Lyle Lovett Talks Lessons of His Early Career on ‘Behind the Setlist’

In the summer of 1976, a young man named Lyle Lovett stood with his guitar before the customers at The Mariner, a seafood and steak restaurant in Houston, Texas. He wasn’t famous then — far from it. Lovett was a freshman at Texas A&M University, earning his first paychecks as a musician. Together with his high school friend Bruce Lyon, he played songs by Texas singer-songwriters such as Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Willie Nelson. These were not songs people typically heard while waiting for their table. But for Lovett, these songs were essential to his formation as a singer-songwriter. 

“They were songs I thought were important,” Lovett tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast. “Ultimately, they were the kind of songs that taught me how to write and taught me what a song could be.”

Performing at places such as The Mariner restaurant may not have been glamorous, but it was foundational. Lovett wasn’t just learning how to perform — he was absorbing the essence of songwriting. 

Lovett’s origin story isn’t unique. Small venues are crucial places where young musicians learn their trades and network with other musicians. In Lovett’s case, his journey began at Texas A&M’s Basement Coffee House, a listening room he helped run during his first years of college. The venue could hold no more than 100 people, says Lovett, but it helped shape his approach to performing live.

As a member of the Basement Coffee House’s student programming committee, Lovett was handed a notebook filled with names and phone numbers. “OK, you’re in charge of programming,” he remembers being told. Suddenly, he was booking musicians, running auditions and filling slots for Friday and Saturday night performances. “I got to know everybody on campus and everybody in town who wanted to play,” he says. It was a valuable education to go alongside the formal education he was receiving. 

For Lovett, performing music in Texas in the late 1970s meant playing two roles: the singer-songwriter rooted in storytelling and the performer playing well known songs, and aspiring to someday perform originals, in hamburger joints. “The difference in the places where people expected to hear covers, those were places where music really wasn’t the point,” he says. At venues such as Poor David’s Pub or Austin’s Alamo Lounge, the music was the draw. 

Anderson Fair in Houston would become particularly significant for Lovett. After opening for Nanci Griffith at the Texas A&M Coffee House, Griffith urged Lovett to visit Anderson Fair. She invited him to play a few songs during her boyfriend’s set. Over time, seeing Griffith and other songwriters such as Don Sanders and Eric Taylor schooled Lovett on how songwriters expressed themselves through their music. “You could see what was important to each performer, what what each performer was trying to put forward personally, and that was all very informing,” he recalls.

It wasn’t just the venues, though. Lovett shaped his style and learned about the art of performing by watching other musicians. He remembers seeing Michael Murphy (later named Michael Martin Murphy) play in 1975 at Texas A&M’s basketball arena — a massive space compared to the coffee house. Murphy performed solo for the first hour of a two-hour set, making the huge space feel intimate. Martin Murphy was riding high at the time, Lovett recalls, with the song “Wildfire” climbing the charts. Lovett was captivated. “He and his guitar were a complete performance,” he recalls. 

By the fall of 1978, Lovett had enough of his own songs to perform a full set of original music. “It took me a couple of years to have enough of my own songs,” he says. This transition — from playing covers to writing his own music — was the turning point. He learned to balance his admiration for Texas songwriters with his desire to carve his own path.

Years later, Lovett would become a household name — at least in some quarters. Lovett signed with MCA Records and released his debut album, Lyle Lovett, in 1986. His next six albums went gold. Without a breakthrough hit single, Lovett made a name for himself as a unique songwriter and performer who absorbed the lessons learned in Houston’s burger joints and small venues. His latest album, 12th of June, released in 2022 on Verve/Forecast, are personal and characterized by Lovett’s singular wit, proving that the lessons of his early Texas singer-songwriter days remain an influence on his songwriting. 

The stages that Lovett now plays are considerably bigger than the restaurants and burger joints of his past, but a concert remains an opportunity for him to connect with an audience. If he gets a request, Lovett will be happy to oblige. “I’m thrilled when people from the audience will ask for song, and if we’re remotely practiced up enough to to get through it, I’ll try it. Even sometimes when we’re not, I’ll try it.”

Listen to the entire interview with Lyle Lovett using the embedded Spotify player below, or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart, Podbean or Everand.