The Musicgoer: Lyle Lovett's Natural Forces

LYLE LOVETT
Natural Forces
(Lost Highway)
** 1/2 (out of 5)

Lyle Lovett’s always been a hard one to read. He has a certain reputation as the hipster’s favourite country singer, too sly and strange to fit into the Nashville mould; but he’s also got a taste for cornball Texas swing — just listen to “Farmer Brown/Chicken Reel,” off his new album, Natural Forces, which repeats the line “I’m gonna choke my chicken till the sun goes down” about 50 times. Or is he somehow actually making fun of cornball humour? It’s hard to tell: that could be a smile on his face, or it could be a grimace.

It’s also hard to know these days if the less-than-prolific Lovett considers himself a songwriter or, as Step Inside This House and Smile suggest, merely an interpreter of other people’s material. Lovett had a hand in writing only five of the songs on Natural Forces, and most of those are tossed-off comic songs like “Farmer Brown” and “Pantry” (which inexplicably appears in two versions). The strongest track on this uneven disc is Eric Taylor’s stunning “Whooping Crane,” and maybe it’s no accident that its lyrics can be read as a metaphor for an artist in search of lost inspiration.