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Song of the Day #426: ‘You Can’t Resist It’ – Lyle Lovett

liveintexasA year after Step Inside This House, Lyle Lovett continued to frustrate fans by releasing a live album. Don’t get me wrong… this is a fine live album. But three years after The Road to Ensenada, I for one was ready for some new Lyle.

While the performances on Live in Texas are not by the actual Large Band, they have the same sound and general makeup — horns, strings, gospel-style backing vocals, and Lovett as the confident ringleader.

I was lucky enough to see him in concert backed by this lineup and Live in Texas is a fair representation of the wonderful concert I saw.

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Song of the Day #425: ‘Bears’ – Lyle Lovett

stepinsideI hope I’m not being too harsh when I say that The Road to Ensenada was Lyle Lovett’s last great album. He’s made several good ones since then, but nothing that compares to his output from 1986-1996.

In fact, Lovett released six full-length albums of original material during his first decade as a recording artist and has released only two in the 13 years since. He has filled the rest of that time with soundtrack appearances, covers albums and a live release. I often wonder about those bursts of creativity that give way to long dry spells, and Lovett is another example. I don’t necessarily suspect that his best work is behind him, but I wonder if he still possesses the creative fire that led to that extraordinary run.

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Song of the Day #424: ‘Fiona’ – Lyle Lovett

ensenadaAnd so it came to pass that, in 1986, Lyle Lovett released his finest album, The Road to Ensenada. Lovett’s early albums are so uniformly excellent that it’s difficult to single one out as number one, but Ensenada blends some of his best songs with perfect performances and production and it’s also his most successful marriage yet of the heartfelt and the humorous.

On the heartfelt side, you have several songs inspired by his divorce from Julia Roberts, just a year or so after their unlikely marriage. I remember I was living at home when Lovett and Roberts married and my mother told me the news one morning when I was half asleep. When I made my way downstairs, I had to ask her if I’d dreamed that conversation. It was that bizarre a concept.

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Song of the Day #423: ‘If I Fell’ – The Beatles

beatlesfellI’m sticking with A Hard Day’s Night for my second tune this Beatles Weekend, highlighting one of my favorite songs on that album, and in the band’s entire catalog — ‘If I Fell.’

This is actually the second time I’ve featured ‘If I Fell’ on this blog. The first was back in April, when I chose Evan Rachel Wood’s version from the film Across the Universe as my 277th Song of the Day. I believe this song joins Ben Folds Five’s ‘Emaline’ (a live version and a cover) as the only songs to appear in two different Song of the Day posts.

I’ll go ahead and link up a third version of the song because I know Amy will if I don’t. 🙂 Here’s American Idol contestant Jason Castro’s version with the added benefit of clips from one of television’s very best shows, Friday Night Lights.

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Song of the Day #422: ‘I Should Have Known Better’ – The Beatles

beat_poolThere’s a pretty clear divide between The Beatles early, poppy stuff and their later more experimental music. Rubber Soul is where that split started to happen, and Revolver saw the transformation completed. Those are two of my favorite Beatles albums (I imagine they’re two of everybody’s). They showed the world that this wasn’t just a pop band but a serious artistic force.

Still, when I rank all of the band’s albums in order, it’s inevitably A Hard Day’s Night — one of those early, uncomplicated albums — that rises to the top. It lacks the ahead-of-its-time production techniques of later albums, the mind-bending lyrics, the complex song construction, but it makes up for all that in unparalleled pop songcraft.

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