POP MUSIC : Lovett Country : The music world doesn’t know where this singer-songwriter belongs. He does: with Randy Newman and John Prine

Just the other day, talk-show host Larry King was using his USA Today column to sing the praises of one of the featured players in Robert Altman’s satirical film “The Player”--”country-Western star Lyle Lovett.”

The self-effacing Lovett would no doubt be flattered, and quite embarrassed. However well-meaning, King’s tag is a little off.

In some ways Lovett does look like a country star . . . from the neck down, with his loose-fitting, beltless black Levi’s and checkered shirt pegging him as an out-of-towner in his West Hollywood hotel.

That oblong face, though--long and thin, crowned at the top by pompadour-style curls that provide unavoidable punctuation despite being less elevated now than they used to be--that face belongs to a character actor or some kind of urban art commando, surely, not a Twang Pan Alley kingpin.

And in some ways Lovett does sound like a country star, too . . . again, pretty much from the neck down, with a perfect aptitude for the feel of Western steel-guitar balladry that resulted in some Top 20 country hits and even a country Grammy in 1989. That head, though, comes up with some awfully twisted lyrics, even by the twisted standards of his native Texas, and his ultra-dry wit, relational satire and seeming non sequiturs don’t necessarily square with the more obvious Nashville brand of cryin’ and punnin’.

Lovett reduces the typical feelings of country radio programmers toward him to a single phrase:

“He’s not quite right,” he whispers conspiratorially.

By which he means that his career as a “country-Western star”--or country contender, anyway--has passed. But there’s no animosity in that assessment, the way there is when you hear fellow expatriates like k.d. lang and Steve Earle talk.

Lovett and the country music scene have had an amicable separation. He never really thought of himself as a genre singer per se; the fact that he was being marketed by his record company’s Nashville division for his first three albums determined that image more than anything, he says.

His new effort, “Joshua Judges Ruth,” has as its primary emphases folk, blues and a kind of light R&B; swing that he’s making his own, with only one obvious dead-on country tune.

It even includes a pair of gospel numbers--the gospel according to Lovett being a little off the beaten aisle. The jubilant “Church” details a hungry congregation’s plan to cut off a long-winded preacher’s sermon; “Since the Last Time” is an equally witty number about the community engendered at funerals (“Lord it made me happy / Seeing all those people / I ain’t seen / Since the last time / Somebody died”) that ends with the narrator in a casket himself.

More than anything, the album firmly establishes Lovett as the standard-bearer of a new generation of reflective singer-songwriters who transcend commercial idioms, closer to Randy Newman than Randy Travis, more like John Prine than John Anderson.

Of the new album, Lovett says, “It’s not reflective of a musical evolution so much as just revealing a little bit more of the kinds of things I’ve been interested in all along.

“I think radio wants you to be one thing or another. I don’t know if any of my songs will get on the radio from this album. It’s like, ‘Well, what is this guy? Let us know when he makes up his mind.’

“And in that way, country radio is particularly personality-driven. And I think that’s one of the reasons I didn’t get played on country radio so much, because my hair was weird, and because I . . . wasn’t quite right.”

You have to have the image and the lifestyle as well as the songs and the sound?

“Exactly. And that’s OK, it’s really OK. I was never offended. . . . Creatively, Nashville is an open place. . . . It’s like you’re only weird to guys like Ralph Emery,” he says, referring to the genial host of the Nashville Network’s cable talk show who would spend a lot of time asking questions about Lovett’s hairstyle and arty album cover photos.

“He’d say, ‘We’ve got good photographers here in Nashville, somebody could’ve taken this picture in focus.’ That sort of thing. I was never offended by that kind of comment. I understand that some people don’t appreciate what Peter Nash is doing with these photographs, and what my songs are going for. As long as there are people who do, then I’m very happy.

“I’ve never put myself in a position to appeal to people in a way that would change me . I don’t really have to pretend, ever. I think that would be awful if you had to. And I think that people who are successful, really in whatever they do, don’t pretend.

“The people that are really successful in country music, they’re the real thing,” adds the Houston native, who graduated from Texas A&M; with a degree in journalism before shifting gears into music. “If to have been really successful at country music I would have had to pretend to have been from somewhere out in the country and only listened to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights and never gone to town, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it very much.”

In person, the thin Lovett is soft-spoken, modest, surprisingly unassuming, unfailingly pleasant and, of course, a little eccentric-looking, in an art-gallery-habitue sort of way.

Just the qualities that most casting directors wouldn’t be looking for when casting a cop.

But when Robert Altman’s daughter took her father to a Lovett show two years ago at the Greek Theatre, the director was sufficiently taken with the singer’s presence to talk to him about playing a role in “Short Cuts,” a project in development that would have combined several of Raymond Carver’s short stories into a single narrative. (That movie has just been announced for production, though Lovett’s involvement hasn’t been confirmed.) In the meantime, Altman ended up filming “The Player” first, and invited this gentle-mannered Texan to portray--of all things--a Pasadena policeman.

Never having acted before, Lovett had some reservations about taking on such a prominent part, especially in a movie that features half the trained actors in filmland.

“I said, ‘Should I take some acting lessons? I’ve never done this, I want to do a good job.’ He said, ‘Nah, that’ll just screw you up. Just come and hang out and get to know everybody. Besides, this guy you’re playing, he’s not from Hollywood but he’s hanging around these Hollywood people and trying to act cool, and he’s not a very good actor.’ ”

Lovett enjoys a good chuckle over this seemingly impromptu bit of character motivation from the director. “He told me that just to try to put me at ease about doing it.”

When on his own turf, the concert stage (he’ll be at the Wiltern Theatre on Aug. 1), Lovett cuts even less of a Jack Webb-like figure. Between songs, his halting, comically laconic storytelling style is so far from a just the facts, ma’am approach that you might assume the tales he spins in and out of song are apocryphal, the offbeat narrative lyrics pure conjecture.

“Oh, that’s really not true at all,” he responds. “It is conjecture, or an embellishment, for sure, but usually it comes out of some sort of . . . I mean, I don’t make up the stories.” Another chuckle. “I try to make ‘em funny, but they’re true.

“Southern humor, it’s very clever, and there’s a lot of unspoken, understated kind of stuff. That’s what I’m trying to do, kind of capture the spirit of that kind of subtle humor that I grew up with.”

But to peg Lovett as a humorist would be to pass over the many touching songs in his repertoire, and the knife-like digs that show up even in the lighter ones. Off-screen, the lanky Texan is a highly effective detective of the human condition.

While the new album’s quieter songs--like the lost-love lamentations “She’s Already Made Up Her Mind” and “All My Love Is Gone”--may seem edgily honest, he says they’re “not self-revealing in a way that makes me uncomfortable, just self-revealing in a way that, I would hope, demonstrates an understanding of how people feel about things. It’s not like this really too-personal thing. I hope I’m not telling people more than they want to know! It’s really (about) the way people feel about things and react to them, that’s all.

“Like a story like ‘L.A. County’ (from the second album, “Pontiac”)--it’s about this sick guy who goes out and kills these people, but because the song is written from his point of view, you almost have some compassion for him.”

Given the off-kilter quality of much of his writing, it may seem surprising that Lovett cites such a comparative sentimentalist as James Taylor as an influence as well as more character-driven writers like Newman. Lovett’s own tack--not as fictional as Newman’s nor as accessible as Taylor’s--lies somewhere in the middle, with a rootsier, genre-crossing musical base.

“I don’t feel like I’m doing anything new, at all,” he maintains. “If there’s anything that makes my stuff worth listening to, it’s just a point of view.

“But the tradition that I would want my songs to fit into is the singer-songwriter tradition, like Newman and Prine, and Tom Waits and James Taylor and Jackson Browne--those guys were a real inspiration to me. That is the kind of music you don’t hear on the radio these days. I’m a fan of those people and sort of trying to do my own version of that, with my own personal spin on it.

“And I think that writing about very specific things comes from the tradition of singer-songwriters that I grew up listening to from Texas, like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. I learned how to play guitar playing their songs. I feel like listening to writers like that gave me permission, taught me what it was OK to write songs about. It is kind of a Texas thing.”

Though Lovett modestly figures he’s doing nothing new under the sun, there’s surely something untested in the way he’s integrating what remains of his country inclinations with a more concentrated focus on particularly black styles--blues, gospel, R&B--and; how the looseness and rhythm inherent in these forms contrast with his own mellow, almost stiff intellectual-white-guy presence.

“That’s an interesting observation,” he muses, as if he hadn’t thought of the juxtaposition before. “Yeah, it must be inevitable just because they’re my songs . . .

“Or because I can’t dance.”