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Singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett is at home in Texas, where he has been busy lately. He's not rehearsing for his current tour with John Hiatt or working up material for a new album. The part-time actor isn't prepping for his next film role, either.

No, Lovett has been cleaning up after his property took a direct hit from Hurricane Ike a few weeks back. The eclectic singer with the crinkly grin and the best bedhead hair since the youthful Bob Dylan lives outside of Houston on a ranch that has been in his family for more than 150 years. Lovett breeds horses - he has, in fact, been pursuing this sideline with his folks since the mid-1980s - so there was a lot at risk when that mammoth storm blew through. Worse still, the west wall of the hurricane, which packed the biggest wallop, passed right over the Lovett spread.

"It blew from 10 o'clock at night till 10 o'clock the next morning," Lovett recalls. "We lost half a dozen oak trees that had to be over a hundred years old."

In the storm's wake, Lovett was without electricity for eight days. Fortunately, none of the critters was hurt, and the ranch's human population weathered Ike without a scratch, too. Lovett realizes he's one lucky cowboy.

"No complaints," he says. "Zero complaints."

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That could well be the story of Lovett's musical career, too. He has been a working singer/songwriter since his college days, never having had, in his words, a "real job." A few supportive musicians helped Lovett get his initial breaks. Nanci Griffith recorded one of his songs back in 1984, and Guy Clark passed his demo tape along to MCA Records in Nashville, where producer Tony Brown liked what he heard.

Lovett has been releasing albums on MCA/Curb since 1986. There have been 10 discs of original material to date, plus one anthology ("Cowboy Man"), a live album ("Live in Texas") and a double-disc tribute to the Texas singer/songwriters who influenced him ("Step Inside This House"). "It's Not Big, It's Large," his latest release, came out last year. He's already planning to head back into the studio later this year or early in 2009.

Much of his time, he says a bit ruefully, is taken up with music business.

"I spend most of my day on the phone and the computer, dealing with business aspects and planning aspects of my music career," Lovett says. "Getting to play music, that's the fun part and the reward for pursuing the business part of it."

Again, he's not complaining. He picks up the guitar whenever the mood strikes and gets to ride his quarter horses and help out around the ranch at his leisure.

"My day is full of things I enjoy doing," he says. "I'm a very lucky person."

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Lovett's acoustic tour with John Hiatt comes to War Memorial Coliseum Oct. 17. This year marks the first time they've gone out as a duo, though both have been part of a series of four-man "guitar pulls" that date back to 1989. That's when Hiatt, Lovett, Guy Clark and Joe Ely undertook a six-city tour under the banner of the Marlboro Country Music Festival. They'd take turns singing songs and telling stories, and that's the format Lovett and Hiatt are following on their current tour.

"We just sit next to each other and take turns singing and talking," Lovett says. "It's all pretty spontaneous. We don't rehearse anything, and we don't do the same songs night to night. It almost doesn't seem right that we do it as a show 'cause we really just sit up there playing songs for one another."

Any song in Lovett's catalog is fair game on this tour, even the ones that are associated with his aptly named "Large Band." He points out that although those songs might have been arranged for upward of a dozen other instrumentalists, they originated as pieces he composed by himself on an acoustic guitar.

"You might have to imagine the embellishments," he says, "but the basic song is still the same. I kind of try to be ready for everything."

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For Lovett, writing songs is a mystical process that he still doesn't quite understand. He doesn't even refer to it as "songwriting" but as "making stuff up."

"I have no idea how to make up a song," he says. "I just like to pick up my guitar and play with it. It's not something that ever seems like work or that I have to do. None of it is a technique, and it doesn't seem structured in any way. I just naturally enjoy playing music, and as part of that you can't help but make stuff up."

Lovett's songs have been crossing the lines and violating country-music protocol from his very first release. He may have recorded in Nashville, but his idiosyncratic songwriting bucked Music City's rigidly prescribed sound and system. That didn't prevent him from having four country hits from his landmark debut, "Lyle Lovett."

At the same time, the Nashville establishment remained wary, keeping budding new talents such as Lovett and labelmate Steve Earle at arm's length when they broke out in the mid- to late 1980s. The industry paid a price in the long run when the country audience burned out on all the hat acts and formula artists. Meanwhile, Lovett and Earle found safe haven with the more rootsy side of the rock audience, which appreciated both their adherence to tradition and sense of adventure.

Rather than worry about trying to fit in with the contemporary country scene, Lovett let them figure out how to accommodate his more eclectic overview. It's arguable that Lovett isn't even a country musician at all but rather a pioneer in that more open-ended field that got termed "Americana" at some point back in the 1990s. In addition to country, there's folk, blues, Western swing and gypsy jazz in Lovett's far-ranging potpourri.

And so, Lyle Lovett has quietly insisted that his music be taken on his own terms. Even his album covers reflect his predilection for offbeat modes of self-expression. Every one of his releases, save for the first one, is an arty black-and-white study of some sort.

"I just kind of like, there's something a little more, I dunno ...."

He trails off, then resumes.

"There's something about black and white that I find compelling in a mysterious way," he says. "It's not quite as literal as a color photo. A good black-and-white photo can inspire your imagination in the same way that music is supposed to. That's the parallel I draw - that music is supposed to provoke the imagination rather than spell everything out.

"The kind of music I like to listen to, anyway."

Parke Puterbaugh is a freelance contributor who lives in Greensboro. Contact him at parkeputerbaugh@earthlink.net.