★★★★★
Somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Bob Wills lies the Promised Land inhabited by Lyle Lovett, who balances elegantly broken romanticism with loose-jointed swing that shuffles and jumps like exalted Texas Playboys. Lanky with high rise hair, Lovett has been an anomaly of the singer/songwriter ilk since appearing with a chock-a-block debut album--and Release Me, his final album of an almost 30-year career for Curb, finds him resolutely steadfast in his excellence and eclecticism...
- www.pastemagazine.com
2012-03-08
★★★★★
Lyle Lovett signed with Curb Records in the 1980s and has been there--or on Universal, or on Curb partner Lost Highway--ever since. That's a quarter-century, nine studio albums, thousands of shows, a tabloid marriage, countless hair jokes, and a mercifully short acting career. This is his last album in his contract with the label, so in true Lyle Lovett fashion it's wryly titled Release Me and features the granite-faced singer tied up on the cover...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2012-03-06
★★★★★
Some soundtracks stand on their own; this doesn't. Lyle Lovett's score forfriend Robert Altman's new movie Dr. T and the Women is all too self-effacing ? not onenew song features Lyle's vocals. Instead, we get 13 pieces ofbackground music by the Large Band, two recycled Lovett chestnuts("You've Been So Good Up to Now" and "She's Already Made Up HerMind"), and a nice, gospelish remake of another ("Ain't It Somethin"'). For soundtrack collectors and Lyleoholics only.
- ew.com
2011-03-03
★★★★★
In a recent interview with Dan Aquilante of the New York Post Online, Lyle Lovett explained the rationale behind his most recent album, Smile: Songs from the Movies, a compilation of material he has recorded to accompany films. "I always have a compulsion to organize my work," he said, "but I broke my leg last year [in a much-publicized encounter with a bull] and I was laying around thinking, 'How can I be productive'? That's how this record came about...
- www.popmatters.com
2011-01-20
★★★★★
On paper, an album that leads with four original songsâ?"two of those hot in groove and contentâ?"then enters a long stretch of languid, story-centric covers, before wrapping up with an all-out rock and roll cut and a string-band reprisal of one of those earlier bawdy numbers might come off as a tad fragmented. Whose album it is makes all the difference in the world...
- www.the9513.com
2010-12-07
★★★★★
With Natural Forces, Lyle Lovett breathes new life in the western swing/jazz fusion that has held him in good stead for years. The heart of his music is still poetic songs about everyday people which match his dry voice with elegantly lush arrangements...
- roughstock.com
2010-12-07
★★★★★
Put bluntly, Lyle Lovett is not so well-established a musicalartist that he can indulge himself by releasing his juvenilia, yetthat is what his fifth album, I Love Everybody(MCA), amounts to. Afreshly recorded collection of songs he wrote between 1977 and 1986,the material here reveals a Lovett who hadn't fine-tuned his irony tothe impeccable pitch it now has...
- ew.com
2010-08-27
★★★★★
Lyle Lovett's latest is something of a ? hybrid: Natural Forces is half self-penned material, leaning toward upbeat levity (if not outright comedy), and half an album of dead-serious ballads from his favorite Texas songwriters. The cover tunes ? written by the likes of Townes Van Zandt, David Ball, and Vince Bell ? are lovely and haunting...
- ew.com
2010-08-27
★★★★★
Note with relief that he's papering over his spiritual limitations with covers and cowrites ("Pantry," "Loretta").
- www.robertchristgau.com
2010-08-25
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