Thursday, August 24, 2006

Lyle Lovett

The moniker "Large Band" was certainly no understatement for the group of musicians backing Lyle Lovett on Tuesday night at Wolf Trap.

The evening began with the sparsely plucked "Don't Cry a Tear," with a cello accompanying Lovett's acoustic guitar and heavy voice. A few songs later, musicians walked onstage one by one until Lovett was surrounded by a 17-piece orchestra, which included mandolin, violin, pedal steel, four horns and four backup singers.

The diversity of these musicians mirrored the breadth of Lovett's songs. The backup singers added a gospel flair to "I Will Rise Up" and "Since the Last Time," a Stevie Ray Vaughanish electric guitar brought the blues to "My Baby Don't Tolerate" and the brass section gave a jolt of jazz to an instrumental number. Lovett highlighted his mandolin player, the Chieftains' Jeff White, on a pair of bluegrass songs performed with fiddle and acoustic guitar.

Lovett's understated presence and dry sense of humor infused his performance as he talked about his family and home in Texas. He divulged his method of coping with contractors who hadn't completed his projects -- immortalizing their failures in a song and performing it at every show: "Eventually I'm going to sing it someplace they are," he said, grinning. "Because they're sure not at home!" But the laid-back song that followed, "In My Own Mind," was so lovely, even the spurned workers would likely have been won over.

-- Catherine P. Lewis

In certain rarefied musical settings it's considered bad taste to ask what a song is about: That's between artist and muse, or the listener and her experience.

None of this was a problem at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Tuesday night, where the ebullient Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland prefaced nearly every number with "This song is about . . . ." Hope, first love, nostalgia and all kinds of other themes seemed to resonate more with the audience than any of the deftly wielded, heavily miked stringed instruments onstage could ever manage.

Make no mistake -- there were no lip-sync shenanigans in this modern-country rave-up. And yet, while Nettles's big, Georgia-bent pipes complained "I'm so sick and tired of being told what's good for me" or declared "I ain't settlin' for just gettin' by," the rest of her person mimed shout-outs, accepted gifts from the crowd and teased her band.

From the get-go -- an opening set by Rodney Atkins, who promised there'd be no "edge" to his music, and an appealing '70s-harmonic convergence by Little Big Town -- the show was a group hug with the boot-stomping, banner-waving citizens of "this great country of ours," especially its female citizens, who were much in evidence. During "Down in Mississippi (Up to No Good)," the most overt of Sugarland's girl-power numbers, the music took on a grungy rockabilly cast, but Nettles still evoked more of the pep rally than the roadhouse: no danger, no poetry, just a beat and a big ol' grin.

-- Pamela Murray Winters

In certain rarefied musical settings it's considered bad taste to ask what a song is about: That's between artist and muse, or the listener and her experience.

None of this was a problem at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Tuesday night, where the ebullient Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland prefaced nearly every number with "This song is about . . . ." Hope, first love, nostalgia and all kinds of other themes seemed to resonate more with the audience than any of the deftly wielded, heavily miked stringed instruments onstage could ever manage.

Make no mistake -- there were no lip-sync shenanigans in this modern-country rave-up. And yet, while Nettles's big, Georgia-bent pipes complained "I'm so sick and tired of being told what's good for me" or declared "I ain't settlin' for just gettin' by," the rest of her person mimed shout-outs, accepted gifts from the crowd and teased her band.

From the get-go -- an opening set by Rodney Atkins, who promised there'd be no "edge" to his music, and an appealing '70s-harmonic convergence by Little Big Town -- the show was a group hug with the boot-stomping, banner-waving citizens of "this great country of ours," especially its female citizens, who were much in evidence. During "Down in Mississippi (Up to No Good)," the most overt of Sugarland's girl-power numbers, the music took on a grungy rockabilly cast, but Nettles still evoked more of the pep rally than the roadhouse: no danger, no poetry, just a beat and a big ol' grin.

-- Pamela Murray Winters