While I was grabbing a snack during the intermission at Lyle Lovett’s recent Wolf Trap show, I overheard a mother telling her kid not to get lost. If there was a show where she didn’t have to worry about that, at least not very much, it was this show. If the audience was as good-natured as Lyle, who seems like a genuinely kind and sweet man, she could count on things working out. 

In this performance, Lovett was accompanied by his large band as well as the National Symphony Orchestra. Not every artist’s music would work in that configuration, but his does. While his self-titled debut and the follow-up, Pontiac, were fairly grounded in country, he quickly moved beyond that genre with his third album, Lyle Lovett and His Large Band. (I joked to the folks sitting next me to that this night’s performance was with the “extra large” band.)