2022 is turning out to be a good year for Lyle Lovett, not least because he is, to use a cowboy metaphor, back in the saddle.

"I've been out of work for two years," he says archly. Normally, Lovett performs more than 100 concerts a year, regardless of whether he's released new work. But the pandemic pinned him down at home in Houston, with his wife and their now–four-year-old twins, in the house his grandfather built in 1911. Domesticity suits Lovett. "There was plenty to do every minute of every day. Absolutely no boredom!" He sounds like he means it; unselfconscious mentions of paternal tenderness bubbled up in our conversation from time to time.

My tastes coalesced around rock music, particularly the harder and faster kind, by the time I was in middle school. Earlier, they were oriented toward pop: The Beatles are my first and forever musical love.

Like an immense night bird aloft in the gold'n sky.
I should like to sail off towards islands of flow'rs
While list'ning to the perverse sea singing
In its old and bewitching rhythm.

It took some time to figure out why, in the middle of auditioning Rotel's Michi S5 stereo power amplifier ($7499.99) with the room-shaking opening of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ravel's far subtler and perfumed setting of Tristan Klingsor's lyrics from Shéhérazade came to mind.

Certain albums stand as monuments because of the influence they had on contemporary and future musicians despite having little commercial success. The Velvet Underground & Nico comes to mind. So do the early Ramones albums. And then there are albums that had just as much influence but were megahits—a much rarer thing.