and John Hagen’s cello, “She begged, ‘Son, please don’t go to Baltimore/And leave me where I’m lying/For you will, Son, but I no more/Will walk among the living.'”
“It’s sort of a divine-retribution/flashback/dream-sequence…about the last time I saw my grandmother alive,” Lovett told Musician magazine in 1992. “Grandma was always really supportive, always wanted you to go and do things, so this was really uncharacteristic of her….She was sick, but we didn’t think she was near death. But she asked me not to go. So it was really a weird thing — a hard thing. And she died the day before I came home.”
The next song on Joshua Judges Ruth is “Family Reserve”, a tour of the Klein Family Cemetery where Uncle Eugene, Aunt Annie and Cousin Calloway are all buried. It’s the antidote to “Baltimore”, a testament to the rewards of living in your hometown, where the graveyard is close enough to visit, close enough to prompt stories, both sad and funny. And the stories make you believe that “I feel them watching/And I see them laughing/And I hear them singing along/We’re all gonna be here forever.”
“My grandfather’s place was sold out from under the family after my grandmother died,” Lovett says. “The property was bought by an investment group in Houston who intended to sit on it and then turn it over to a real estate developer when the price peaked. It became part of my life work to buy it back.
“The investors didn’t care about the old buildings, so I was able to buy my grandfather’s house in 1987 and drag it 200 yards through the pasture to the land that my parents still owned. So I ended up living in my grandfather’s house next door to my parents. That was very satisfying, because I grew up in those two houses. My mother and her six siblings were born in my grandfather’s house, and my aunts, uncles and cousins always congregated there for family get-togethers. And finally, in 1995, I was able to buy back most of the land, though not all of it.
“I lost my dad in September of ’99, and that made me want to be more focused on what was going on at home. My parents did what they had to do in life so I could do what I wanted to do in life. When they graduated from high school, I don’t think anyone asked them, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ That wasn’t part of the program in those days; you just found a job to pay the bills. He and my mom provided a platform so I could take off in any direction I wanted to. I owe them something.”
