Lyle Lovett: Joshua Judges Ruth : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It's hard to resist a song that begins, "I went to a funeral/Lord it made me happy." Though "Since the Last Time" – the centerpiece of Lyle Lovett's fourth, bleakest and most resonant album – may or may not represent the voice from inside the coffin, the song's skewed perspective is pure Lyle. Joshua Judges Ruth (three consecutive Old Testament books) offers gospel songs for those incapable of making the leap of faith, cowboy ballads for urban neurotics and love songs for loners. If Lovett is himself a misfit, he sings to the misfit that lives within every listener.

Musically, the album is sparer than his previous effort Large Band, with arrangements built mainly on Matt Rollings's ragtime-barrelhouse piano and the call-and-response vocals of a soul choir. Church and death dominate much of the material, with the former never quite providing comfort in the face of the latter. In the rollicking "Church," corn bread proves more nourishing; meanwhile, the countryish "Family Reserve" finds its strength in the renewal of blood ties in a world beyond the fragility of human existence – it's the sort of song Lefty Frizzell might have written if he had been Randy Newman. The lesson throughout is both the simplest and the hardest that anyone faces: Death is inevitable, but life goes on.

The album's major artistic progression, however, lies in the more intimate balladry, which is distinguished by sharper writing and more precise emotional nuance than Lovett has previously displayed. Songs of love lost just don't get any lonelier than "She's Already Made Up Her Mind," "North Dakota" (featuring a guest vocal by Rickie Lee Jones) or "All My Love Is Gone," on which the minimal musical setting, leaves plenty of room for the wide-open spaces of the heart. Elsewhere, John Hagen's cello provides exquisite coloring on "Baltimore" – another song of family and death – while Emmylou Harris shows that she remains the finest of harmony singers on "She's Leaving Me Because She Really Wants To."

For all the darkness permeating the songs, the sense lingers that our hero will somehow make his way from day to day, taking sustenance where he finds it. "Sherry she had big ones/Sally had some too," sings Lovett on the album-opening "I've Been to Memphis," drooling for someone to help make him through the night. Maladjustment, like misery, loves company.