Pontiac : Lyle Lovett : Review : Rolling Stone

This goes against the grain. At a time when homespun rootsiness is almost every country artist's calling card, Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith aren't afraid to show off a little book learnin'. And at a time when most of country music's newcomers are only as good as the songwriters whose work they choose or the producers they hire – to varying degrees, this goes for worthy artists ranging from Randy Travis, George Strait, the Judds and Reba McEntire to Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless and Ricky Van Shelton – Lovett and Griffith are songwriters, pure and simple. Though they both have formidable interpretive skills, it's the detail, depth and simple intelligence of their own compositions that make them artists whose work will endure.

If you haven't heard of them, it's partly because subtlety and restraint (and in Griffith's case, a string of independent-label LPs) aren't the way to make much noise. But Lovett and Griffith – Texas-bred friends who for the past half dozen years have brilliantly carried on the folk-country tradition of such great, underappreciated southern-Texas singer-songwriters as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt – have both made minor waves on the country charts and the folk circuits, and it's irresistible to think that this is one of those cases where talent, sooner or later, will turn people's heads.

In Lovett's case this should have happened in 1986, when he released his first solo album, Lyle Lovett. That LP contained what might well be the funniest, most biting and downright best country song of the past five years: "God Will," a beguiling little ditty in which Lovett informed a wandering girlfriend that the Lord would forgive her transgressions but the singer wouldn't – "and that's the difference between God and me."

In addition to that song the gorgeous, evocative ballads "This Old Porch," "If I Were the Man You Wanted" and "Closing Time" are enough to make Lyle Lovett an absolute must – and enough to make Pontiac a slight disappointment. But if "She's No Lady" and "M-O-N-E-Y" show the man who wrote "God Will" borrowing punch lines from Henny Youngman and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the new LP still contains abundant pleasures. An edgier, less country-oriented record, it's distinguished by Lovett's wicked intelligence and by the way in which he infuses his graceful, gentle lyricism with a bluesy bite. By turns playful ("Give Back My Heart"), melancholy ("I Loved You Yesterday," the exquisite "Simple Song"), despairing (the bitter, Randy Newman-style lament "Pontiac") and sprightly ("L.A. County"), Lovett writes songs whose lyrics are as flowing and musical as the tunes to which he sets them.

He sings in the voice of a guy who disdains commitment, a ramblin' man who still rues the day some damn woman managed to tame him, and in the voice of the barroom cynic who'll occasionally give you a glimpse of his sensitive side. Pontiac is a bitter compendium of regrets and disappointments (plus a pair of murders); if it sounds varied and resonant rather than desperately sad, you can thank the spare, deft arrangements, the exquisite grace of songs like "Walk Through the Bottomland" and the twisted, tongue-in-cheek cool that comes through in the likes of "If I Had a Boat," a bizarre reverie in which the singer dreams of going to sea with only his horse for company.

Lovett achieves his remarkable intimacy with a voice that's weathered, comfortable and haunting; Nanci Griffith does the same with a high-pitched voice that's seemingly innocent and guileless. And if Pontiac's characters endlessly regret bad relationships that have somehow survived, Little Love Affairs is an album of nostalgia for faded love, sung by a wounded optimist who is haunted by the little love affairs that didn't work out but stubbornly clings to her optimism.

The fragility in Griffith's voice is extraordinarily well suited to the stories she's telling, and the indelible sense of detail that has always characterized her work gives added poignance to songs like "Love Wore a Halo (Back Before the War)" and "So Long Ago." These stories don't cut as deep as those she told on The Last of the True Believers, the 1986 Rounder album that remains her most affecting work, but Griffith draws the southern-Texas landscape better than anybody this side of Guy Clark and savors the hurt of a lost love as well as any pop songwriter alive.

At the end of her album, Griffith brings out veteran singer-songwriter John Stewart for a duet, "Sweet Dreams Will Come." The Stewart song is initially cynical ("Lookin' for some love/I guess that's why people buy dogs"), but in the end it shrugs off the bad times and turns defiantly hopeful ("It's beginning to feel like those sweet dreams will come"). And that's as fitting a serenade as any to Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith.