Biography of Lyle Lovett

Lyle Lovett represents the increasing diversity of country music as it recovers from a commercial slump in the '80s. Highly literate (he has degrees in journalism and German from Texas A&M), the Houston-born singer comes from the eclectic tradition of Western swing, as filtered through the work of such wry '70s songwriters as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Lovett has a dry but absurdly hilarious sense of humor, as expressed on his first recorded song, "If I Had a Boat." ("And if I had a pony, I'd ride him on my boat.") But he also writes bitingly of love relations, as in "God Will," in which the singer tells his lover that God will forgive her, but he won't, "and that's the difference between God and me." Despite some success in the country market and a Grammy award in the country category, it has been questionable since at least Lovett's second album, Pontiac, that his music could be categorized as country. But it's so multigeneric, with elements of folk, jazz, blues, and, lately, gospel, that it's hard to say exactly where it fits. At bottom, he's a singer/songwriter -- and an amazingly imaginative one at that. ~ William Ruhlmann