Lyle Lovett is in a Lone Star state of mind for his upcoming album. The disc, due October 20, doesn't have a title yet, but the Texas native tells Billboard that he's supplementing his original tunes on the record with songs "by some of my favorite Texas singer-songwriters."

"I had a few new songs I was really eager to record, but I just didn't have enough new songs I liked to do an entire album of my songs, to be honest," adds Lyle. "So this is a combination of my songs and the approach I took on 'Step Inside This House' (the 1998 double-album on which he covered tunes by Robert Earl Keen, Michael Martin Murphey and Guy Clark, among others)."

Songwriters covered on the new album will include Texas mainstays Eric Taylor, Vince Bell and Townes Van Zandt. Musicians featured on the record are "the usual suspects," says the singer-songwriter, including Russ Kunkel on drums, Dean Parks on guitar, Matt Rollings on piano, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Sam Bush on mandolin and Lovett's Large Band members Viktor Krauss (brother of Alison Krauss) on bass and Keith Sewell on guitar, mandolin and vocals.

Lyle's summer tour with the Large Band kicks off July 14 in Memphis, and he'll be hitting the road after the album is released in the fall, although he admits the economic downturn has changed his tour plans a bit.

"For the first time we're seeing the effects of the economy," he says. "This year we would have ended up playing some indoor venues in the summer, so we thought we'd save them for the fall rather than combining the two. So it's mainly outdoor places this summer, and this fall will be more East Coast stuff, and we're not playing Texas this summer so we'll end up playing indoors (there) in the fall."

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