Lyle Lovett at Tanglewood (8/21/00)
(LENOX, Mass., Aug. 22, 2000) - On a chilly August night, Lyle Lovett and
His Large Band entertained a crowd of devotees with the pinpoint skill and
intimate response of a bar band at Tanglewood.
Maybe it was the fact that the Shed was half empty on Monday night
that accounted for Lovett’s warmth and rapport with the audience. Whatever
the case, the Texas singer-songwriter was downright charming and gregarious
compared with past appearances, when he tended to be aloof and let his music
do the talking.
Instead, after an opening suite of tunes, Lovett grabbed the
audience’s focus with between-song patter and stories about what inspired
his songs, and thus brought a coffeehouse-type feel to Tanglewood’s only
Popular Artist concert of the season.
Lovett was his typically wry self, singing love songs to his pickup
truck and his hat (“Where I come from you can sing love songs to your truck
and your hat and it’s not considered cheating,” he explained), portraying
himself as the sad-sack loser and other characters as pathetic misfits.
For the most part, he did so without malice and with genuine tenderness and
understanding. There was also always a subtle undercurrent of parody to
everything Lovett sang; in the country idiom he draws upon, sad songs about
losers who get dumped on are a dime a dozen. That Lovett writes new ones
that work straight or with a sly wink of an eye is just his special talent.
Lovett deadpanned his way through new songs and old favorites like “I’ve
Been to Memphis” and “If I Had a Boat.” The latter was brought to a sudden
halt midway through when Lovett stopped singing and signaled the band to
stop playing. He explained that he’d swallowed a bug, and if you didn’t know
better you’d think he’d made it up just for the laugh.
“You’re Not From Texas” explored the lone star state of mind, and “She’s No
Lady, She’s My Wife” took on added resonance in light of Lovett’s famed
celebrity marriage and divorce with Julia Roberts. He played a friend’s song
called “Bears,” about which he said, “I never heard a song like that until I
heard ... that song,” and his explanation of the origins of his own song,
“Penguins,” was even funnier than the song itself.
Lovett was backed by his nine-piece string band, including mandolin,
guitars, cello, dobro, bass and percussion. The arrangements were smooth and
well-oiled without being slick, and Lovett allowed individual musicians to
strut their stuff occasionally without getting too indulgent. No one would
complain, however, about listening to cello solos by Lovett’s longtime
cellist, John Hagen, or mandolin breaks by the newgrass superstar Sam Bush,
who also harmonized vocally on several tunes.
The group easily handled the stylistic transitions from hard country
to jazzy, western swing to blues and country-flavored r&b. Some tunes were
given orchestral arrangements that added nuance and drama, particularly “She
Already Made Up Her Mind,” a minor-key, moody, searing ballad portraying the
break-up scene which was rendered starkly with huge, crashing crescendoes of
drums and strings. Perhaps the night’s highlight, it was Lovett at his best,
making poetry out of pathos: “There is nothing so deep as the ocean/Nothing
so high as the sky/Nothing so unwavering as a woman/When she’s already made
up her mind.”
Warming up the crowd for Lovett was Nickel Creek, an acoustic
bluegrass quartet ranging in age from 19 to a whopping 23. This young group,
including brother and sister Sean and Sara Watkins, has actually been
playing together for a decade, and their intuitive sense of dynamics shows.
While they can play a high, lonesome breakdown as good as the next guy, they
juice their bluegrass with a bit of rock ‘n’ roll syncopation.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 23, 2000.
Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy rogovoy@berkshire.net music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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