James McMurtry’s grainy voice adorns perfectly his vivid, powerful American writing, like a shabby jacket, collar turned up against the wind.
He’s arguably America’s most eloquent living songwriter who’s more storyteller than poet. Here he examines the chastened romantic within, but still masterfully gazes across the blighted American horizon. He fashions lyrical, breathing composites of people he’s known, of ghosts and others who haul heavy hearts.
With spare, perfectly pitched accompaniment, he describes the burden of raising cows: “It was barely even fall / but that blizzard got them all / Left them sprawled across the pasture stiff as boards.”
It’s a dead-insect windshield view, yet it retains the land and the people’s indomitable spirit: “It’s hard not to cry and cuss / when this old world is bigger than us / and all we got is pride and trust in our kind.”
