Lyle Lovett looks back at ‘Pontiac’ 30 years later
Some songs require living, and others require labor. And some are “sky songs,” a phrase songwriter Townes Van Zandt used to describe the tunes that came so easily that they felt more like a gift.
Of course, even sky songs aren’t necessarily miracles: A lifetime spent fishing assists a fisherman in knowing where to set up, an advantage any other ding-dong with a rod and a net might not have.
But if you go binary with sweat songs versus sky songs, Lyle Lovett says “If I Had a Boat” — his endearing and enduring song, a lovely surrealist piece of writing about solitude and partnership that cast Roy Rogers, Dale, Trigger, the Lone Ranger and Tonto — was a sky song.
“I was skipping history class,” Lovett says. “I was in school, it was in the morning, and I knew I was supposed to be going to class. But I had this idea and I thought, ‘Maybe I have something here?’ And I thought maybe it was worth skipping history. It’s one of those songs I finished in less than an hour.”
Less than an hour. So in the amount of time Lovett’s classmates spent learning some sliver of history they likely forgot, he wrote a song that his fans still love 30 years later. “Boat” endures in Lovett’s setlists and also found its way to Rolling Stone’s 100 greatest country songs of all time. The song opened “Pontiac,” Lovett’s breakthrough album, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
If the timeline of “If I Had a Boat” seems a little stretched, well, Lovett had the song in the pocket of his suit jacket for several years before most people heard it.
Tim Leatherwood, who has for nearly half a century operated the songwriter’s haven Anderson Fair, remembers hearing the song in the club in the early ’80s.
“It was the kind of song you don’t forget because it didn’t sound like anything else at the time,” Leatherwood says.
As has been well documented, Lovett wrote for the Battalion when he was a student at Texas A&M University, interviewing songwriters he admired. He also played his own songs, booking songwriters on campus so he could be the opening act. Just off campus, he found himself picking and singing with Robert Earl Keen, another aspiring songwriter who became a lifelong friend.
A Klein native, Lovett’s interest in ’70s folk and country music led him back home, where he took gigs at Anderson Fair. He traveled Europe and there met a band from Scottsdale, Ariz., that would become longtime collaborators. He traveled to Arizona and made a demo, with the band helping him flesh out his songs. That demo — 18 songs — got him a record deal in Nashville.
So though it’s easy to plot out Lovett’s early recording career, his first three albums were a mix of songs old and new, some simply remixed from that original demo, others re-recorded. “Lyle Lovett” came out in 1986 and nearly hit the Top 10 for country albums. He thought “Pontiac” would follow the next year, though it wasn’t released until 1988.
Some of the songs were new: “L.A. County,” “Pontiac,” “Black and Blue.” Others were pulled from the demo. Lovett says “Simple Song” was the second-oldest he’s written among those he’s recorded, and “Give Back My Heart” was the oldest.
“Simple Song” found Lovett applying a lesson from a composition class in college to music.
“It was the five-paragraph paper,” he says. “Opening paragraph, three more paragraphs, and then one that closes. I wondered if I could write a song that way.”
I asked him about the sequencing of “Pontiac” because the album takes a daring, dark move in the middle of its side B, with “Black and Blue,” “Simple Song” and “Pontiac.”
“With the sequencing, one side was meant to be more country, more steel guitar,” he says. “The other was meant to be bluesier or folkier.”
Such a push/pull dynamic made more sense then: “Pontiac” was originally released on LP and cassette.
“Pontiac,” the record, proved telling about how Lovett’s career would subsequently go. It did marginally better on the country charts. But it also found its way into the Billboard 200. Nobody was going to confuse it with George Michael’s “Faith” as a pop juggernaut. But it was the first indication that Lovett had a potential audience outside Nashville’s boilerplate programming.
Nashville’s music industry knows how to make an outsider feel unwelcome. Lovett is a strange case where in doing so, the city’s staid music industry helped him find a space where he belonged.
“He needed a chance to find an audience that didn’t necessarily know it wanted to hear him,” says Tony Brown, an exec and producer who worked with Lovett in the ’80s. “He could’ve made country hits, but he was much more interesting an artist if he didn’t have to follow that path. He knew who he was and what he wanted to do. And he didn’t need to be trying to write country hits.”
Brown appeared to know this shift was going to happen. He accommodated Lovett’s vision, even before the singer and songwriter had any sort of sales track record.
Traditionally, country-music albums out of Nashville include photos of the artist on the front, in an attempt to make them identifiable and also approachable. Lovett was presented clearly on the cover of “Lyle Lovett,” but “Pontiac” was the first of his soft-focus black-andwhite album covers, a design motif that has run through most of the rest of his work.
His was not a music designed for instant relatability. The population in the town of “Pontiac” included killers and those victimized by violence. He didn’t offer a “High Noon” black-hat/white-hat world with heroes and villains.
The lack of color and focus on the cover of “Pontiac” underscored that.
The album’s sequencing, Lovett says, was all done on a Velcro whiteboard. Songs were written on little panels and moved around until the 11 songs found their place, starting with “Boat,” a curious almost-folk song, and steering through songs that were countrier and then those with more brass. The album took that dark folk/ blues turn near the end and then wrapped with “She’s Hot to Go,” spiffy, brassy and funny.
The album sold more than a half million copies, a formidable sum for a recording that wasn’t all over radio.
“Lyle Lovett and His Large Band” followed a few months later in 1989, with a few more songs from the old days and some new ones, too. It performed better on both the country and pop charts than his first two albums.
It led him west, where he’d keep working on albums that found an audience that liked his country music more than the country music on the radio.