CD Odyssey Disc 1517: Lyle Lovett

Today is Remembrance Day, and after I write this review I’ll be heading down to the cenotaph to pay my respects to Canada’s veterans and war dead. For someone like me, who has never experienced war first-hand, the horrors our veterans faced to preserve our country is unfathomable. I read a lot of military history, however, which if I am fortunate will be the closest I, or my loved ones, will ever have to come to a battlefield.

I recommend to you John Keegan’s “The Face of Battle” and “The Price of Admiralty”. These books describe battles across many centuries both from an organizational and strategic overview, but also from the gritty perspectives of what it would have been like for those individual soldiers in the thick of it. These books are harrowing accounts of just what people endure so that we can sleep safe and sound in our soft beds each night.

Disc 1517 is….  Lyle Lovett and His Large Band

Artist: Lyle Lovett

Year of Release: 1989

What’s up with the Cover? In the days before digital cameras sometimes your best picture from the party was also a bit blurry.

How I Came To Know It: “Here I Am” was the first Lyle Lovett song I knew as I was getting into his music. It was on this record, making purchasing it an easy decision.

How It Stacks Up: I have 11 Lyle Lovett albums and put this one in at #8. That bumps a few earlier decisions, but we’ll catch up on all that when I’ve reviewed them all (three to go). For now, if you see anything #8 or lower in a previous review, mentally bump it down one spot. I could have put “…and His Large Band” as high as #6, but let’s keep the depth chart disruption to a minimum, shall we?

Ratings: 3 stars

“…and His Large Band” represents a departure for Lyle, as he blended his blues/country croon with a big band sound for the first time. Lyle has kept elements from this new sound through the rest of his career, including a second big-band record almost twenty years later (2007’s “It’s Not Big, It’s Large” reviewed back at Disc 1331). However, 1989 was his first foray and the results are…mixed.

At this point I should note that “…and His Large Band” was a critical darling and even won a Grammy. Long-time readers may know the disdain I hold for the Grammys (seriously, put the Steely Dan records down Grammy voters) but I do recognize why critics liked this record.

First of all, the musicianship is tight as hell. Throughout his career, Lyle has shown a preternatural talent for finding the best of the best and he’s done it again here. Further, the band is as ‘large’ as advertised, and with so many more instruments there is even more pressure on everyone to be tight. I listened multiple times and didn’t hear a single note missed. More importantly, the feel of the record has the alchemy great records do, with everyone playing their individual best, while never bumping the elbow of their fellows.

This is only Lyle’s third record, and his vocals benefit from the combination of youth, and increased production values. Lyle is a natural crooner and is able to maintain personality and emotion throughout his range where a lot of lesser crooners just sound like they’re doing vocal gymnastics to prove they can.

There are plenty of good examples of this, but I was drawn to his cover of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” The song’s natural plaintive quality is made for Lyle’s delivery. It has always been thematically complicated, given its dubious suggestion that all men are worth standing by, where some are plainly douchebags not worthy of the sentiment. Having Lyle sing it adds an additional twist – is this the man in question, appealing to some kind of external authority that his woman not leave him, or just a romantic notion sung into the ether of a world less complicated than the real one? It isn’t clear, and Lyle sings it so straight-up as to give you no clues.

In some respects, it is Lyle’s complicated yet simultaneously idealized vision of love. This is a theme that threads through all his work. On this record we have songs like “I Married Her Because She Looks Like You” where the singer extolls all the virtues of his wife that his ex did not possess, but as the title suggests, he doth protest much too much.

Lovett’s wry humour is on display as well, with the (relatively) famous “Here I Am” which has one of the finest mixtures of comparison logic and poetry I’ve heard with:

“If Ford is to Chevrolet
What Dodge is to Chrysler
What Corn Flakes are to Post Toasties
What the clear blue sky is to the deep blue sea
What Hank Williams is to Neil Armstrong
Can you doubt we were made for each other”

If it seems like gibberish, read it again, because it is sneaky brilliance merely disguised as random ravings.

Where the album lost me was on the jazzier elements. The record opens with “The Blues Walk” which I can assure you is not a Blues Walk, but very much a jazz walk, which is not a walk I tend to enjoy. Starting a record in such a way might have been new and exciting for Lyle, but it was annoying for me. Later on “I Know You Know” has a lounge singer quality that was supposed to put me in a slow and sexy sway, but just had me nodding off around the time the saxophone kicks in.

This is my second review in a row where, due to a lack of free time, I ended up listening to much longer than I would have wished. The previous time (Dry Cleaning’s “New Long Leg”) each listen became progressively more annoying. This time, I liked the record more on each new listen, which is always a good sign.

Best tracks: Here I Am, Stand By Your Man, If You Were to Wake Up