Lyle Lovett (album)
Lyle Lovett is Lyle Lovett's 1986 eponymous debut album. By the mid-1980s, Lovett had already distinguished himself in the burgeoning Texas singer-songwriter scene. He had performed in the New Folk competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1980 and returned to win in 1982. In 1984, he recorded a four-song demo with the help of the Phoenix band J. David Sloan and the Rogues and his music had begun to be distributed by the "Fast Folk Musical Magazine" Nanci Griffith had recorded Lovett's "If I Were the Man You Wanted" as "If I  Were the "Woman" You Wanted" for her 1984 album, "Once in a Very Blue Moon". He appears on that album as a vocalist and also can be seen in the picture on the cover of her subsequent album "Last of the True Believers" (1986). Chart performance. Lovett's debut reached number 14 on "Billboard's" chart for Top Country Albums. Critical reception. "Lyle Lovett" was ranked No. 91 in Rolling Stone's 100 Best Albums of the 1980s, and both "Velvet" and the Italian magazine "Il Mucchio Selvaggio" also cited it as one of the top 100 albums of the  decade. Allmusic compares the album to Steve Earle's "Guitar Town", calling it, "one of the most promising and exciting debut albums to come out of Nashville in the 1980s." Robert Christgau described Lovett's debut as: "Writes like Guy Clark, only plainer, sings like Jesse Winchester only countrier." Track listing. All songs by Lyle Lovett, except "This Old Porch" by Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen.