“I’m so grateful that, from the age of 18 on, I’ve been able to play and sing for a living,” the 65-year-old Lovett said, in one of the many wonderfully discursive monologues he unfurled over the course of more than two hours. “When you get to meet and work with people you admire, it makes your life that much richer.”
His earnest aside was a prelude to the evening’s opener, Hayes Carll, returning to the stage to join Lovett and his Acoustic Group for a collaborative interlude.
It was a moving, magnanimous gesture from the headliner — Lovett could easily fill the entire night with his own material — and one that underscored his point: Those who Lovett admired paved the way for him at various points, just as he now finds himself doing for those who look to him as a paragon of songcraft. The singer-songwriters traded verses on Townes Van Zandt’s bruised gem “Don’t You Take It Too Bad,” which Carll teed up by saying, “Guy [Clark] called it a perfect song — at least I think it was this song.”
After a stirring rendition of Clark’s own, eternal “L.A. Freeway,” the pair reached back into Lovett’s own catalog and dusted off 1992’s “Family Reserve,” from Joshua Judges Ruth. “He painted himself into this corner,” Lovett cracked, alluding to Carll’s mention of the song during his opening set.
Although the musicians took turns singing, Lovett often laid back, encouraging Carll to take the lead. It was profoundly affecting to watch Lovett urge Carll to sing the words he’d written 30 years earlier, as if a torch was being passed and a legacy being affirmed simultaneously.
That generosity wasn’t just extended to Carll – Lovett had scarcely finished singing the evening’s first song, “Are We Dancing,” when he scurried offstage, leaving his bandmates (fiddler Luke Bulla, bassist Leland Sklar, pianist Jim Cox and guitarist Jeff White) to perform an instrumental without him.
Lyle Lovett is 65 and can play three concerts in a row in Dallas while we barely have the stamina to attend one show a year.
Andrew Sherman
Thursday was also the musicians’ first performance in about a month, which led to some amusing stop-start as Lovett’s recall of lyrics momentarily failed him during “The Mocking Ones.”
The hiccup also yielded what may have been the longest anecdote I’ve ever heard Lovett share on stage, about a mildly traumatizing appearance on an awards show in the mid-1980s when he briefly blanked on the lyrics to his own song, and culminated in thanking the sold-out Majestic audience for “allowing me to start over.” Lovett’s art has always walked a fuzzy border between humor and heartbreak, but as he has grown older and become a father, there’s a more pensive undercurrent most evident particularly on the material drawn from his first album in a decade, 2022’s 12th of June.
Whether it was “On a Winter’s Morning” or the quietly shattering “The Mocking Ones,” Lovett has continued to find a way to plumb the corners of what it means to be human. He has also not forsaken his signature wit: “Pants Is Overrated” — well, all you really need to know is there in the title — and “Pig Meat Man,” a giddy, greasy ode to the pleasures of pork were sparkling highlights.
His eclectic, stubbornly genre-resistant music has always been multifaceted, overflowing with pleasures both verbal and melodic, but it’s the faint darkening around the edges — the creeping acceptance of mortality — making an evening with Lovett and his incredibly accomplished bandmates so much more vital.
To paraphrase Lovett’s own observation, spending time in the company of artists whose work you admire makes your own life that much richer. It’s a truism the Houston native reinforced again and again Thursday — bearing witness to the singular pleasures of Lyle Lovett and that the exquisite music he makes is nothing short of life-affirming.
