Lyle Lovett Completes A Chapter in His Life with Release Me

Four time Grammy Winner Lyle Lovett has always been about making music.  The singer-songwriter has released thirteen albums, including nine studio albums.  He’s also acted in a number of films including The Player, Short Cuts and Pret a Porter, but music still comes first for him.  He stopped by the SiriusXM studios to talk with Ron Bennington about his newest album, “Release Me”.  Excerpts of the interview appear below.

Ron Bennington: For all the accolades that you get as a singer songwriter, you always have great players with you.

Lyle Lovett: Hey thanks, Ron. I’ve gotten to work with just some of the greatest musicians in the world.

Ron Bennington: Well you definitely pick it up on this album. Has that always been an important thing to you since the beginning? There’s always this real musicality.

Lyle Lovett: Well thank you, very much. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing more fun than getting to play with people who are really great. One of the things that I just love about getting to do this for a living is all of the really talented and smart people that I get to meet all the time. And when you hit it off with somebody personally and they’re a great player…there’s just nothing better.

Ron Bennington: Texas has always had this phenomenal reputation for great songwriters. Why do you think that is? 

Lyle Lovett: I don’t know but there is a great music tradition from Texas, and certainly the songwriters from Texas that I admire, and that I used to go listen to, and that I tried to stand like on stage, like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and Steven Fromholz and Willis Allen Ramsey and Willie Nelson and Michael Murphy and Rusty Weir and B. W. Stevenson. Those guys were just incredible and they were great performers and I could just go and see them.

Ron Bennington: And these are the guys that you grew up on?

Lyle Lovett: You bet. The song that you just played [Isn’t That So] was written by Jessie Winchester, one of the great American songwriters and I love his writing too. So I listened to a lot of stuff coming up, but the Texas guys I could actually go and see. And that was a big deal.

Ron Bennington: And it still hasn’t stopped. I mean there’s still great guys coming out of Texas all the time.

Lyle Lovett: Well I think so. And I’m sure proud to be able to represent my home state. Another reason I think there are a lot of Texas songwriters is that people from Texas are pretty easy to come to word and they’re happy to tell a story in any form whatsoever.

Ron Bennington: You cover Townes in this. And I think he’s one of those people who, his reputation grows every year.  In comedy it’s Bill Hicks and…

Lyle Lovett: Wow, that’s brilliant. He’s the Bill Hicks of music.

Ron Bennington: …I think it’s the fact that they were such complicated fellas. But Townes’ songs I think just mean more every single year.

Lyle Lovett: Well it’s wonderful to see more and more people become aware of Townes and his songs. I mean the songs…they’re gems that anyone can appreciate if they just take the time to discover.

Ron Bennington: How tough is it to compete against yourself as a songwriter?

Lyle Lovett: Oh gosh, well I think you have to be able to make yourself happy in writing a song. I don’t write a song just to do it, it has to mean something to me. And I have to have something that I really want to say. My songs are a combination of real life and imagination. But usually they start off in something real that happens to me. I’m not a great craftsman– the kind of songwriter that could just knock something out if you threw a topic my way.

Ron Bennington: So how do you know when it’s time to write a song?

Lyle Lovett: Because you can’t help it. In fact, I’ve had experiences where I’ve been busy and you start thinking of an idea and you think, well I’ll just come back to that. But it just sometimes…the ideas won’t leave you alone and half hour later, you’ve stopped whatever else you’re doing and you sit there and play it.

Ron Bennington: Is there ever a fear that if you don’t stop and take care of it that the song will be gone after that?

Lyle Lovett: When I was a kid watching the old Mike Douglas show on tv after school, I saw him interview Buck Owens once. And he asked Buck Owens how he wrote his songs and if he wrote down the words as soon as he thought of them. And Buck Owens said he never wrote down lyrics, he said, “I figure if they’re good enough, I’d remember ‘em.” So I don’t worry about it really. If the idea is solid enough, it sort of keeps coming at you and it won’t leave you alone.

Ron Bennington:  Out of everything we have in the arts, I think song writing stands as the real mysterious part of it. With a film script or a novel you spend years with it. But with a song, some of our greatest songs that have ever been written happen almost in real time.

Lyle Lovett: You know that’s very true, and talking about Townes Van Zandt, he called those kind of songs Sky Songs. Songs that just came down from the sky and he said they would just go right into his arms.

Ron Bennington: And I’ve heard that from people too, that some of the greatest song writers take very little credit for those songs that were written. Almost like being a vessel to it.  The record business is changing and after being with your record company for a long time, this is going to be it for you, this last album.

Lyle Lovett: This is my very last record on my original record deal that I signed back in 1985. My first record came out in 1986. Mike Curb of Curb Records took me to MCA records in Nashville. Tony Brown talked MCA into taking a chance on me, so its been Curb and the Universal Music Group all these years, and I’m really proud that they kept me around to the end.

Ron Bennington: And the music business of course has changed and most of the people who come through here are already off doing their own independent thing. You’re getting to be one of the last to get to have that independent thing. But it’s great because your audience is there. You have an audience that has stuck with you.

Lyle Lovett: It’s just extraordinary. And to feel that kind of support from people that come to my shows. I make a living from playing– on the road. That people turn up and ask for songs and know my songs–that’s just a great feeling.

Ron Bennington: And you’ve never lost that? It’s still the same kind of thrill as when you were younger?

Lyle Lovett: Oh I love getting to play and sing. And a lot of that is because of the people I get to work with. Because of the talented musicians and because it feels fresh every time. You know my arrangements aren’t so strict that they require the guys in the band to play the same thing from night to night. I think its important to allow for spontaneity and allow for things to naturally happen in the course of a show in front of an audience. You know some audiences– it’s such a relationship that you have on stage in a theater between the band and the audience. Things can really escalate in nice ways sometimes and I think it’s important to be flexible enough to allow for that.

Ron Bennington: From an audience point of view with a band you can tell sometimes when it clicks. And you’ll see the band is enjoying it more and everybody’s connecting. And then sometimes it will float away and it may come back, it may not. But there are magical nights.

Lyle Lovett: That is absolutely the truth. There is a certain level of proficiency in your set that you have to have from beginning to end. And sometimes the show just has to come from the stage. You have to just put it out there. And you don’t always get the kind of energy back– and it can have to do with the venue as well. You can’t always feel the energy coming back to you. And in that case, it still has to be of a certain standard. But the nights that it does come back to you from the audience– it’s a wonderful feeling.

Ron Bennington: And no idea why. Who knows why? But it does have a church feeling some nights.

Lyle Lovett: Amen.

Ron Bennington: So there’s never been anything else that you wanted to do. I know you did some acting…

Lyle Lovett: And that’s just really come about because of my playing and singing. And I’ve had some extraordinary experiences getting to act, working in those Robert Altman films, working with Don Ruse in the film that he wrote and directed, but what I love to do is play and sing. Anytime you get to do something creative with somebody who is really smart and has an idea that’s a good one, you learn something, and I love that.

Ron Bennington: And particularly now with Altman…those films are going to be around forever. To just play any part in that…

Lyle Lovett: Exactly. To be a part of his family, and be a part of his process– just to be able to witness his process. One of the many things that I learned from Altman was just to be confident in your idea. If you have a good idea you can just go for it. He had the kind of confidence… he was comfortable with anyone watching him work at any point in his process. You could walk in to the middle of editing, you could walk in the middle of anything he was doing, and he’d say come on in, and you could just soak up as much as you want.

Ron Bennington: One of the things that I think is interesting about this album is that it goes into so many different directions. Some of it, real country, some of it folk and then you jump into some Lutheran stuff even.

Lyle Lovett: This album– it was important to me that this album not be contrived in any way. Most of the songs on this record are songs that I played when I first started playing. Early on when I was first writing my own songs– until I had enough of my own songs together to be able to play an entire set of my own songs. So that version of Brown Eyed Handsome Man I started playing in 1976. I learned White Boy Lost in the Blues from my friend Tom Elskes who told me about the Sonny Terry Brownie McGee album that he had learned it from, which I ran out and bought immediately. I learned that in 1978. The two old blues songs on the record, Keep it Clean written by Charley Jordan and One Way Gal written by William Moore I learned from a wonderful acoustic blues player, named John Grimaudo that I get to open shows for down in Houston. And then I heard John play a song he wrote, called Dress of Laces. And I learned all three of those songs in 1978. The title song, Release Me, I couldn’t resist the joke of it since it’s my last record. And I met K.D. Lang in 1986 just shortly after her first record came out in 1985 and we got shuttled around to a lot of those new artist things together and we got to be friends. We did a tour in 1988. We toured again in 2005. We stayed friends and I just always dreamed of singing a classic country song with her because of her appreciation for traditional country music. The hymn– when I grew up I went to Lutheran school– we sang everyday and it’s really where I started singing. And it’s just one of my favorite hymns. We were recording that day– it was a Sunday and we were recording at the Blue Rock studios down in Wimberly Texas, out in the Texas hill country. And it was so quiet and peaceful and Matt Rollings, our piano player was the first person to get there. I actually had my old hymnal with me and I took it out and I asked him to play through it and so we just decided to roll tape.

Ron Bennington: Well what a sentimental journey for you to take everybody through. It’s coming full circle.

Lyle Lovett: I wanted it to feel like the end of something. And I don’t know what I’m going to do next, I don’t know how I’ll pursue my recording or what I’ll do. But I am really truly grateful for the career I’ve had and feel really proud that I was able to keep my record year all these years.

Ron Bennington: When you started song writing you had to make sure that these songs had to fit in, and had to be good enough.

Lyle Lovett: Well gosh, when you play great songs– Michael Franks wrote White Boy Lost in the Blues, Chuck Berry wrote Brown Eyed Handsome Man, to play a Townes van Zandt song like White Freightliner Blues– yea to slip your own songs in there is a little scary.

Ron Bennington: (laughs) Yea it’s kind of a ballsy move…like alright, here’s the next one folks. And Chuck Berry– to sit back and think about what he did early on and where he came from, and the fact that– almost, in America we’ve forgotten how much that man has changed music for a generation.

Lyle Lovett: Incredible. Incredible insight. The lyrics to Brown Eyed Handsome Man– I mean gosh– it’s just a very forward thinking lyric and very subtle and full of great humor.

Ron Bennington: And just the amount of people who, that man moved to change their life. I mean, certainly an entire generation and the generation after him. The Beatles and Stones were directly connected to that, so for all of that youth country that came after– you’ve got to take it back to Chuck. I don’t know if we realize that something this precious is still here with is.

Lyle Lovett: That’s exactly right. Truly a national treasure. I got to meet him once. At the ‘92 Rock and Roll hall of fame awards, when it was still here in New York I got to give the induction speech for Johnny Cash, and I’ll never forget that as long as I live. But it was at the Waldorff and they were moving us from one room to another, going up some steps, and there was Chuck Berry, right next to me. And I said, Mr. Berry, you’re an inspiration to us all. And he looked at me and he said, “I do my best.”

Ron Bennington: (laughs) But just the fact that you’re with Cash and Chuck Berry in the same night, is almost insane. What was it like to have a guy like Cash just accept you like that?

Lyle Lovett: Un-believable. Just so gracious. You know that was thrilling to me when I first went to Nashville in 1984 and started meeting people. To have a chance to actually spend time with people that you admired, and to watch them work and to connect all the dots– to realize that gosh, the reason that they are iconic– the reason that their songs are so good– the reason that they’re such great performers– it all makes sense. You watch them work and you realize that it’s no accident.

Ron Bennington: The new album is Release Me. It’s available in stores now and online at Amazon.com and Itunes and you can also check out tour dates at Lylelovett.com. It was a pleasure to have you come by.

Lyle Lovett: Thanks for having me on.

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This interview can be heard in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber?  No worries, you can get a free trial subscription by clicking here.

Get more information on LyleLovett.com or on twitter @LyleLovett.

Purchase the new CD on Amazon here.

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