LEFT OF NASHVILLE : Lyle Lovett’s Twisted Style Is Still a Little Bit Country but May Be More Suited to Hollywood

Though he doesn’t exactly look the part, singer/songwriter Lyle Lovett portrays a Pasadena policeman in “The Player,” director Robert Altman’s new Hollywood satire. Being self-aware enough to know that he doesn’t exactly exude heavy Jack Webb vibes, the thin, soft-spoken Lovett--a novice actor hired for the movie after the director saw him perform at the Greek Theatre two years ago--asked Altman before the shoot if perhaps, well, maybe he should take some acting lessons.

“He said, ‘Nah, that’ll just screw you up. Just come and hang out and get to know everybody. Besides, this guy you’re playing, he’s not from Hollywood but he’s hanging around these Hollywood people and trying to act cool, and he’s not a very good actor.’ ” Lovett enjoys a good chuckle over this seemingly impromptu bit of character motivation provided by Altman. “He told me that just to try to put me at ease about doing it.”

When on his own turf (the concert stage), Lovett isn’t any more of a Webb figure when telling the offbeat stories he often uses to introduce his narrative songs; his halting, comically laconic storytelling style is so far from a just the facts, ma’am approach that you might assume the tales he spins are apocryphal, the offbeat narrative lyrics pure conjecture.

“Oh, that’s really not true at all,” he retorts. “It is conjecture, or it’s an embellishment, for sure, but usually it comes out of some sort of . . . I mean, I don’t make up the stories.” Another chuckle. “I try to make ‘em funny, but they’re true.”

Lovett’s fourth album, “Joshua Judges Ruth” (go ahead, look ‘em up in the Old Testament table of contents, but don’t be long now), has not only its share of humor and truth but a remarkably fine mixture of blues, folk, swing, country and gospel besides to recommend it. Somehow the creator of its untraditional blend of disparate traditional strains and its sub-dry wryness couldn’t have come from anywhere but Texas.

“The kind of humor that I grew up with, it’s real subtle,” says Lovett, snacking on strawberries at a West Hollywood hotel near the Roxy, where he and his Large Band had a sold-out four-night stand last week. The band heads to Anaheim tonight for a performance at the Celebrity Theatre. “Southern humor,” Lovett continues, “it’s very clever, and there’s a lot of unspoken, understated kind of stuff. I think my songs reflect that. That’s what I’m trying to do--kind of capture the spirit of that kind of humor that I grew up with.”

But to peg Lovett as strictly or even mostly a humorist would be to pass over the many touching, laughless songs in his repertoire, and the knife-like digs that show up even in the lighter ones. Off-screen, a major musical “player” in his own right, the lanky Texan is a highly effective detective of the human condition.

The songs are “not self-revealing in a way that makes me uncomfortable, just self-revealing in a way that, I would hope, demonstrates an understanding of how people feel about things. It’s not like this really too-personal thing. I hope I’m not telling people more than they want to know! It’s really (about) the way people feel about things and react to them, that’s all.

“Like a story like ‘L.A. County’ (from the second album, “Pontiac”)--it’s about this sick guy who goes out and kills these people, but because the song is written from his point of view, you almost have some compassion for him.”

And, yes, if you believe his song introductions, “L.A. County” did stem from his own homicidal inclinations once upon a time toward a woman who left him to marry a man out West Coast way. “They’re divorced now,” he told the Roxy audience, and he feels fine, really, about the whole thing these days.

On the less murderous side, Lovett has a song on the new album called “Flyswatter/Ice Water Blues” that he describes as “actually a tender song about spending the last few minutes of the morning with your husband or wife before they leave for work.”

Reminded that he doesn’t have too many other sweet, heartfelt love songs--sans twists, anyway--in his four-album ouerve , he responds: “That’s my first one. I’m making progress, I think.”

Given the twisted quality of much of his writing, it may seem surprising that Lovett cites James Taylor as a big influence. Less surprising are more character-driven writers like Randy Newman. Lovett’s own tack--nonfiction through an eccentric filter--lies somewhere in the middle, with a rootsier, earthier, genre-crossing musical base.

“I enjoy country music from the standpoint of songwriting. I feel like I draw from very traditional forms of music in general--blues and country and these gospel arrangements on the new album. I mean, I’m not pushing any kind of musical boundaries, but I work with these forms that allow for a certain way to express an idea.

“I don’t feel like I’m doing anything new, at all,” he maintains. “If there’s anything that makes my stuff worth listening to, it’s just a point of view. But the tradition that I would want my songs to fit into is the singer/songwriter tradition, like Randy Newman and John Prine, and Tom Waits and James Taylor and Jackson Browne--those guys were a real inspiration to me. That is the kind of music you don’t hear on the radio these days.

“I’m a fan of those people and just sort of trying to do my own version of that, just with my own personal spin on it. That’s really something to aspire to. You go back and listen to a Joni Mitchell record and you think ‘Whoa, man, this was really on it, this was really perceptive and insightful, and these people were saying things that were really relevant about people.’

“And I think that writing about very specific things comes from the tradition of singer/songwriters that I grew up listening to that I really respect from Texas, like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Those are the kinds of songwriters that I learned how to play guitar playing their songs. I feel like listening to writers like that gave me permission, taught me what it was OK to write songs about. It is kind of a Texas thing.”

Lovett’s first two albums were marketed almost strictly to the country audience, though they encompassed the blues and other more far-reaching styles that would show up in greater abundance later, and he had some minor hits in the country market. As recently as Monday, Larry King was referring to Lovett as a “country-Western star.”

But by the time of his third effort, 1989’s “Lyle Lovett and His Large Band,” which was divided into blues-based and country-folk sides, it was clear that his target audience was probably somewhere left of Nashville, philosophically speaking. The new recording is his first produced under the auspices of MCA Records’ L.A. division instead of its Nashville wing.

Unlike k.d. lang, who has also made the shift from being marketed as a country artist to a pop one, Lovett evidences no bitterness about not having been a smash on that scene.

“Boy, from the point of view of the country music side of things, those songs were pretty outside in terms of acceptable material. I was lucky that radio was as receptive as it was. Those weren’t big hits; they were Top 20, but that’s it. They really were considered a bit odd as country songs go.

“Country radio, I think, is particularly personality-driven. And I think that’s one of the reasons I didn’t get played on country radio so much before, because my hair was weird. ‘He’s not quite right.’ And that’s OK, it’s really OK. I was never offended.

“I’ve gotten to do whatever I wanted to do with each album. I mean, I’ve never had to put myself in a position to appeal to people in a way that would change me . My audience allows me to be myself. I don’t really ever have to pretend, ever. I think that would be awful if you had to. And I think that people who are really successful, really in whatever they do, don’t pretend.

“The people that are really successful in country music, they’re the real thing. If to have been really successful at country music, if I would have had to pretend to have been from somewhere out in the country and only listened to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights and never gone to town and all that, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it very much.”

Though the self-deprecating Lovett says what he’s doing is nothing new, there’s surely something untested in the way he’s integrating what remains of his country inclinations with a more concentrated focus on particularly black styles--blues, gospel, R&B--and; how the looseness and rhythm inherent in these forms contrast with his own quiet, still, almost stiff intellectual white-guy presence.

“That’s an interesting observation,” he muses, as if he hadn’t thought of the juxtaposition before. “Yeah, it must be inevitable just because they’re my songs. . . . Or because I can’t dance.”

Who: Lyle Lovett.

When: Thursday, May 14, at 8 p.m. With the Fairfield Four.

Where: The Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim.

Whereabouts: Take Harbor Boulevard south from the Riverside (91) Freeway or north from Santa Ana (5) Freeway and head east on Broadway. The Celebrity is on the left, just past Anaheim Boulevard.

Wherewithal: Tickets are $23.

Where to call: (714) 999-9536.