Lyle Lovett
National Concert Hall, Dublin
★★★☆☆
“I’ve been singing about nakedness a lot lately,” Lyle Lovett says by way of introduction to It’s a Naked Party, which he wrote with his seven-year-old twins. As he points out, the older you get, the more you can do whatever you want.
Thankfully, Lovett has been doing whatever he wants since the release of his eponymous debut, in 1986. He plies his deliciously idiosyncratic trade in country, jazz, honky-tonk, folk and swing with the quiet authority of an original. His songs come suffused with a dry wit, a rich sense of irony and an emotional rawness that is utterly disarming.
This is Lovett’s first visit to Dublin for six years, propelled by the release of 12th of June. That 2022 album is a fine reminder of his stellar songwriting talent, with the title track a poignant meditation on family history and the delights of parenthood, where his children “make a better man of me”.
This time around Lyle brings his acoustic band, a smoking-hot quintet of wily session musicians whose resumés stretched from Joni Mitchell’s Blue (Russ Kunkel, on drums and percussion) to Linda Ronstadt and The Doors (Leland Sklar, on bass), Alison Krauss (Grammy award winner Jeff White, on guitar and mandolin), Emmylou Harris (Stuart Duncan, on fiddle) and Barbra Streisand (the extraordinary Jim Cox, on piano). Lovett revels in their musicianship, leaning into the welcoming embrace of White and Duncan’s warm backing vocals as if they’re a soft pillow.
His set list is another reminder of the extraordinary breadth and depth of his writing. The plaintive longing of Here I Am, the Truman Capote-worthy musings on marriage that is Her Loving Man, the heartsore simplicity of Nobody Knows Me and the wryly inverted religiosity of God Will. Each is a master stroke in understatement.
Lyle’s inclusion of Texas River Song, learned from Townes Van Zandt, strikes a timely chord on Donald Trump’s inauguration night, with its quiet insistence that “there’s many a river that waters the land”. Lyle has always had an open door, regardless of who’s occupying the White House.
[ Lyle Lovett: ‘I’ve never enjoyed anything more than being my children’s dad’Opens in new window ]
Tríona Marshall and Kevin Conneff with his Dublin Trio are special guests, in homage to Lovett’s collaboration with The Chieftains on The Old Plank Road. While Marshall in particular soars, there’s a suspicion that Lyle is buying time, affording them their own short set.
Suffusing all that richness, though, is a stark realisation that Lovett’s voice is transforming dramatically. Throughout his performance he grapples with a strangulated vocal tension. This is particularly evident in She’s No Lady, where he almost exploits it as a virtue in the closing line. Where previously he would have glided all over the scale on the final “wife”, this time he settles for a croaky close, eyes glinting at the juxtaposition of his vocal struggles and the twin challenges and delights of marital life. It is a bittersweet meditation on the uncompromising demands of life as a hard-working musician.
