Song unlocks appreciation for Lyle Lovett’s kindness

EL DORADO — An acoustic guitar is not complicated once you get past the math that goes into determining scale lengths and the setting of the frets. It is a box with a neck attached, strung with wire. You pluck the strings and change their length—and therefore the frequency at which they vibrate—with your hands.

Yet acoustic guitars are complex in the sense that what is recognized as their sound is composed of several different voices—strings, body, neck—singing together but in imperfect time with one another.

You fret a note on the guitar and you don’t just get that note, you get a choir of harmonics, overtones and undertones that register as an instrument’s unique voice.

The conventional thinking is that you can best capture this voice with a high-quality microphone expertly placed. (A popular spot for recording is to place the mic about 12 to 16 inches from the 12th fret on the guitar’s neck.)

While there are all kinds of acoustic guitars with different degrees of ornament and filigree made from different materials but usually from wood, some people will tell you too much is made of the brand, build and vintage of the instrument.

They say it’s not important that John Hiatt is playing a Gibson LG 2 manufactured during World War II (which you can tell from the “Only a Gibson is Good Enough” banner on the headstock) because once you feed trembling air into an electronic signal chain—through the sound hole pickups which maybe blends the hum of a single-coil magnet with a condenser mic, to a direct box, out to the board where the sound man slides and tweaks it—you’ve obscured and minimized whatever small differences might exist between a sikta spruce solid top and plywood. Some will tell you the strings don’t recognize the hand that sets them vibrating.

That’s all right. Not everyone who goes to church is a believer.

Some people go because they want to be seen as church goers. Or because they are looking to be filled with an elusive spirit. Faith, they say, is a gift, and not everyone has received it. Some people can’t give themselves over; you can’t judge them for that, we all have capabilities and limitations.

As regards Lyle Lovett, I have been agnostic, respectful of his talent but largely untouched by his recorded performances. I have listened to them and nodded, filed them away in the section reserved for Texas singer-songwriters who aren’t Townes Van Zandt or Guy Clark. I’ve never said a bad word about him; I have always liked “If I Had a Boat.”

On the other hand, I have been a Hiatt fan since the beginning of his recording career, long enough to consider his 1979 album Slug Line a comeback attempt. Long enough that I still offer Elvis Costello as a reference point to his career (a comparison that makes sense again now, though the two artists followed divergent paths through the ’80s and ’90s). Lovett did not deter me, but Hiatt is what drew me to First Financial Music Hall at the Griffin last Sunday night.

I’ve seen him a few times over the years, most recently in January 2018 in North Little Rock at Pulaski Tech’s Center for Humanities and Arts. He played half of that show with the Goners, the band with which he recorded his second comeback album, 1988’s Slow Turning, but the more intriguing part of that show was his solo set. I like songs and songwriters and Hiatt has been one of our best for more than 40 years.

It’s easy to get to El Dorado these days; we have friends here and everybody ought to be proud of what they’re doing in the former boomtown’s downtown. The Murphy Arts District is the real thing, and its organizers haven’t made a misstep yet. I plan on coming to a lot of shows here.

It didn’t bother me that Hiatt didn’t play my favorite John Hiatt song “Only the Song Survives,” about how a song can be like a dream, pulled together from free-floating anxieties, flash images and unconscious pre-occupations, because he played other songs, like the devastating “Crossing Muddy Waters,” about the time his estranged wife committed suicide the day before their daughter’s first birthday.

(Yes, I am familiar with Hiatt’s material.)

I like that he seemed at ease with himself, talking to Lovett—who should have his own talk show—and the way his fingers wrenched sui generis sounds out of that beat-up old guitar. I like his whistling which, like faith, is a gift.

I even like his glottal voice, though he started out singing a bit flat; at times Lovett would contribute a harmony line that seemed at least partially designed to lift Hiatt into pitch.

Hiatt’s voice has always been something to debate; either you like it or find it affected. I’ve always thought it a wonderful instrument for a songwriter working in a rootsy idiom; now that Hiatt has lost a little off the top of his range, I think it’s even stronger. But I’ve never favored choirboys.

Which is what I thought Lovett was; but maybe I’d never really heard him before. I once thought he was a novelty act, then came to think of him as an interesting but fairly academic artist who pulled together elements of Western swing, jazz, blues and country.

But then I heard him play his first song of the evening, “She’s Already Made Up Her Mind,” from his 1992 album Joshua Judges Ruth live.

It is a song I’d heard a few times, most recently a few nights before the concert when we prepping for the show. But I had never really listened to it. It’s stark with a gorgeous melody and a lyric about the death of hope:

So now she’s sitting at one end of the kitchen table

And she is staring without an expression

And she is talking to me without moving her eyes

Because she’s already made up her mind

I heard “talking to me without moving her eyes” and had a revelation. Lovett impresses, not just with his music, but with his intelligence and most of all, his kindness. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a Road to Damascus moment like this, where a line from a song seems to unlock something vital about an artist, where I just seemed to get it.

Having got it, I don’t think I can go back. I believe in Lyle Lovett.