If at the close of singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett’s concerts this year you hear “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles playing as Lovett leaves the stage, well, there’s a story behind that. And it’s delightful.
In 2017, shortly before Lovett turned 60, he and his wife April Kimble became first-time parents to twins Ella and Will. For Lovett, who says that by then he had more or less accepted he’d not be a father, their arrival was a life-changer.
He named his most recent album “12th of June” after their birthdate. The title song is a heartbreakingly lovely tale of how their birth fit into a family tree that stretches into the past while flowing forward into the future. Another track, “Pants Is Overrated,” was inspired by another familiar parental experience, the joys and trials of getting small pants over wiggly bottoms.
Lovett, who called from the road to talk about his upcoming Southern California shows, says he flies home almost weekly for a few days so he can take them to and from school and be with them ’til bedtime.
It’s in his son’s first-grade classroom where the story about the Bangles’ begins.
“My son’s teacher, a really nice young lady, went to Egypt over the Christmas break and brought back trinkets for everybody in her class,” says Lovett, 67. “I guess she’s been talking about her trip enough that my son is just obsessed with ancient Egypt. He’s going to the library, checking out books.
“And because of that – I mean, just follow his line of thinking – he has discovered ‘Walk Like an Egyptian.”
From that, the family dove into the rest of the songs on the Bangles’ 1986 album “Different Light.” When his daughter adopted “Manic Monday” as her favorite, pint-sized power struggles broke out in the backseat of the car, Lovett says.
“It’s an argument, which is just delightful to listen to them back and forth,” he says. “It’s just the debate and all of that I find so entertaining. The things they say to each other. The way they rationalize just absolutely anything.”
A few weeks ago, his wife brought the kids along on the tour bus to one of Lovett’s shows at Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas, and as a treat, he and his band came on stage to “Walk Like an Egyptian.”
The twins loved it, and since then the song has continued to play at the end of each show, Lovett says. Eventually, bassist Leland Sklar offered to share the story with his friend Susanna Hoffs, the Bangles’ lead singer.
“She offered to send them autographed pictures and all of a sudden Susanna Hoffs is emailing my children and they’re drawing pictures for her,” Lovett says. “So everything I do is sustained by thinking of them. I love what I do. Would I play as much if I didn’t have children? Maybe, maybe not. But they are the reason that I’m doing anything I’m doing.”
Working and playing
Lovett comes to Southern California the first week of March for shows in Cerritos, Palm Desert, Thousand Oaks and Del Mar. Even after his family doubled in size, he’s continued to tour steadily each year.
“I play because it’s how I make a living,” Lovett says. “It’s my job and I’m grateful for it. And I love to play, too. I love getting to play. As it is, I’m home more than I’m gone, but being gone at all these days, you know, with the children, it makes it harder just to be away.
“But the upside of that is when I’m home, I’m really home,” he says. “My parents both worked, and they’d leave the house at six in the morning to deal with the commute. We lived about 28 miles north of downtown Houston and traffic in those days was as bad as it is now. They were gone during the day and home on the weekends and the evenings.
“So I rationalized my being gone with that perspective, and I’m grateful that when I’m home, I can really devote myself to just being with the children.”
On the road, his family is the band and crew that accompany him. Where summer tours are typically with his Large Band, playing larger outdoor venues that can support a bigger traveling show, fall and winter tend to hit smaller venues and markets, with the five members of his Acoustic Group: bassist Leland Sklar, drummer Russ Kunkel, fiddler Stuart Duncan, keyboardist Jim Cox, and guitarist-mandolinist Jeff White.
The sets change from season to season and band to group as well, Lovett says.
“The first criterion is what songs best feature these players?” he says. “Really, for me, it’s about, ‘Who am I on stage with?’ Then I think to myself, OK, what did I play last time? What songs do I need to play every time? And what songs can I swap out and do something different from my side?”
Having the flexibility to change things up from night to night makes the shows more interesting for the performers and audience alike, Lovett says.
“I like the flexibility of being able to honor a request if somebody hollers out something,” he says. “I especially like it when people ask for songs early enough in the show to actually play them. When they ask for something in the encore, it’s a little harder to work in.
“The single most fun thing about playing to me, besides getting to work with really talented people, is feeling the audience, reading the audience, and in the moment, taking a show where it needs to go,” he says.
Much ado about music
A fixed setlist just isn’t as fun, Lovett says, even when in 2010 he played one as part of the cast of Shakespeare Center Los Angeles’ production of “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.
Founder and artistic director Ben Donenberg cast Lovett as Balthasar, a character with enough lines to get him and fellow musicians, including Nickel Creek’s Sara and Sean Watkins, on and offstage between Lovett originals such as “She’s No Lady” and covers such as Dave Frishberg’s “Peel Me A Grape,” which Lovett include on his 2022 album “12th of June.”
“Shakespeare had songs in all his plays,” Lovett says. “Donenberg told me that oftentimes these were always original songs, they were popular songs of the moment and Shakespeare would include them in his plays as a little bit of a guarantee that the crowd was going to like something.
“I always joke that since those songs were no longer popular songs of the day that Ben was replacing them with contemporary songs that also weren’t popular – my songs.”
One of the things he remembers about that production was wishing at times he could swap in a different song to better meet the mood he sensed in the audience on different nights.
“If I were in my own show, I would say something different,” Lovett says. “Play something different. I would change what I’m going to do.
“But you know, when it’s Shakespeare, you kind of have to say the lines, right?”
Land and family
The feelings Lovett has for his family aren’t limited just to his wife and children. In the plains of East Texas where he’s always lived, the roots of his family tree extend more than 150 years into the past and influence his life and music today.
“I don’t know how it is, but I do know family is important to me,” he says. “Our home place, my grandfather’s farm, which is part of his grandfather’s farm, was important to me.”
When his grandmother died in 1979, much of the land was sold “to an investment group with a Mulholland Drive address,” Lovett says. “In 1980, real estate in that part of Harris County was just going crazy. I mean, development was going wide open. Then, in the next year or two, the bottom dropped out of it, and all the development that was happening in those days in Houston just ground to a halt.”
In 1994, Lovett managed to buy the property back from the investors who’d bought it from them, he says.
“The property hasn’t just been in the family,” Lovett says. “I mean, I didn’t just get it handed to me. I had to work my whole life to buy it back. But that’s important to me. And I ask myself why? Why is it?
“It might be that I did spend every afternoon at home in my imagination,” he says. “After school, waiting for my parents to come home from work. Right through the pasture from my grandparents and my uncles and aunts. My grandpa had given each one of his seven children a couple of acres on the farm to build on. So I never felt alone.”
Even as an only child, there were cousins to play with or a snack waiting for him after school at his grandmother’s house, Lovett says.
“I could go fishing, I could go hunting, I could go, you know, explore,” he says. “When I was a little boy, I could just go out and pretend. And all of that was just such a fundamental part of my childhood that it’s always been important to me.
“My mom only has one sibling left now,” Lovett says. “My mom is 95 and her younger brother is 90. He still runs his cow-calf operation on the place, so it’s still a working farm. He and I make hay together. So it still occupies a lot of my imagination.”
So he knows that the family and the land they’ve lived on since the middle of the 19th century spills over into his songs in ways that feel most directly in regard to the children.
“You know, I always thought I wanted to have children, but I just had no idea the impact it would have on me, and how much I would enjoy it,” Lovett says. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m an older dad, but there’s just nothing in the world that I enjoy more than being with my children, listening to whatever they might be imagining or whatever they might be into.
“How they will debate things or argue, yet being as thick as thieves and play together from the second they wake up to the second they go to back. It’s all fascinating to me.”
Lyle Lovett and his Acoustic Group
Sunday, March 2: McCallum Theatre for the Performing Arts, Palm Desert. See mccallumtheatre.org.
Monday, March 3: Fred Kavli Theatre at Bank of America Performing Arts Center, Thousand Oaks. See bapacthousandoaks.com.
Wednesday, March 5: The Sound at Del Mar, Del Mar. See thesoundsd.com.
Thursday, March 6: Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Cerritos. See ccpa.cerritos.gov.
For more: See lylelovett.com.