POP MUSIC : Let Lyle Be Lyle : It’s funny what marriage can do to change your whole outlook on life. Ask Lyle Lovett.

Two joggers are curious during their midmorning run about a photographer who has set up equipment next to the sleek tour bus parked behind the Four Seasons Hotel.

Slowing, one of them walks over to the front of the bus to learn whose picture is being taken. He sees a lean man with a leather jacket, turtleneck sweater, jeans and-- tip off! --an unruly mound of hair.

Returning quickly to his female companion, the jogger says, “It’s that country singer . . . the one with the funny hair who’s married to. . . .”

Before he can get the name out, the woman asks excitedly, “Is Julia there too?”

Lyle Lovett, the man leaning against the bus as the photographer snaps away, is too far from the couple to hear the exchange, but it’s nothing new.

Anybody in pop music is used to attention from the media, but the Texas singer-songwriter, whose often bittersweet tales about relationships have been widely acclaimed, stepped into a whirlwind of curiosity when he married actress Julia Roberts 18 months ago.

Because most people first heard of him through his marriage to Roberts, some may have seen the weird hair and stereotyped him as a novelty songwriter who was getting his 15 minutes of fame.

There was the initial rush of stories--covers everywhere from People magazine to the National Enquirer--all asking what the Hollywood beauty saw in this guy with the “Eraserhead” haircut.

As the months rolled by, the questions got darker and sometimes cruel because the couple’s work schedules, which keep them apart for much of the year, make them a target for gossip: Was the marriage in trouble?

When Lovett played the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood in October, two dozen photographers stood guard near the door of this same tour bus, hoping for a shot of the pair. Watching that scene, you had the sense of a man under siege and fighting for his artistic self-respect.

Sitting on the tour bus later this day as he heads toward Syracuse and another concert, Lovett tries to be philosophical.

“I do my best not to let any of this bother me even when I run into people who ask you to sign the cover of National Enquirer,” he says. “I know all this fascination isn’t about me, so I don’t take it personally in that way.

“Besides, I think I have definitely peaked in terms of pop culture. I don’t think anything I’ll do in my life on a public level will be as newsworthy, and maybe that’s a good thing because all I’m interested in doing is what I’ve always done . . . write about my life.”

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The first things you heard in pop circles about Lovett back in the mid-’80s were his goofy hair and his marvelous songs.

The hair was a bit of a gimmick.

Lovett always liked to wear it long, but he let things get a bit out of control on an early tour with Bonnie Raitt and he noticed that critics were writing about his hair. It seemed like an easy way to get attention so he adopted it as a trademark.

But the songs are real.

Though Lovett was identified at first as a country writer because he recorded in Nashville, he has more in common with a wide range of tasteful craftsmen, from John Prine and Randy Newman to Rickie Lee Jones and Tom Waits, who appeal to discriminating adults throughout pop.

There is in a wry heartache song like “God Will,” from Lovett’s 1986 debut album, the clever wordplay that has led some journalists to describe him as a writer of “twisted love songs.” The song is about a guy responding to a woman who has cheated on him:

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So who says he’ll forgive you

A nd says that he’ll miss you

And dream of your sweet memory

God does

But I don’t

God will

But I won’t

And that’s the difference

Between God and me.

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There are also quirky elements in other Lovett songs, leading the general media to often dismiss Lovett’s work as “novelty.” Yet there are poignant, insightful edges that give his music more character and substance.

In “She’s Already Made Up Her Mind,” from 1992’s “Joshua Judges Ruth” album, Lovett writes about the breakup of a relationship with a tenderness and ache that are rare in pop:

So now she is 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.

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By the early ‘90s, one of the fans attracted by those songs was Julia Roberts. The actress named Lovett her favorite country singer during a TV interview a few years ago, but they didn’t actually meet until a few months before their marriage.

Susan Sarandon’s brother, Terry Tomalin, a sportswriter at the St. Petersburg Times, told Lovett in early 1993 that he had just gotten back from Costa Rica with Sarandon and Roberts and that Roberts had all Lovett’s albums. So, Lovett decided to phone her. Things moved quickly from there.

Rather than the flashy Hollywood wedding, the couple caught everyone by surprise by getting married at a Lutheran Church in Marion, Ind.--a spot that owes its unlikely place in ‘90s history to the chance dictates of Lovett’s summer tour schedule.

Since the marriage, Lovett and Roberts have carefully avoided talking publicly about their relationship--refusing even to refute the occasional speculation about tensions, knowing the words would just provide more media fodder.

Wary of prying journalists, Lovett has largely stopped doing interviews, even though the added promotion could have boosted sales of his latest album, “I Love Everybody.” Even so, the collection, with more than 250,000 copies sold in three months, is slightly ahead of the pace of Lovett’s last three albums, each of which eventually sold more than 500,000 copies.

Lovett’s decision to include only old songs in the album, however, may have kept the collection from stepping up to another commercial level: The pop world traditionally shows less interest in albums filled with old songs.

When Lovett announced the songs were going to be old, the natural suspicion was that he wanted to avoid new material so that the media wouldn’t spend all its time trying to figure out which songs were about his marriage.

But he says he simply wanted to pull together some of his old favorites that had never fit into other albums, songs that worked together for him. Lovett says he already has enough new songs for an album, which should be in the stores next fall.

You can already imagine people poring over that album looking for clues to their relationship. If you read between the lines as he talks on the bus, meanwhile, you get the impression that things are much healthier between the two than recent tabloid speculation would suggest.

“You have to keep focused on the reality of this relationship and not on the publicity,” he says, sitting on a couch in the front of the bus. “I’m married to this girl and I am in love with her. We have a relationship that doesn’t get played in the tabloids . . . what you hear about is a fictionalized version.”

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Despite the shy, self-effacing manner that comes across when Lovett appears on a TV talk show or has been profiled over the years, he is an articulate man who speaks easily about his career and background. He does, however, have disarming lack of pretense.

“All my life people have said I was shy, but I’ve never felt particularly shy,” he says, as the bus speeds through the New England chill. “I know I don’t have the kind of personality that walks into a room and commands everyone’s attention, plus I’d much rather be quiet until I get to know someone a little bit.”

Lovett, who has degrees in both journalism and German from Texas A&M; University, is much like Bonnie Raitt in the sense he is as happy to salute his own musical heroes, notably such Texas songwriters as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, as he is promoting his own music.

He’s also generous with his time, encouraging those artists’ careers. In the last year, he produced demos for veteran Houston songwriter Eric Taylor and sang on the debut album by another Texas veteran, Vince Bell. He and Billy Williams have also been producing demos for the critically admired Kelly Willis.

Record producer Billy Williams, who has known Lovett since the days they made a demo tape together in Phoenix in the early ‘80s, thinks of the Texas songwriter as “driven” and “tenacious.”

Lovett looks puzzled when Williams’ adjectives are relayed to him. He says he has never thought of himself in those terms, simply as someone who pursued his love of music, never dreaming in the early days that he’d be able to do much more than play some of the Texas clubs where he used to go to see his own cult favorites.

For all the talk about the music business being a tough, cold place, he says he found publishers and record executives in Nashville wonderfully supportive. He still marvels at how songwriter Guy Clark, best known for such country-folk gems as “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” sent tapes to power players around Nashville, urging them to sign the young Texan even though Clark and Lovett had never met.

Asked what word he’d choose to describe himself, Lovett pauses briefly, then says, “Lucky.”

Lyle Pearce Lovett was born Nov. 1, 1957, and was raised in Klein, Tex., a town 25 miles north of Houston that was named after Lovett’s great-great-grandfather.

Though the area was taken over in the ‘70s by subdivisions, it was still a farming community during Lovett’s youth and he remains so attached to the area that he still has the house that his grandfather built in 1911.

Lovett’s parents both worked for oil giant Exxon--his father in marketing, his mother a training specialist. An only child, Lovett spent much of his time alone in the house because his closest school chum lived five miles away. He spent much of his time playing the guitar, taking lessons as early as the second grade.

Lovett’s main interest during his teen years, however, was motorcycles. He’s so lanky that he doesn’t strike you as much of an athlete, but he raced motorcycles off-road as a hobby. His dream in those days, in fact, was to own a motorcycle shop.

When it was time to go to college, Lovett chose Texas A&M; because it was just 70 miles away, which meant he could come home often. He majored in journalism because writing came naturally, but he was attracted more and more to music, performing at a coffeehouse on campus.

Through friends, he discovered the music of some great Texas songwriters, cult artists like Clark and Willis Alan Ramsey, whose music combined country, folk and blues. He also loved blues legends like Lightnin’ Hopkins and the more obscure blues figures who regularly played Houston clubs.

He was still pretty much limited to playing Texas clubs until he got a booking in 1983 at a music festival in Luxembourg, of all places. It proved important because it’s where he met a group of Phoenix musicians, including Billy Williams.

Lovett, who thought of himself at the time as more a writer than a singer, had been thinking about making a demo tape, hoping to interest someone in recording his songs. He asked the musicians if they’d play on the tape.

Williams, who grew up on the Western swing of Bob Wills and Pee Wee King, remembers the first time he heard Lovett’s songs.

“My mouth just dropped open,” he recalls in a separate interview. “He played ‘God Will’ and some of the other songs that would eventually be on the first album and I thought, ‘Good Lord, this guy can write. . . . --’

“But I also thought, ‘He’s going to have some trouble in Nashville because the songs are a little, well, different.’ ”

Williams was right on both counts.

Signed in 1985 to MCA/Curb Records, Lovett became part of an eclectic group of much-admired artists, including Steve Earle and k.d. lang, who were bringing new energy and spirit to Nashville.

Despite enough country strains in such songs as “God Will” and “Cowboy Song” to get modest country airplay, Lovett was never really accepted by the country market despite a Grammy in 1989 as best male country artist. Who ever heard in those days, for instance, of a country singer being backed by a cello and congas instead of a steel guitar and fiddle? Instead of the old rhinestone shirts or Wrangler jeans, Lovett and his band wore suits.

By the second album, the marketing of Lovett’s albums was shifted to MCA’s Los Angeles headquarters with the idea of trying to reach a wider pop base.

“It was always my feeling that the people coming to my shows weren’t the typical country audience that the records were being marketed to,” he says. “So I wanted to try to match up the marketing with what I thought was my audience.”

As the musical shading on his albums expanded to include blues and gospel, the coloring at his live shows expanded to include horns and gospel-soul backing vocalists.

The glowing reviews kept coming and the audience slowly expanded.

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Despite his gifts as a writer, Lovett may be known to more people for his small roles in Robert Altman films than for his music.

He appeared as a tortured baker in “Short Cuts,” but he made the most impact in “The Player,” where he played a mysterious, tight-lipped police detective. He’s also cast as a Texas millionaire in the new “Ready to Wear.”

A big movie fan, Lovett co-directed an extended version of a promotional video for his song “Penguins” while in Paris working on “Ready to Wear.” The work--which will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival--features interviews with Altman, Lauren Bacall and others from the film.

Despite his interest in films, Lovett doesn’t see acting ever competing with music for his time, unlike Kris Kristofferson, the actor, versus Kris Kristofferson, the musician, in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

The only reason he appeared in the films at all was the chance to work with Altman, whose work he has long admired.

“If Robert Altman calls you and asks you to be in one of his films, you say, ‘Sure, I’d love to,’ then you go, ‘Oh, my God, what am I doing?’ But it’s too late.

“It’s always inspiring to work with people who love what they do the way Altman does. He has never stopped making movies, whether he was accepted at the time by the movie business or not. He has always gone from one thing to the next . . . and his love for what he does comes through.”

There’s sometimes a dark, satiricedge in his songs--including his old “L.A. County,” where a jilted lover shows up at his old flame’s wedding and shoots down both the bride and groom--but Lovett likes to think of his music, like Altman’s work, as inspiring or uplifting even as it showcases human foibles.

You sense that side of him when he talks about the wickedly funny yet violent “Pulp Fiction,” the year’s most talked-about film.

“I was able to enjoy it more the second time because the first time I just knew any second something horrific . . . something gory was going to happen on the screen and I kinda dreaded seeing it,” he says.

“I liked it as I watched it, but I was a little uncomfortable where he was headed with it. I wanted the violence to have a point and that (happened) for me when Samuel Jackson delivers the moral in the coffee shop . . . when he says, ‘You are the weak and I am the tyranny of evil men, but I am trying to be the shepherd.’ I thought that was brilliant and it made me feel comfortable with liking the movie.”

What makes a song or movie work for Lovett is something that touches on an element of truth--something growing out of an actual situation. In his own work, Lovett covers an unusually wide range of emotions and styles--from “Here I Am,” a wacky tale of a flirtation with a waitress, to “Family Reserve,” which centers on a visit to a cemetery plot.

“Sometimes people ask why I don’t write more songs in a particular style, which is interesting to me because it assumes I have a vast array of ideas and techniques to choose from,” Lovett says as the bus nears Syracuse.

“To get an idea for a song and to make it work is still the hardest thing and most important thing I do. Every time I write a song that I am happy with there is part of me saying that I may never write another one.”

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The atmosphere is relaxed as Lovett and the six band members step from the bus and head for the dressing room of the Syracuse Theatre, an old movie palace where they’ll play three hours later. There’s just one person with a camera waiting by the side door--and the camera is cheap enough to suggest it’s a fan, not a tabloid scout. Every night, he says, isn’t like the crush at the Pantages.

James Gilmer, who has played congas with Lovett since the Houston club days, thinks Lovett is handling the pressure well.

“Lyle has always seemed so genuine that I never thought any of this would change him . . . whether it was going from a 20-seat club to signing a record contract to getting his picture in the paper. He’s always been able to handle everything really well.”

As fans do start showing up, they speak affectionately of Lovett--just as the fans had the night before in Boston. Most of them have been listening to his music for years, having found him chiefly through reviews or the recommendations of friends. They were all shocked when he married Roberts, but none expressed concern that it would change him. The only fear some had was that it would bring “sightseers” to the shows and ruin the intimacy of the performances.

But that hasn’t seemed to have happened.

“I’ve been listening to his music for so long now that I feel like I know him,” Jim Tyler, 38, said in Boston. “The thing that strikes me most about the music is that it seems genuine.”

Lovett is pleased when told of the fans’ comments.

“To me, that’s the goal. Art is sincere. Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life. That comes through in Dylan, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson. There is no separating their life from their music. The craft of it becomes their life, too. Most of my songs I write as a way to communicate with a particular person and they are full of personal references. . . .

“As far as what’s happened with me, I think all you can do is keep going forward in as normal a way as you can and trust that everything will be OK.”