The tender aside elicited the expected ripple of adoring "awws" from the comfortably full room and shone a light upon this latest facet of the 66-year-old Lovett’s personality: unabashedly happy dad.
The unalloyed ardor for his family unit — a topic to which Lovett frequently returned throughout the two-hour-plus set Tuesday — provided a sweet counterpoint to his lightly acerbic songs, which breeze among country, folk, pop, gospel and R&B. (The stomping, surging “Church” was an early highlight that had the audience clapping along.)
The tartly funny “Here I Am” or “She’s No Lady” hit a little different when the urbane man singing them moves from lines like, “She loves to tell me she hates the things I do” to gushing about photos of his young children shopping for Halloween costumes.
Lovett will perform again Wednesday at the Majestic (with an opening set from the War & Treaty), then head over to Fort Worth for his annual stop at the Bass Performance Hall on Oct. 22.
He’s joined on these dates by the expansive Large Band, which counted among its ranks on Tuesday the following pros (not to mention his own contributions on acoustic guitar at various points): pianist Jim Cox, fiddler-vocalist Stuart Duncan, pedal steel player Buck Reid, drummer Russ Kunkel, bassist Leland Sklar, guitarist-mandolinist Jeff White, electric guitarist James Harrah, alto saxophonist Brad Leali, tenor saxophonist Mace Hibbard, trumpeter Steve Herman, trombone player Charles Rose, and backing vocalists Willie Greene, Jr., Lamont Van Hook and Amy Keys.
Lyle Lovett and His Large Band performs on Oct. 15, 2024, at the Majestic Theatre in Dallas.
Preston Jones
That such a sprawling ensemble can tighten up and play with such nuance is a breathtaking testament to the collective skill of those arrayed on the bare stage — “My Baby Don’t Tolerate” seemed to stretch for more than 10 minutes Tuesday, as nearly every player took a brief solo; Kunkel’s contribution dropped the beat away to almost nothing, reducing the room to pin-drop silence. It also demonstrates the ease with which Lovett marshals whatever talent is gathered around him.
Lovett or Leave It
A Lovett performance is characterized by the stories tumbling forth between the songs — a near-stream of consciousness touching on everything from attending Texas A&M with fellow Texas troubadour Robert Earl Keen to his history playing in Dallas (complete with an affectionate plug for Poor David’s Pub), and the pleasures of having his family join him on the road in the summer to the virtues of bluegrass — and Tuesday was no different. (An extended discourse about Brussels sprouts tacos elicited some of the loudest reaction all night — hearing boos at a Lovett concert is shocking, but then again, Texans are nothing if not defensive about the quality of Tex-Mex dishes.)What was unusual, and alternately startling and saddening, was Lovett’s singing voice. There were multiple instances on Tuesday where something — it was not entirely clear what — caused Lovett’s fine-grained tenor to hitch and catch and jerk. It was not continuous, nor was it consistent. His speaking voice between songs betrayed no such issues.
Emotional moments like “This Old Porch,” “12th of June” or “Nobody Knows Me” were marred by Lovett’s seeming straining to hit the notes he would ordinarily reach with ease. No mention of any affliction was made Tuesday — Lovett sipped water from a plastic bottle and another beverage from a Styrofoam cup, but not with any discernible avidity — but it was jarring and the only real blemish on an otherwise smoothly executed evening.
Gratitude for parenthood — “I’m grateful I got a chance to be a dad at all,” he said late Tuesday — often competed with affection for those with whom he was performing, as he made explicit at one point: “They say never meet your heroes, but I’m lucky to stand on stage with mine every night.”
The players were visibly as pleased to be sharing space with Lovett, whose own ineffable qualities are the spark igniting the fun everyone seems to be having: Kunkel mouthing the words to the funky, pulsing “Pig Meat Man” as he anchored the beat; the prodigiously bearded Sklar pointing to his collaborators after they would peel off a sizzling flourish; the backing vocalists dancing in place. The joy rippled out into the dark room, setting feet tapping, hands clapping and yelps of pleasure bouncing off the elegant interior.
