Lyle Lovett,
It's Not Big It's Large

Label: Lost Highway
Released: 2007

(4 out of 5)

With his 50th birthday approaching this fall, it seems Lyle Lovett has been thinking about mortality. From the resistance of the downtrodden in "I Will Rise Up" to the dangers of his beloved Ducatis on "This Traveling Around," legacy and loss recur as themes throughout It's Not Big It's Large.

But if anyone can make such weighty morsels easy to swallow, it's Lovett. He takes a downright playful approach on "It's All Downhill," which asks if things are so good already, how could they possibly get any better? The mischievous "Make It Happy" delivers additional whimsy and leaves one guessing just what "it" is.

There's no guesswork needed when assessing the album's musicianship. The Large Band swells to as many as 26 members and features a rotating cast of top-notch pros, including Viktor Krauss on bass, Sam Bush on mandolin, Bela Fleck on banjo, Mitch Watkins on electric guitar, and Jon Randall on guitar and backing vocals.

While the musicianship is impeccable, the real soul of the album is in its lyrics and of course their singer's signature vocal style. Everything comes together perfectly on two songs. The tender "South Texas Girl" is a wistful recollection of bygone youth and the long-gone family that helped make it so memorable. An intro and outro by Guy Clark adds extra gravitas. "Don't Cry a Tear" is the album's masterpiece — a heartbreaking number that pairs spare acoustic instrumentation with beautifully simple lyrics:

Shout if you can speak
Sing if you mention my name
Don't cry a tear for me

A limited edition CD/DVD package including nearly an hour of behind-the-scenes footage is worth the upgrade. Lovett provides backstory to the provenance of "The Alley Song," which he wrote while still a teenager but hadn't recorded or played in public for nearly 30 years. We also learn that while "Don't Cry a Tear" may be a break-up song, he first performed it at Hunter Thompson's memorial service. There's also a montage of home movies set to "South Texas Girl" so poignant it brought a lump to my throat.

Buy: Lone Star Music (CD), Amazon (CD/DVD), iTunes

August 28, 2007