My Baby Don't Tolerate

My Baby Don’t Tolerate features songs Lyle Lovett accumulated during the seven-year break between The Road to Ensenada and the 2003 release of this album. The first completed tracks, “San Antonio Girl” and “The Truck Song,” revisited people from Lovett’s past by inhabiting their memories, and that process serves as theme for the rest of the songs. It's an album populated by names of real people (Randy and Danny Ray, a litany of people listed in “Nashville,” even a named truck in “Truck Song”) and real places (Cline’s Corners truckstop outside Albuquerque, plus Tomball, Palestine, and Paris in Texas). Approaching 50, Lovett had reached the point where it was necessary to make sense of the traveled road by communing with the spirits of the people he met along the way. That’s not to say the album is melancholy. In fact, it might be the most energized and familial affair of Lovett’s career. It’s telling that for all its boisterous moments, the album ends in church, with a pair of gospel affirmations equal in voraciousness to the purebred rock ‘n’ roll of “Wallisville Road.”