Lyle Lovett is the 1986 debut album by American singer
Lyle Lovett. By the mid-1980s, Lovett had already distinguished himself in the burgeoning
Texas singer-songwriter scene. He had performed in the New Folk competition at the
Kerrville Folk Festival in 1980 and returned to win in 1982.[5] In 1984, he recorded a four-song demo with the help of the
Phoenix band
J. David Sloan and the Rogues[6] and his music had begun to be distributed by the Fast Folk Musical Magazine[7]
Nanci Griffith had recorded Lovett's "If I Were the Man You Wanted" as "If I Were the Woman You Wanted" for her 1984 album, Once in a Very Blue Moon. He appears on that album as a vocalist and also can be seen in the picture on the cover of her subsequent album Last of the True Believers (1986).
Critical reception
Lyle Lovett was ranked No. 91 in Rolling Stone's 100 Best Albums of the 1980s,[8] and both Velvet[9] and the Italian magazine Il Mucchio Selvaggio also listed it as one of the top 100 albums of the decade.[citation needed]Allmusic compares the album to
Steve Earle's Guitar Town, calling it, "one of the most promising and exciting debut albums to come out of Nashville in the 1980s."[1]Robert Christgau described Lovett's debut as: "Writes like
Guy Clark, only plainer, sings like
Jesse Winchester only countrier."[2]
Track listing
All songs by Lyle Lovett, except "This Old Porch" by Lyle Lovett and
Robert Earl Keen.