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Waiting for Lyle Lovett back stage after his show at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival initially made me feel a little uncomfortable and conspicuous but ultimately, it proved instructive. I was able to get a sense of the Texan singer songwriter before we sat down for an interview, organised because Lovett’s Australia tour was about to be announced.

Lovett’s tour manager is not some snappy fast-talking industry type but percussionist James Gilmer who has been with him for decades and who steers him slowly and with gentle persuasion through the crowd.

As I wait, I get to shake hands with legendary drummer Russ Kunkel (whose son does the sound for the band) and mention perhaps the greatest drum segue ever, in Jackson Browne’s ‘Take It Easy/Our Lady Of The Well’ on the For Everyman album. Kunkel tells me it was Browne’s idea and that he has to go. I realize that this is a pretty nerdy thing to mention and that Lovett, across the way, is probably dealing with similar comments.

As friends and fans mill around trying to meet Lovett he calmly and graciously works the crowd, shaking hands, chatting, laughing, accepting compliments, trying to recall concerts from many years ago in far flung places that people were mentioning as if they had happened yesterday and Lovett should remember them as highlights of a lengthy career. You know, ‘We saw you in San Antonio in 1992’ as Lovett smiles and graciously says, ‘Well, that was a long time ago.’

Looking elegant in his black suit Lovett, with his trademark unique hairdo, has the air of the gracious Southern gentleman as he makes his way through the small crowd, having come off stage just a few minutes earlier. Calm, polite, friendly, patient, genuine. That is exactly how he is when you sit down to talk.

“It really is extraordinary, isn’t it, that one family would do this,” comments Lyle as we break the ice talking about the festival. He admires fact that investment banker Warren Hellman actually pays for all of this.

Set in the massive Golden Gate Park, the festival collects many of the world’s best ‘roots’ music acts – with a stunning collection of genuine legends – to an increasingly large audience each year.

He wants to know how many times I have been here, whom I have seen. Then I have to steer the conversation back to him. I suggest that this festival and many others prove that there is a massive audience for this music that is not catered to any more by commercial radio and that it must be reaffirming for him.

“That’s always reassuring for a performer like me that has been on the edge of commercial radio my whole career,” he says. “These are the people who support me and the band and I am just grateful to them.”

While he might tell you that he has been on the periphery or ‘under the radar’, Lovett was once one of the hottest new acts in the world – country music or otherwise. Wayback before there was an Americana category to embrace a disparate array of musicians, Lovett was making music that paid tribute to his past and pointed the way to the future.

Since then, his music has embraced gospel, blues, Texas swing and even jazz – expanding the possibilities of the form and taking him outside the readily marketable format preferred by the host of cookie-cutter mainstream country artists that dominate the charts. It is hardly a surprise that many of Lovett’s peers, who emerged with him, have had careers devoted to quality rather than quantity.

The 52-year-old singer songwriter was born and raised in Klein, Texas – he still lives near Houston – and began his music career in the early ‘80s, around the same time so many other talented Texan musicians were undergoing their formative years.

“I grew up in the Lutheran Church and went to Lutheran school and we sang all the time,” recalls Lovett when I ask where the inspiration came from to meld so many genres. “I was always interested in the kind of gospel music we didn’t get to sing. That kind of gospel music is not in the hymnal. As you can hear in most of my songs I love blues music. So blues and gospel go hand in hand. Blues is Saturday night and gospel is Sunday morning – that’s the only difference.

After Nanci Griffith recorded one of Lovett’s songs, ‘If I Were The Woman You Wanted,’ in the early ‘80s, Guy Clark heard one of his demo tapes and recommended him to MCA.

“My first trip to Nashville was in 1984 and I didn’t know what to expect,” explains Lovett, “and I was kind of scared to go but I was surprised at how receptive people were, how nice people were to me, people in the business. I was able to talk to people I never thought I would get to talk to, meet people I never thought I’d get to meet.

“This was after the urban cowboy craze had gone away. That was a big deal in country music. Country music rose to a commercial height it had never seen before and when that was sort of over Nashville seemed to be looking for what was next.”

For a little while Lovett and quite a few of his peers – Griffith, Earle, Yoakam – looked like they were next. It didn’t quite work out that way but it established Lovett’s career and those of a lot of others who are still making great music.

“I’m the kind of guy,” says Lovett. “I always get in the slowest line at the supermarket. I get in the slowest line going through security at the airport. But luckily, my timing going to Nashville just happened to be pretty good and I feel like there were a lot of singer songwriters who got a chance to make records in Nashville that might not have gotten a chance if the timing had been different.”

“If Nashville hadn’t have been looking for what was going to be the next big thing - and the next big thing turned out to be Randy Travis and Clint Black and Garth Brooks,” he continues. “It turned out to be more traditional country.”

Lovett points out that 1986 marked not only his debut but those of Steve Earle, Nanci Griffiths, kd lang, Dwight Yoakam, Ricky Van Shelton and Keith Whitley. It’s an impressive graduation class.

“There were some of us that got a chance to slip through the door that might not have got a chance if it had been a year or two later,” he adds, explaining that the ‘successful’ acts became the ones that ‘fit into the music business.’

Lovett’s eponymous debut album in 1986, showed the influences of writers such as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, with the dark humour of Randy Newman. ‘God Will’ is a classic example of Lovett’s ability to write songs with a wry twist to them. Bitter though the song is, one cannot help but laugh at the way in which the sentiment is expressed.

“I was so fortunate to grow up where I did that I could go and listen to Texas singer songwriters like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and Willis Alan Ramsey, whose music is blues and more blues,” he says. “It was listening to the narrative in Guy Clark’s songs and the imagery in Townes’ songs and the blues in Willis’s songs that helped define what a song could be for me. Then listening to Tom Waits and to Randy Newman and to Ry Cooder and to John Prine.”

“The albums that he did devoted to one particular style or other – those are brilliant records,” says Lovett of Cooder’s recordings, which archived American musical history back in the late ‘60s and ‘70s.  “I’ve been lucky in my career to work with people who have supported me creatively.”

In fact, Prine appeared on stage with Lovett at the Hardly Strictly show singing Townes’ ‘Loretta’ (a song that appears on Lovett’s latest album, Natural Forces).

“Oh man, what an honour,” exclaims Lovett when I mention Prine’s guest spot. “Gosh, I have played ‘Angel From Montgomery’ so many times and ‘Paradise’ so many times that it’s not even funny. To be able to stand next to Prine, it’s something that you never forget.”

“The first time I heard Townes was in a little club in Houston that holds maybe 80 people,” he recalls about his early years, “and to be able to sit that close to him and to be able to listen to him was just spellbinding. He had that effect on everybody. The effect that you see, the influence that you see on songwriters and all the songwrters that cite Townes as an influence – and Steve Earle being chief among them – Townes had that same profound effect on anybody who listened to him, whether they wrote songs or not. Townes had that kind of effect on people. He was just one of those people…...just a very special individual. “

“Oh, certainly, you bet,” answers Lovett when I ask if he ever met Townes. “I got to be friends with Guy really. I didn’t know Townes as well as I know Guy and I never really hung out with him but certainly he was always a gentleman to me and always would take time to talk for a minute. He was just a really sensitive character.

“The first time I ever met him was at the Kerrville Folk Festival and I walked off stage after my set and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, there’s Townes Van Zandt.’ My first thought was that I was so glad I didn’t know he was standing there listening.”

While Lyle Lovett was pretty much a country album its successor Pontiac managed to take him to a pop market as well. He started to expand his band, added gospel singer Francene Reed to the ensemble and on Lyle Lovett & His Large band did a notable version of Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man.’ The gospel influence was amplified on Joshua Judges Ruth in 1992, which arrived after a hiatus from music and the start of what he calls his ‘accidental acting career’ in Robert Altman’s The Player. (He calls Altman a ‘professor of life’). But Lovett got more publicity for his marriage to actress Julia Roberts than he did for his music (they were divorced in 1995).

In the next few years Lovett released I Love Everybody, the more country-oriented The Road To Ensenada and, in 1998, a double disc of cover versions, Step Inside This House (which is almost a precursor to his latest recording in that regard). A live album, the soundtrack for Dr T & The Women preceded his Lost Highway debut My Baby Don’t Tolerate in 2007 followed by It’s Not Big It’s Large in 2007.

Natural Forces, released in October last year, is Lovett’s tenth studio album and once more sees him paying tribute to some of his favourite songwriters – Van Zandt, David Ball, Don Sanders, Eric Taylor, Vince Bell. There are four Lovett originals, including the surprisingly upbeat ‘It’s Rock and Roll,’ co-written with Robert Earl Keen. It is one of the album’s highlights - though country fans might think it out of place - and sits neatly next to Ray Wylie Hubbard’s ‘Rock-N-Roll Is A Vicious Game’ as an expose of the music industry.

The studio band includes Matt Rollings on piano, bassist Viktor Krauss, Sam Bush playing mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and pedal steel maestro Paul Franklin.

“These are all songs that have been part of my musical life ever since I first started playing,” explains Lovett about his choice of material. “I did a record called Step Inside This House. The title song’s a Guy Clark song. It was the first song Guy ever wrote and he never recorded it and he was nice enough to let me do it. But any of these songs could have been on that album as well. These are all songs that I’ve played. I didn’t learn any of these songs for the recording project.”

“Their songs are so important to me,” he continues when I mention that it is nice for him to pay able to pay homage to some of his favourite writers. “I tell you, it’s privilege to play great songs like that.

“It’s interesting to go into the recording studio and record songs that you have complete confidence in. If you record a Guy Clark song you don’t even think twice about the song. Of course, recording one of your own songs in your mind you are turning it over until the red button comes on. Until the red light comes on you think how you could make it better and there’s an insecurity associated with recording your own songs. In doing a Townes Van Zandt or Steve Earle song you just stand up and sing it.”

I tell Lyle that Steve Earle said a similar thing about his recent album Townes: how it was great to go into the studio with a bunch of songs that he didn’t have to agonise over because they were already done.

“You know, it doesn’t surprise me that Steve would have said something like that before I got a chance to,” laughs Lovett. “Steve is just eternally quotable, isn’t he? I met Steve in 1986. Of course, I knew of him because he was from Texas, but he moved to Nashville to do the Nashville deal and I met him in ‘86 because we were both on the same label – MCA Nashville. Both of our first records came out that year and so we ended up going to a lot of record company things together and Steve’s been great to me all these years.

“What’s interesting is that he speaks his mind and the next time if he’s changed his mind he’ll tell you about that too.”

Lovett says that he is ‘so excited’ about coming to Australia and explains that the only reason he had not been here sooner was that his father had passed away one the even of a proposed tour nearly a decade ago and he was reluctant to leave his mother.

While he might be bringing his full Large Band, the list of musicians and singers that will accompany him is still impressive.

“To get to stand on stage and play with Russ Kunkel – life doesn’t get any better than that,” he says but adds that Kunkel will be ion tour with Carole King and James Taylor and James Gilmer will probably fill his spot. “It’s just a privilege to be up there with him. Every night I get to stand on stage with Russ – and the other musicians as well – I just realise how lucky I am. I have such a good time playing with them.”

One of the features of Lovett’s live shows and many of his recordings are the amazing backing singers he has enlisted - Sir Harry Bowens, ‘Sweet Pea’ Atkinson and Willie Green (all of whom have also sung with Ry Cooder).

“I’ll never forget the first time I heard Willie Green sing,” says Lovett. “It was on the 31^st of January in 1981 at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas. He was singing along with Terry Evans and Bobby King in Ry Cooder’s band on his Borderline album tour. John Hiatt was playing guitar in the band. Talk about an important night for me! When I heard them sing and I saw John Hiatt for the first time and I got to see Ry Cooder for the first time. I was such a big fan of Ry’s records and seeing all that at once was just a big moment for me.”

Before Lovett gets to Australia we might get to see and hear him in the new Jeff Bridges movie, The Open Road. He recorded ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’ with Charlie Sexton and he got to practice the song with Bridges, who sings along to it in the film. He describes it as ‘great fun.’

“I have the same record deal that I started out with,” says Lovett as he reflects on his career. “They have always just given me a free hand creatively and I just get to play songs and make up songs in styles of music that I like, that I’m drawn to. Maybe it’s been a blessing that my career has been under the radar enough that I can continue to have the creative input that I like to have.

“That’s nice of you to say and that’s reassuring as well,” he says when I tell him that most serious music fans would think his career was very much on their radar, “but I’ve never had a big radio hit so I’ve never been identified with one particular style or another. So it’s really given me the freedom to move within different styles of music. My songs usually start with a lyrical idea and my hope is that the words in my songs provide a continuity, even if the musical styles are different.”

“Make no mistake about it,” he continues. “I couldn’t feel more successful because success to me has always been being able to do something that you love to do. And that’s an immense privilege for anybody on the face of the earth that he enjoys doing. Life can’t be any better than that. If you get to do what you like to do, the way you like to do it, with the people that you like to associate with – your closest and most talented friends – to me that’s what success is all about.”

“These people are my family at this point and I feel so lucky to be able to work with great quality people who I care about and who I hope care about me,” he says and then adds with a chuckle, “it’s a kind of moment to moment thing! I couldn’t be happier about that.”

When I tell Lovett that his words are a great inspiration for young musicians, he replies in his typically humble style, “Well, you know, if you get to do something you like to do and you get to hang out with people you enjoy hanging out with then that’s pretty good.”

Natural Forces is out through Sony Music. Lyle Lovett tours Australia in March.