The little picture is his frame

By Randy Lewis

Sept. 9, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Lyle LOVETT is looking rather prescient on tour this month, what with the lighthearted song “Election Day” in his set list, one of many songs from his latest album, “My Baby Don’t Tolerate,” that he’s spotlighting.

The iconoclastic Texas folk-country-rock singer-songwriter, however, quickly disavows any suggestion that the song is a sign that he’s turning away from the richly detailed slices of quirky life that have long been his signature. There’s no attempt to delve into timely political commentary.

“I should be so marketing savvy,” Lovett, 47, says from Houston after launching a new tour leg that brings him to the Hollywood Bowl for the first time Sunday, along with Shelby Lynne and eastmountainsouth. “Anybody worth his salt would have thought a year ago, ‘We should record this song next year in time for the election.’ But it was really just a happy accident.”

Indeed, the album came out nearly a year ago, and “Election Day,” which is getting airplay on some adult album alternative radio stations, has nothing to do with voting booths. It’s a good-natured but heartfelt plea from a down-on-his-luck character who’s trying to talk a police officer out of confiscating his rapidly diminishing drug stash. (The man complains “it probably ain’t enough to get me through election day.”)

That’s much more in keeping with Lovett’s hallmark style, although “Election Day” isn’t even one of his own compositions. It was written by Blaze Foley, a respected Texas songwriter best known for “If I Could Only Fly,” recorded in 1987 as a duet by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Foley, whom Lovett described as “a friend of mine and a wonderful songwriter,” was murdered in 1989.

“My point of view is more the little picture,” says the man with the supersized Brillo-pad hairdo and a topsy-turvy smile that wends its way across half his face. “I’ve never written about the big picture and the world in general. I’ve always been more interested in how you find your way through this day, in the little ways; the little choices you make from morning to evening.”

That description applies to “My Baby Don’t Tolerate,” which surfaced last September as Lovett’s first album of new material since 1996’s “The Road to Ensenada” and generated two more Grammy nominations for him.

In between, the four-time Grammy winner released three other albums: “Step Inside This House” (1998), a collection of songs by other writers Lovett has long admired; the “Live in Texas” (1999) concert recording; and his predominantly instrumental film score to Robert Altman’s “Dr. T and the Women” (2000).

He’s now at work -- as an actor -- in Altman’s upcoming film about Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion.” Lovett says he and Tom Waits appear as cowboys who are regular characters on the show.

For now, however, he’s still on the road focusing on songs from “Tolerate,” which run from the bouncily humorous “Cute as a Bug” and the wryly cautionary title tune to the whimsical “On Saturday Night” and three songs that deal in various ways with the death in 1999 of Lovett’s father.

Two of those, “I’m Going to Wait” and “I’m Going to the Place,” are gospel-drenched companion pieces that search for solace through spiritual faith in the face of staggering personal loss.

“It’s such a helpless feeling,” Lovett says. “You always see folks when they lose somebody, they are compelled to want to do something. But there’s just nothing you can do.”

Although he’s now been putting out albums for 18 years, since turning to songwriting after earning degrees in journalism and German at Texas A&M; University, Lovett says creating songs has become anything but a science.

Asked whether his approach to songwriting has changed over the years, he quips, “No, because I have no way that I go about putting a song together.

“Songwriting is mysterious to me, and it’s not something that just because you’ve done it before means that you can ever do it again,” he says. “So with each song I have to figure out how to do it. For me, it’s an endless pursuit of how do you do this? How do you write a song -- how does anybody? That’s the way it always feels.”

For a time after his celebrated marriage to, then split from, actress Julia Roberts, Lovett made an effort to distance his music from his personal life, stressing that songs people might have interpreted as reflective of that relationship were written before he and Roberts had gotten together.

Now, he says, it doesn’t bother him if fans ask whether certain songs are about her, or anything else.

“I always enjoy anybody who listens enough to be interested -- that’s always gratifying,” Lovett says. “But you can’t really know what people think, I just hope they think something. People have a myriad of ways of understanding things, and I’m not offended by any of that. I think a lot of what you deal with is good old human nature, and it’s human nature to read things into [songs]. Some people think they know when they don’t and sometimes maybe they get it right.

“My songs are always based in something real, even if a song takes a turn, and takes on its own life away from the reality of my life.”

Randy Lewis can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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Lovett on disc

1986 “Lyle Lovett” (Curb)

1987 “Pontiac” (Curb)

1989 “Lyle Lovett and His Large Band” (Curb)

1992 “Joshua Judges Ruth” (Curb)

1994 “I Love Everybody” (Curb)

1996 “The Road to Ensenada” (Curb)

1998 “Step Inside This House” (MCA)

1999 “Live in Texas” (MCA)