Klein, Texas, is halfway between Tomball and Spring, on the coastal plain north of Houston. The land is flat. The roads run straight along the old property lines and meet at right angles, like joints in furniture. Where there are fields with cattle or horses, the trees in the distance appear as remote and aloof as a coastline. Adam Klein, a German, arrived in 1848. He had made his way to New Orleans, taken passage up the Mississippi, and gone to California to mine gold. Then he rode a horse to Panama, sailed to Galveston, and settled among Germans with names such as Klink, Klebs, Doerre, and Strack, on land that reminded them of the farms they had left behind. According to a historical marker by the graveyard in Klein, which Lyle Lovett, the singer and songwriter, drove me to in his pickup one morning and then got out of his truck to show me, nearly the oldest grave in the cemetery belongs to one of Klein’s daughters, who died of diphtheria.
Lovett lives in Klein. His mother’s people are Kleins—Adam Klein was his great-great-grandfather. Lovett’s house was built on Klein’s farm by his grandparents, in 1911. Up and down the roads that enclose the farm are houses occupied by Lovett’s relatives—each generation passed land to the next as it came of age. Bernell Klein, Lovett’s mother, was born in the house. In 1962, when Lovett was five, Bernell and her husband, William, who was from East Texas, and who died a few years ago, built a house next door. Before that, they lived an hour from Klein, in Houston, where they worked for Humble Oil. They had always intended to move to Klein and send their son to the Lutheran school.
Lovett is an only child. Each day after school, he went to his grandparents’ house until his parents came home from work. He developed a deep attachment to his grandparents and to the house, and he thought that when he was grown he would like to live in it, among their possessions. Lovett’s grandmother, who survived her husband, died in 1979, when Lovett was twenty-one. Believing that the tax bill would be too much to accommodate, the family sold the house and what remained of Adam Klein’s farm—about a hundred and sixty-five acres—to an investment group from Los Angeles, then discovered that the accounting of the bill had been wrong and they probably could have held on to the place.
The investment group put up “For Sale” signs, and while it waited for offers it leased the farm to Lovett’s uncle Calvin Klein, a cattleman, to use as pastureland. The arrangement gave Klein no incentive to care for the buildings. In 1985, Klein and Lovett persuaded the group that a good way to improve the property would be to let Lovett buy the house and its barns and remove them. Before Lovett had the house transported two hundred yards, onto land that belonged to his parents, he measured the distance from the house to the trees in the yard, so that he could plant new trees. He recorded the placement of the outbuildings. When he sits in the kitchen now, early in the morning, drinking coffee and looking out the window, as his grandmother did, he sees the same things she saw.
The house is a small, one-story frame house of a style called pier and beam, which means that it sits on blocks. It has clapboard siding and is painted white, and has a wide front porch with columns. It is surrounded by shade trees, and there is a pond in front of it. The walk through the horse barn to the back door of Lovett’s mother’s house is about a hundred yards. Among the horses in the barn are ones that Lovett and his father bought to breed and race.
The house is furnished sparely. In the parlor, the principal adornments are two saddles, each in a corner on a sawhorse. A plaque on the kitchen wall that says “Beware of Bull” commemorates an encounter Lovett and his uncle Calvin had two years ago with a bull in the pasture behind the house. They had delivered a check to a bulldozer operator who was digging a ditch. Walking back across the field, they discussed a pecan tree that had no leaves when it should have and whether it had to come out. The bull walked slowly toward them. Lovett had found the bull in the pasture as a day-old calf. The calf had followed him as he walked through the herd looking for its mother, and when no cow acknowledged it Lovett decided to raise it on a bottle. Once the bull turned two, Lovett stayed out of its way, since it was playful and was big enough to hurt someone without meaning to. Klein, who is sixty-nine, has worked with cattle all his life, so Lovett felt, as the bull approached, that if there was any reason to be worried Klein would tell him. “Usually, you throw a hat down on the ground or slap your leg,” Klein says, “and a bull will stop long enough for you to leave.”
Klein absently flipped his hand toward the bull and told it to be gone. “The next thing, my uncle did a three-sixty flip in the air,” Lovett says. “Bulls, when they’re really going at something, they’ll get down on their knees and work their head on it. He had his head on my uncle’s chest, and had torn up his shirt, and I went over and started smacking him with my cap, and he went for me.”
The bull pinned Lovett against a board fence and raked him back and forth until the fence post broke his leg. He lay on the ground and said, “Uncs, I can’t get up.” Klein and a friend from Tomball who had just arrived pulled Lovett over the fence. They laid him down in the pasture and waited for the ambulance. Klein’s arm was bleeding, and his chest was heaving—the bull had fractured several of his ribs.
“I was the ignorant one to trust him,” Klein says. “You take a wild bull, they might hurt you, but a pet bull will kill you. They have no fear. My dad almost got killed by a Jersey bull that was a pet.”
Lovett’s leg was broken in so many places that it couldn’t be set; it had to be pinned together. He performed his next tour sitting down, and was fortunate not to have been crippled. He doesn’t much like talking about the bull—he doesn’t especially enjoy answering questions at all—and sometimes, to deflect people who ask how he broke his leg, he shrugs and says mildly, “Just walking around.”
Lovett is tall and thin. His shoulders are narrow. He has long, ropy arms and broad hands. There are pleats in his cheeks, and wavy lines across his forehead. His eyes are pale blue. Their expression is intelligent and measuring to the point of guardedness. His ears are large and his nose is large and his eyes are small and close together, but they are arranged in such a fashion that his face has the solemn and handsome dignity of a workingman of the thirties, a farmer who hears the sound of your tractor stalling in the field and shows up to help you get it started.
For most of his career, his persona has been ambiguous. Billy Williams, his producer, says, “Lyle mistakenly sees himself as an ordinary human being.” Bonnie Raitt, with whom he made his first big tour, in 1986, following her bus in his pickup, regarded the way he looked—the skinny-legged suits, the hair rising like a bloom—as exotic. “He was always very sartorially astute,” she says. A Texas musician in Nashville who met Lovett before he was famous once told a reporter, “I took one look at him and pegged him for a French blues singer.” Lovett is not a demonstrative person. Raitt describes his temperament admiringly as “a banked fire.” Many women find him deeply attractive. Raitt also told me that sometimes when she and Lovett perform together and he looks over at her, she feels her “knees buckle.”
Lovett is smarter than most people he meets, but he conceals it. He has something of the typical country musician’s attitude that one must never affect to have risen above one’s beginnings. He is very polite, but his manners can conceal disdain. His habits of mind are meticulous, and he says he has difficulty doing anything casually. His sympathies are mostly charitable—he says that when he writes a song he imagines that he wouldn’t mind meeting anyone who liked it—but he is also prone to judging people harshly on little evidence and holding his opinions steadfastly.
Occasionally, Lovett dresses like the celebrated person he is—Prada and Armani send him clothes to wear onstage—but he nearly always wears cowboy boots. Lovett’s boots are made by a man in Austin named Lee Miller. One morning last summer, Lovett stopped by Miller’s to order a new pair.
Miller is in his late forties. His parents had a department store in Rutland, Vermont. “I hung out in the shoe department,” he told me. “I was fascinated by footwear.” He went to a bootmaking college in Oklahoma. Each year, an old bootmaker in Austin named Charlie Dunn hired the student who graduated first in the class. Miller went to work for Dunn, who was in the habit of driving off his employees. Miller grew accustomed to being fired, then arriving home and having Dunn call and hire him back. “He was from the old days,” Miller says, “when you said it like it was, then regretted it later.” Dunn died in 1993—he was ninety-five—and Miller took over the business. While Miller told me this story, Lovett and Miller’s wife, Carrlyn, discussed Lovett’s new boots. They decided they would be two-piece boots—that is, made from two pieces of leather, instead of four. “I love two-piece,” Carrlyn said. “They feel like you’re wearing socks with soles and heels.”
On a counter in the workshop were two boot tops stretched out flat. They were black, with red hearts and yellow arrows and white guitars embedded in them, and, in white letters, the name “Lucky Bill.” They had been attached to one of the few pairs of boots ever returned to Miller. “Lucky Bill’s a guy from someplace out West,” Lovett said, “and he was not happy with how they turned out. He took them to a bootmaker in Las Vegas or Reno, and made a videotape of the guy criticizing all the flaws—or what he regarded as flaws—and he sent the tape back to Lee with the boots.”
“He said the arrows were too dark, and the guitars couldn’t be read from the stage,” Miller said. “He’s a night-club singer, I guess, and he wore them for his act.”
“Two years ago, I walked into the shop and saw them and thought they were great, and I wore them for two weeks, even though they were too big for me,” Lovett said. “I walked around the Austin airport and everyone came up to me and asked me about the boots. I was going to make a videotape of them talking about all the things they liked and send it to Lucky Bill.”
“Instead, he’s writing a song about Unlucky Bill, who lost his boots in a card game,” Miller said. He told Lovett that he hoped to have the new boots ready in a few months. He unrolled several alligator hides he thought might be right for them, and then Lovett bought some shoe trees.
Lovett is excessively self-effacing. Miller said, “Lyle, a friend of mine called the other day and asked me, ‘If you’re in the record store, and you’re going to buy only one Lyle Lovett record, which one do you get?’ I said I didn’t know, I’d ask you.”
“Willie Nelson,” Lovett said. “ ‘Red Headed Stranger.’ ”
Lovett tours assiduously. He had a long tour last summer with his Large Band, which includes twelve other musicians and four singers, and then, to promote his new record, “My Baby Don’t Tolerate,” which came out at the end of September, he went on the road with a smaller band, essentially the Large Band without the singers and the horns, and with a few changes in personnel. He also came to New York and played guitar and sang by himself one night on a small stage downtown, and he went to Los Angeles with a five-piece band to appear on the “Tonight Show.” Otherwise, he mostly stayed in Klein.
Before Lovett made records, he often played in Houston and Austin, with two musicians who are still members of his band. In Houston, he was accompanied by James Gilmer, a percussionist, and in Austin he appeared with John Hagen, who plays cello. Hagen was working in a print and copy shop, and Gilmer was the manager of an outfit called Acme Tools, which imported inexpensive hand tools from Korea and Taiwan. After Lovett’s first record came out, in 1986, the three of them toured together. When Lovett describes this period, he says things such as “During the cello solo, which all of them were cello solos.” In the South and the Midwest, playing for country-and-Western audiences, the three were sometimes embraced and sometimes not. Hagen remembers their playing in Nashville at a showcase for bookers of country bands and hearing one booker tell another, “I feel sorry for that guy with the bongos and the viola.”
Lovett is regarded as a country-and-Western musician, but his catalogue is far too diverse for a category. John Hagen, whose background is in classical music, says, “The difficult thing to explain to people if they haven’t heard Lyle is what does he do. He crosses so many genres it falls in the cracks. It’s not country, it’s not jazz or blues, it’s not rock and roll, it’s not strictly swing, but it’s all those things. There is no word for his style.”
Lovett had always intended to record country music, blues, ballads, gospel and church songs, rockabilly songs, folk songs, Western swing tunes, and songs with big-band arrangements, but he didn’t think he could get away with having records devoted to a single classification, so he put them together, usually with half of a record devoted to a particular style. Even a Lovett song with a straightforward country structure—such as, say, “The Truck Song,” from his new record—is subversive. The song describes a man’s dependence on his pickup truck, and for two verses its sentiments are conventional. The narrator says that he’s been on the road for three days in his rickety truck, which he calls Old Black. Then, “I went to high school / I was not popular / Now I am older / And it don’t matter.” Then there’s a verse saying that he’s slept in his truck on occasion. Then, a trifle defensively, “I’ve been to Paris / I don’t mean Texas / I met Wim Wenders / One time in London.” The surprising juxtaposition exemplifies Lovett’s writing. A sentimental subject is not handled predictably, as a clever redneck poem; instead, it becomes the expression of an inner life, a single existence and sensibility—you think I’m a hick, but I’ve been to Europe—which is both amusing and unsettling.
Lovett likes songs that have a story, and especially one that is told by a character, often a solitary whose habits and manners are peculiar. A Lovett song frequently illuminates parts of the character’s experience that aren’t quite suitable conversation. The narrators tend to be a little combative and sometimes sulky: “Don’t Touch My Hat,” “That’s Right (You’re Not from Texas),” and “God Will,” in which a man tells his cheating lover, God loves you, but I don’t. “Creeps Like Me” has a narrator who wears a ring made from his grandmother’s gold tooth, which he killed her for. “You look surprised,” he sings brightly. “You shouldn’t be. / This world is full of creeps like me.”
Lovett’s most masterly song is a lament about his father called “You Were Always There,” which appears on his new record. His father died without warning, of a stroke. The song is written in a minor key and is sparsely arranged. Its lyrics include terse images of horses and riding and death and loss. “The sun comes up,” Lovett sings, “the world goes around and around / There’s no bad luck, / There’s just the luck you’ve found.” Then, “You steal away / Into a lonesome sound. / Another day is lowered in the ground.” His delivery is subdued—the song is confided as much as sung—and the repetition of the line “You were always there” suggests a bewilderment, a stasis, a resistance to absorbing the loss. He is describing not the diminished present but the beautiful past. It is a mature work, intensely dramatic, a solemn and keening observation of grief.
Lovett’s voice is typically a bit raspy, and his diction is slurry. He often sounds as if you’d just woken him up. “Wire” becomes “wi-er.” “Threw” becomes “thoo.” He isn’t a belter. When he takes part in a gospel shout—as the song “I’m Going to Wait,” also from his new record, requires him to do in performance—he seems courteous. He’s persuasive, though, as if he had just got the spirit and felt it fervently but weren’t quite sure how to handle it.
Singing was part of Lovett’s Lutheran education. “Every school day began with a devotion,” he says. “The teachers would get us together, and the best player among them would play the piano, and the rest would lead the singing.” When the children were old enough to be made into a choir, they were lined up against the lockers and led in a song. The choir director walked along the row with his ear lowered. The children he selected to stand in a second line were sent to recess. Lovett and the others remaining became the choir.
Lovett’s parents encouraged him to play music. He took guitar lessons at a music store in Houston. His mother drove an hour home from work in the city, picked up Lovett, drove back to the city, and waited while he had his lesson. They arrived home around nine-thirty or ten at night. Lovett’s mother and father left the house at five-thirty or six in the morning. “I was always able to do what I wanted to do because my parents did what they had to do,” Lovett says. “I’m the other part of their imagination.”
Lovett went to a public high school. In ninth grade, he was invited to be in a band. All of its members, including Lovett, belonged to the Future Farmers of America. “I owned a guitar, so I got drafted, but I wasn’t really good enough to be in the band,” he says. “My friend Anthony Hildebrandt played bass. He’s a machinist now, and he does custom cattle feed, too.” The band included a singer, two guitar players, a bass player, and a drummer, and they practiced in the Hildebrandts’ garage. On the F.F.A. calendar the biggest event is the F.F.A. Project Show. For the F.F.A. Project, a child raises a piece of livestock (Lovett raised a steer), which is judged at a fair and then sold. Lovett’s band entered the fair’s battle of the bands. Prizes were given for first and second place. “Our ag teacher came backstage after the show and said, ‘Well, boys, you came in third.’ The other guys received that news kind of gladly,” Lovett says, “and I was saying, ‘Wait a second . . .’ ”
After ninth grade, Lovett no longer played in bands, but he still took guitar lessons, from a student at the University of Houston. When Lovett was seventeen, he enrolled at Texas A. & M., in College Station, about seventy miles from Klein. By the time he was eighteen, he had begun playing in clubs around town. He studied history, but he liked writing and became a journalism major, because “making up songs, it was not a real job,” he says. “It didn’t feel like any legitimate pursuit that I would be able to continue.” For The Battalion, the school’s daily paper, he wrote about the city council of Bryan, a cotton town. He also interviewed songwriters he admired—among them Michael Martin Murphey, Steven Fromholz, Eric Taylor, and Willis Alan Ramsey. He couldn’t bear to write anything uncomplimentary about them. With Taylor, he interrupted the interview and asked the musician to teach him one of his songs. Eventually, Lovett gave up the idea of being a journalist, because, he says, he would think of a question, then decide, That’s none of my business.
Lovett spent five years as an undergraduate. He was more comfortable telling people he was a student than he was describing himself as a songwriter. After he got his degree, in journalism, he moved back to his bedroom in his parents’ house in Klein and played in clubs in Houston. “When the winter rolled around, I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing anything,” he says. “I missed the structure of school, and I realized that I was only a semester short of getting a degree in German, so I went back.”
I asked Lovett if while he was living at home he was allowed to have girls in his room, and he said evenly, “I can’t tell you everything.”
For the last six years, Lovett has been seeing a young woman named April Kimble, who grew up in San Antonio. Kimble is tall and slender and vivacious. She was a student at Texas A. & M. and was introduced to Lovett at a talk he gave about ethics in journalism. She has a mind for figures and procedures and levelheaded thinking, and in a number of matters Lovett depends on her judgment. On her left hand she wears a diamond ring that Lovett gave her. Lovett was briefly married, ten years ago, to the actress Julia Roberts. Their marriage is a subject he will not discuss. The only time I know of his referring to it was in a performance a few years ago, when he elided the phrase “or movie stars” from his song “Penguins.” The phrase is preceded by the lines “I don’t go for fancy cars, / For diamond rings.” Instead, he hummed.
Early last summer, Lovett and Kimble were living at a hotel in Beverly Hills while Lovett worked on his new record. Just about every day, he would leave the hotel garage—he likes to park his own car, which allows him to take the elevator directly to his floor and avoid the lobby—and drive over the hills to a recording studio in Burbank, where he and Billy Williams would spend the day listening to versions of the songs he had recorded and decide whether to erase a squeak made by Lovett’s fingers on the strings of his guitar or make the piano solo incrementally louder or try to make the gospel choir on one track sound as if it were standing closer to him.
Lovett and Williams met in 1983, at a festival in Luxembourg which had a tent devoted to American music. Williams was a guitar player in a country-and-Western band from Phoenix. Lovett played the set changes—that is, while one band’s equipment was being cleared from the stage and the next brought on, Lovett stood below the stage and sang and played guitar. I asked Williams how Lovett’s performances were received, and he closed his eyes, as if recalling them, and said, “It wasn’t magic.” Then, “They didn’t pay too much attention to us, either.”
I asked what Lovett was like then. “Very shy,” he said. “Mild and very soft- spoken, and I remember thinking, I don’t know if this guy is forceful enough to climb up through it.”
Before Williams left Luxembourg, he told Lovett that if he came to Phoenix he and the other musicians would play behind him if he wanted to record some songs. Lovett would only have to pay for the studio. A few months later, Lovett arrived. “We sat in my living room,” Williams says, “and he played me his songs, and I tried to think of how to arrange them.”
Initially, they recorded four songs. Lovett, carrying the tapes, made trips from Klein to Nashville every four or six weeks. Friends let him sleep on their couches. Back home, his mother taught the employees of various companies how to write business letters, how to proofread and use words properly—to use “different from” instead of “different than,” for example—and sometimes when people called to hire her she would say, “I have a son who needs work, maybe he can help you.” Lovett liked teaching—he says that standing in front of a class was a little like standing on a stage. The money he made he used to record more songs in Phoenix. Eventually, he and Williams and the band recorded eighteen songs, which cost Lovett thirty thousand dollars. After about a year of visiting Nashville, Lovett got an introduction to a man at a publishing company who said that if Lovett signed with the company he thought he could get him a record deal. Ten of the songs Lovett recorded in Phoenix became his first record. The rest, in new versions, appeared on his second and third records.
Since childhood, Lovett has ridden horses and been interested in cowboys. Most of the time, he dresses like a cowboy. When he rides, he wears spurs with his name on them. Until lately, he had never taken a riding lesson, but he has begun learning maneuvers specific to cow-horse competitions—contests that feature the ability of a horse and rider to do ranch work. Lovett hopes to become proficient enough to ride his own horses in amateur trials run by the National Reined Cow Horse Association.
Lovett has attended cow-horse trials for three years, and not long ago, from a breeder and trainer named Carol Rose, he bought two horses to be trained for the work. He also asked Rose if she would teach him the intricacies of riding them. Rose’s ranch is in Gainesville, Texas, near the border with Oklahoma. Rose is a small, good-looking, effusive woman who appears to be in her fifties—“age is a number and mine is unlisted,” she says. She has probably bred more champion performance quarter horses than any other breeder has, and she is a member of the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. One night last summer, after playing in Fort Worth, Lovett went to dinner with Rose and a number of other prominent quarter-horse people. The next morning, I drove about an hour with him and Michael Wilson, the photographer who has taken most of the portraits of Lovett for his record covers, to Rose’s ranch, so that Lovett could ride his horses, Shiner’s Bootlegger and Fifth Avenue Cash. We arrived around ten. Rose was in the arena, with three other riders. During the summer, trainers begin working their horses around three or four in the morning to get them back to the barn before the worst heat.
A stable hand asked Lovett which horse he wanted to ride first, and he said Bootlegger. The stable hand put a saddle on the horse, and gave the reins to Lovett. In the arena, when Lovett’s turn came, Rose had him ride at a lope in a big circle, then in smaller ones, while she shouted remarks such as “All right, Lyle, you look awesome.” Lovett rode in so precise an agreement with his horse that he looked like a man on a carrousel—that is, his head went up and down, and his back remained straight. Watching him, I realized how poorly most horses are ridden in movies.
Rose next had Lovett ride to the center of the arena and perform four spinning turns, a trials requirement. “Four turns, Lyle, not four and a quarter,” she said when he finished. “Say one after you go, then two, then three, then whoa.” The next time, Lovett stopped on the mark, but his hat, a cowboy panama, lay brim up in the dirt. He rode off without it. Another rider dismounted and collected it. Since Lovett was engaged, the rider brought it over to the fence and gave it to me.
“Funny thing about the hat,” the cowboy said. “You can drop it in the arena, cows can step on it, defecate in it; horses trample it, fill it with dust and dirt; a tractor can even run it over; but don’t let a man touch it. No, sir.” Lovett has a collection of cowboy hats and hard-plastic hatboxes with leather handles to carry them in. After defending his hat from a stewardess who kept trying to stow it, he wrote “Don’t Touch My Hat.” The narrator challenges a man whom he catches studying his hat. “You can have my girl,” he says pointedly, “but don’t touch my hat.”
Rose came over to the fence and spoke to a young woman who had been watching the riders. “Run to the house and get me some of that extra-hold hair spray,” she said. “I’m going to fix Lyle’s hat.” When the young woman returned, Rose applied hair spray to the inside of the hatband, waited for it to get sticky, and gave Lovett the hat. “That should take care of it, Lyle,” she said. “It’s always better for a cowboy to wear his hat.”
Rose then had cows sent into the arena, one at a time, and the riders practiced stopping them and turning them on their heels, an activity called boxing. Lovett’s first cow spread its ears like wings and lowered its head. Each time it took a step, the horse took a step, too. It was like chess. Rose finally said, “Get Lyle another cow. This one’s lazy.” The next cow ducked and dodged, and the horse responded, leading it back and forth, snapping Lovett from one side to the other in his saddle as if someone were shaking him. I asked Rose if Lovett had talent for the work. “Lyle’s got good balance, good hands, his timing’s excellent, and he absorbs everything you tell him,” she said. “He needs to learn the basics of where the cow is, and where he needs to be, but it’s only the second time he’s done it.”
When the riding was finished, Rose and Lovett and Michael Wilson and I and the other riders drove in two trucks out to a pasture to look at some yearling fillies. Rose parked her truck in the field. About ten horses stood thirty feet away from us, eying us nervously. Rose called to them, and they moved a step or two closer.
Lovett had brought a video camera, and he pointed it at the horses. “Lyle, there’s a palomino filly coming with a star on her head,” Rose said. “I have grown to have an awesome affection for her.” Lovett pointed the camera at the horse. “She’s a pretty little mover,” Rose said. “She just flows on the ground.”
I began a conversation with Dickson Varner, a veterinarian whose specialty is horse fertility. He has clients in the Middle East, he said, whose horses are so valuable as studs that he can’t mention the names. If it was thought that they had problems, their fees would drop. He had been making a routine visit to Rose’s ranch, and she had asked him to stay over and ride.
Rose said it was time for lunch, and we got back in the truck. Someone mentioned that Varner had been a professional bull rider when he was younger. “My parents were rodeo producers,” Varner said modestly, “so it was a family job.”
I asked how old he was when he rode his first bull, and he said, “Nine. My father found an old crow-hopping, straight-tracking bull that would buck in a line and told me to ride him. I said I didn’t want to. He said it was the bull or him. I got on and made it across the arena, and finally I hit the fence, and I grabbed it and held on. My shirt was all tore up, and I was crying. I looked back, and he was waving me over to ride another one.”
I asked when he had given it up. “Last bull I rode was at Madison Square Garden, the weekend before veterinary school began,” he said. “At the time, I was recovering from a broken back.”
Rose served a big luxurious lunch of Mexican food. It was like a Spanish Thanksgiving. As for the conversation, everyone agreed that Amarillo had the toughest airport security anywhere, but someone pointed out that at least they offered you a boot jack.
Over the summer, I met up with Lovett one rainy night in Philadelphia, where he was to perform with the Large Band on a stage beside the Delaware River. The crowd waited in the rain and got soaked. I sat with Lovett on his bus and looked at tapes of the fillies in the field at Carol Rose’s ranch. Onstage, under a leaky awning, the drums and the piano and the pedal steel guitar were covered with big sheets of plastic, like drop cloths. The Large Band is very expensive to keep on the road. Lovett essentially plays five nights to break even, then makes his money on the sixth night. He can’t easily afford to cancel a show. The rain slowed to a drizzle around showtime. Lovett stood behind a curtain by the side of the stage with Gilmer, Hagen, and Viktor Krauss, his bass player.
“I think we should start out as a quartet,” Lovett said to Gilmer. “If we get a break in the rain, we can bring some people up.”
Gilmer nodded.
Lovett said, as if to himself, “O.K. No telling what this show will be like.” Then, to Gilmer, “So, quartet, huh?”
“Fine with me,” Gilmer said.
“Are John and Viktor all right with that?”
They both said they were.
“You quit anytime you want to,” Lovett said.
“It’s dry onstage, right?” Hagen asked.
“I don’t know,” Lovett told him. “Feel free to leave.” Then, “Let’s start with ‘Which Way Does That Old Pony Run,’ and after that I have no idea.” He turned to me and said, “It’s what the original trio would have been if we’d had a bass player. Or found one who’d work cheap enough.”
The audience received Lovett warmly. In the bright stage light, the rain made scratchy little tracks in the air above them. Sometimes it fell on the musicians. Gilmer now and then dried off his cymbals and drums with a white towel, like a man wiping down a bar. When he hit a cymbal, water sprayed from it. He is a big, lugubrious man whose presence can be imposing, but his playing is austere and elegant and understated. Mostly, it contributes emphasis here and there to what Lovett is singing. In the course of a concert, he and Lovett appear to be engaged in a sly and literate conversation that because of the deep familiarity between the speakers has come to be signified by its essentials and shared understandings. Two laconic men nodding and saying to each other, Yes, sir, and I know it, You don’t mean it, and How cool is that.
The four men played for about forty minutes, then the rain stopped. Mitch Watkins, the guitar player, walked out, and a stagehand pulled the plastic off the piano. The singers—three men and one woman—stood in the wings watching. On the next song, I heard the woman, Francine Reed, ask, “Are we supposed to be out there?” Then they all ran to the microphone in time for the chorus. Lovett played “Blue Skies” and “Summer Wind,” smiling just faintly enough so that you could tell the choices appealed to his sense of humor.
After the concert, I rode with Lovett and Kimble and Ultan Guilfoyle, a documentary filmmaker who is a friend of Lovett’s, and Mitch Watkins and Gilmer and Hagen and Gene Elders, the fiddle player, on the bus to Cape Cod, for Lovett’s next concert.
We arrived at the hotel in Hyannis about eight in the morning. Lovett was playing that night at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, which has a revolving stage. Kimble walked out, as she usually does, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Lyle Lovett and his Large Band.” The band played a sprightly, night-clubby swing tune on its own, then Lovett arrived and sang “Mack the Knife.” His version is mournful and sinister and not at all like the pop version that was a hit years ago for Bobby Darin. The stage turned slowly. A few songs into the show, the singers joined Lovett, which meant that there were now seventeen people on the stage. I was watching with Guilfoyle, who leaned toward me and whispered, “The stage has stopped turning.” Eventually, it was repaired, and the musicians wheeled slowly, like figures on a wedding cake.
The next day, Lovett and Guilfoyle borrowed motorcycles from Kevin Hines, a friend of Lovett’s, and the three of them rode at a dirt track near Hines’s house, just off the Cape. Lovett’s parents bought him a minibike when he was ten, to ride around the pastures. He became interested in the kind of dirt-track races that used to be called scrambles and now are called motocross. A motocross rider needs to be in good shape, to prevent being injured, so Lovett, to appease his father’s concerns, joined the track team and sometimes ran to school in the morning. His parents would drop off his clothes on their way to work, and he would shower in the gym. On the weekends, they took him to his races. His mother borrowed movie cameras from her office to film them, and then she began covering the races for a motocross newspaper.
Hines is a racer with a national reputation. A few years ago, Lovett bought a motorcycle dealership in Houston—Lyle Lovett Motorsports—and hired Hines to come down from Massachusetts and run it for a year. Riding motorcycles was another pleasure Lovett shared with his father, and a few years after he died Lovett sold the dealership.
Hines had come to our hotel. On the way to the track, he made a U-turn to pull into a place that had been a gas station and now had a lineup of Harley-Davidsons parked on its apron and a sign saying “Rent a Harley.” The three of them were curious to see what it cost. Lovett was dressed in a shirt and jeans and his cowboy boots. The owner was wearing a shirt and cut-off jeans and combat boots. He was closing for lunch. Lovett asked politely what someone needed to rent a Harley. “You need a motorcycle license,” the guy said. Lovett nodded. The guy looked Lovett up and down. “Then you need to convince me you can ride a Harley,” he said. Then he turned his back on us.
The track belonged to a contractor named Bob Kelliher, who had a sideline gravel business. Having removed the fill and gravel from a pit about the size of a couple of football fields, he decided to bulldoze a hilly, twisting motocross track into it. Kelliher is forty-five. He was going around the track when we arrived. It was a hot day. A motocross rider wears a helmet and lots of padding, and Kelliher was drenched with sweat. He pulled off the track and came over to us. While Hines and Guilfoyle were getting dressed, Lovett asked Kelliher if he minded having his picture taken, and when Kelliher said not at all, Lovett pointed his video camera at him and said, “Howdy, Bob, thank you for having us out here today.” When he got the shot he wanted, Lovett stepped into the truck and changed into riding gear. For the next hour or so, the four of them went round and round the track, while I tried to find places from which to tape them, with Lovett’s camera, flying over the hills. Lovett was tired when they finished but the happiest I had seen him.
We drove back to Hines’s house, which is on a pond, and borrowed bathing suits and went swimming. The water was dark and cool and we swam out a ways and treaded water, then went back to the dock. Hines got lobsters for us, and we had a fine dinner and went back to the hotel around ten.
The next morning at breakfast, Lovett’s manner was grave. The night before, at a racetrack outside Houston, one of his horses had fallen and broken her spine. His mother and uncle were in the stands, and had to go down to the track and make the decision to have the horse put to sleep. They had tried to reach Lovett, but he had gone to bed and turned off his phone. By the morning he had twelve messages. “She’s Dad’s last horse,” he said at breakfast. “He never got to see her grow up.”
Lovett bought back Adam Klein’s farm in 1995, using “all that great music-business money, which I’m still paying on,” he says. “I paid what they wanted, so I paid more than it was worth. I just wanted to get it back.” For years, he had avoided walking in the fields, so as not to see the “For Sale” signs.
The Kleins built on the perimeter of the farm, to be close to the roads. What is left of the fields is a pasture in the interior, like a huge courtyard. Not all the land around it remains in the family. Now and then a helicopter passes over the farm, and that is a neighbor who is the minister of three African-American congregations and travels among them in the helicopter. The pasture has been farmed since Adam Klein settled it. Lovett’s grandfather ran the place as a truck farm, and his sons ran it as a dairy farm. Lovett has horses and cattle on it.
One evening in September, Lovett and I and Jorge Mandujano, Lovett’s ranch hand, sprayed on bug spray, then rode horses along the fence line to the trees at the far end of the pasture. We circled a pond and turned back toward the barn. It took us about forty-five minutes. The cows lifted their heads from the grass and watched us. Lovett and Mandujano fed the horses, then Lovett and I played for a while with some big Dobermans he keeps. Then we walked past the house to a field and stopped among some shade trees. “We’d be standing on my grandmother’s front porch here,” Lovett said. He took a few steps. “The back door was about here,” he said, “and this holly tree was right at the end of her bedroom window.”
The sun was low over the pasture. The helicopter flew over the far fence line. “There goes the reverend,” Lovett said. We turned back toward the house. “By the time I was in high school, the old farmers had started selling their home places and moving up to Madisonville,” Lovett said. “It went on my entire growing up. Seemed like there was always a deal going on. Everything was changing, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be great to preserve this farm—have it all put back the way it was supposed to look.”
Lovett’s mother’s car turned in to her driveway. Kimble came out the back door of Lovett’s house and walked toward us.
“There’s Momma,” Lovett said to her when she arrived.
Mandujano was hosing down a horse under a shade tree.
“My great-grandpa’s barns were built in the eighteen-seventies, and when we fixed them up, for me that was a real proud accomplishment,” Lovett went on. “I understand everything has to change, but all my life I’ve been interested in preserving the old stuff.”
Kimble asked Lovett if he wanted to have dinner in town, meaning Houston. He said he wasn’t sure. He asked Mandujano to use fly spray on the Charolais bull, the one that had broken his leg.
Mandujano said he would.
“Don’t get in there with him,” Lovett said, and Mandujano grinned and said he wouldn’t. The light was fading. The color was leaving the fields. We stood quietly for a moment, then Lovett broke the silence, saying pensively, “Progress is the hardest thing for me to accept.” 
