CD review: Lyle Lovett, Natural Forces

Lyle Lovett has never been known to make a foolish move. But you, Avid Listener, are entitled to debate the wisdom of Lovett frontloading his first album in two years with a pair of songs whose outrageous sexual puns would embarrass any self-respecting locker room full of junior high boys.

Normally one of the most debonair presences in pop music, Lovett’s adolescent japes in “Farmer Brown/Chicken Reel” and “Pantry” seem wildly out of character. But Lovett has never been one to hew to expectations, and the balance of the album is full of deeply felt and often moving music. 

Unlike 2007’s ornate It’s Not Big It’s Large, Natural Forces harkens back to the swing, bluegrass and folk/country side of Lovett, most recently on display on 2003’s My Baby Don’t Tolerate.

This album’s title track is Lovett at his strongest, juxtaposing his lanky and laconic persona against classic Western figures cast against an immense landscape. The trucker and the rodeo cowboy are the modern heirs to that tradition, but Lovett slyly undercuts his own Marlboro Man image by conjuring up a couch potato with a light beer in one hand and a game control pad in the other.

The album’s other standout Lovett composition is “Empty Blue Shoes,” a lovelorn, mostly-acoustic ballad that contains one of Lovett’s best single lyrics: “That girl with the face of an angel/She’s the girl with the face that’s long gone.”

Much in the manner of 1998’s Step Inside This House, the balance of Natural Forces is a tip of the Stetson to the Texas singer/songwriters (most of them unknown outside the state) who served as Lovett’s mentors and muses in his happy-hour days. The luscious and moody “Sun and Moon and Starts” (by Austin songwriter Vince Bell) is a particular standout, as is the jazzy, muscular arrangement of Tommy Elskes’ “Bohemia.” And “Loretta,” with its playful imagery (“Dances like a diamond shines/Tells me lies I love to believe”) is that rarest of critters, a happy Townes Van Zandt song.

Natural Forces winds up with “It’s Rock and Roll,” a song no more imaginative than its title. Perhaps it’s Lovett’s way of poking fun at his own celebrity (he’s no one’s idea of a rock star, after all), but either way it leaves one wondering what hat the unpredictable Texan will try on next time around.