Blurring the lines between genres with a clever amalgamation of country, folk, jazz, gospel, and blues, musician Lyle Lovett is a storyteller at heart. I had the pleasure of speaking with him prior to his visit to the Lobero, where his acoustic group — featuring Leland Sklar (whose Immediate Family band has graced that stage several times of late), Jim Cox, Stuart Duncan, and Jeff White — will play on Monday, March 25.
A four-time Grammy Award winner and prolific singer-songwriter, Lovett shared a bit about his creative process. Rather than words first or music first, he said, “Writing a song for me is having the idea first … of something that you think might be interesting enough to talk about or worthy of commanding someone’s sitting still for three minutes. If you have a solid idea, the writing part for me, it depends on the idea. I've never written just lyrics and then applied music or vice versa. It's always a lyrical idea or an idea as to a form of music.”
He has a degree in journalism from Texas A&M and was on staff at the student newspaper for a bit, covering the city council in Bryan, Texas, where he said it was interesting to learn how “heated a debate could be about how many curb cuts the new Exxon station was going to get, that sort of thing.”
