Lyle Lovett: I have great memories of driving from Houston to Lafayette, Louisiana, almost every week in the summertimes, with my grandmother and I in the backseat of our 1968 Buick Wildcat, driving through Beaumont and Orange and Lake Charles and over to Lafayette to watch my uncle’s horses run at the old Evangeline Downs.
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NS: You’ve got a song with the line, “Home is where the horse is.”
LL: “Home is where my horse is.” Yeah, the idea in that song, “Natural Forces,” is really we make the world that we live in.
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NS: Tell me a little bit about the family land and the history there around Klein and that part of Texas.
LL: I’ve lived in the same place my whole life. My grandfather’s grandfather was the original immigrant to that area in our family. He came to the United States in 1848 from Germany. My grandpa’s farm really was the place where all of my aunts and uncles lived and all of my cousins, and so I grew up in a very close-knit family atmosphere.
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NS: Why do you think you became somebody that would write songs?
LL: I think it definitely comes from my experience of sitting around in my grandmother’s lunch table or supper table and listening to my aunts and uncles tell stories.
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LL: There always seemed to exist a sense of humor and irony in the stories I heard growing up. You know, I’m still drawn to that type of storytelling, and it can’t help but find its way into some of those songs.
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