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Time - Man of the Year
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1992-09-22
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REVIEWS, Page 71MUSICLone Star Gothic
By RICHARD CORLISS
PERFORMER: Lyle Lovett
ALBUM: Joshua Judges Ruth
LABEL: MCA
THE BOTTOM LINE: Twelve fine songs take you riding on the
strange stretch of Texas inside this country singer's mind.
With his kitchen-knife physique, sour face and a hairdo
resembling a road-kill toupee, Lyle Lovett looks like a serial
killer in Southern Baptist preacher's garb. That must be what
inspired Robert Altman to cast the singer as a spooky detective
in The Player. Anatomy is destiny in modern show biz, so it
doesn't hurt Lovett that he looks like his songs. He could be
a death-row denizen musing about the ends of life and love.
It happens that Lovett, 34, is a gentle Texan who
dedicated his first album to "Mom and Dad." His songs abound in
comic irony: I Married Her Just Because She Looks Like You,
She's No Lady (She's My Wife) and the antic, bluesy Here I Am,
which won this country singer a 1989 Grammy. The wit, merging
Larry Gatlin's folksy humor with Randy Newman's city sickness,
cued you that Lov ett was not to be mistaken for the losers in
his Lone Star gothic laments.
In Joshua Judges Ruth, the weirdness is harder to laugh
off. The lyrics are gaunt and elusive, the melodies so familiar
as to be generic, the arrangements as spare and naked as the
sentiments. The album's intertwined themes are keyed in its
title: three books from the Old Testament -- the all-time best
seller of wrath and reconciliation -- that pun on a man's need
to pass stern judgment on women.
Lovett's favorite characters are "the cowboys down in
Texas," as he sings in North Dakota, who "look across the
border/ To learn the ways of love." But they never do learn.
They are in the habit of hearing women say no or goodbye. The
lost soul in All My Love Is Gone limns a broken triangle in
words as simple as heartbreak: "She was angry/ He was free/ She
loved him/ Then she left me." In She's Already Made Up Her Mind,
a bereft man needs a friend to "sail with me out to that ocean
deep/ And let me go easy down over the side/ And remember me to
her." Suicide: that'll show her.
This could seem like a terminal display of down-home
misogyny. Women treat men like cow patties; men get even writing
country music. But Lovett touches on more elemental issues:
religion and death. Religion can make you laugh, as in Church,
where a ravenous minister eats "a great white dove from up
above." And death can offer solace. In Since the Last Time, a
man at his own funeral is happy "Seeing all those people I ain't
seen/Since the last time somebody died."
The glorious waltz Family Reserve is a list of family
deaths, including that of a baby who choked on peanut butter and
jelly. "The help, she didn't know what to do/ She just stood
there and she watched him turn blue." But then this bizarre
vision turns into a communal sing-along with the departed:
"We're all gonna be here forever." Looking across the border
separating life from the afterlife, Lovett sees they are part
of one seamless journey. The dead will teach the living how to
grieve for lost friends and lorn love.