Lyle Lovett

A wry and eccentric lyricist with a humble, homespun style, Lyle Lovett is a Grammy Award-winning country star and acclaimed songwriter. Born and raised in rural Texas, Lovett started writing songs at university and was inspired by the likes of Guy Clark and Townes van Zandt, country folk singers who were deemed to be too rough and unruly for an increasingly commercial and sanitised Nashville in the late 1970s. He played the local bars and clubs of Austin before Nanci Griffith covered his song If I Were The Woman You Wanted on the album Once In A Very Blue Moon (1984), and the recognition led him to sign with MCA Records. His debut Lyle Lovett (1986) produced four Top 40 hits on the US Country charts, but it was second album Pontiac (1988) that really helped him cross over to more mainstream rock and pop audiences. He married Hollywood actress Julia Roberts in 1993 (they divorced two years later) and won four Grammy Awards throughout the 1990s as he built up a respected reputation for his well-crafted songs. Away from music he has acted in a number of films and TV shows and was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Houston. Still recording and performing, he released his 11th studio album Release Me in 2012.

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