Photo by Mary Keating-Bruton
James McMurtry
James McMurtry
James McMurtry is calling from the parking lot of a bank. It’s not rock and roll debauchery or celebrity glitz. And while the parking lot is not a particularly romantic image of art, it makes sense when he talks about his creative process—writing songs when he needs to record an album. Getting things done.
McMurtry plays Shank Hall on Sunday, touring for his latest album The Horses and the Hounds.
“It don’t matter all that much if it don’t bleed”
McMurtry’s songs cut to the bone, character-driven with people often in circumstances that will define their lives. Likewise, lyrics might depict the details of the day-to-day existence of working and underclass folks. In fact,it might be a worthwhile project to try to connect the dots from characters in his songs beginning with his 1989 debut Too Long in the Wasteland.
It would be temping, but an exercise in laziness, to use phrases like “… as McMurtry sings” but that implies biography and he’s adamant to point out his songs are works of fiction. So, it’s beside the point to pester him what the songs are about. His job, it would seem, is to provide the listener images and let them come up with their own version of how things go down.
The press release for McMurtry’s new album The Horses and the Hounds includes this reference, “There’s a definite Los Angeles vibe to this record,” McMurtry says. “The ghost of Warren Zevon seems to be stomping around among the guitar tracks. Don’t know how he got in there. He never signed on for work for hire.” Like Zevon, McMurtry shares a deadpan sense of grace and dark humor in his songwriting. At the end of the day songs like “Cheney’s Toy,” “We Can’t Make It Here” and “Choctaw Bingo” deal with war, the impact of outsourcing and the changing landscape for working class Americans.
“I keep losing my glasses”
With tunes that easily cruise past the three-minute mark, you might think his songs are streams of words, but with McMurtry’s new album he continues his refinement of using space and cadence to help tell the stories.
“Operation Never Mind” conveys the frustration at the reality of an anesthetized society where “the country boys will do the fighting, now that fighting is all a country boy can do” and the gatekeepers who “won’t let the cameras near the fighting, that way we won’t have another Viet Nam.” Atop a loping beat, “Decent Man” finds McMurtry part of a long line of keen observers who lament frustration and the intersection where choices are made and the consequences they hold. The lines, “My fields are empty now, my ground won’t take the plow. It’s washed out down gravel and stone, its only good for burying bones” could have come from a WPA project. His songs just might be what future generations use to learn about things in 2022.
The brilliant “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call” raps out a trucker’s roll call of obstacles, all the while circling back to a chorus of “I keep losing my glasses,” echoed by soulful background vocalists. Darkly humorous, this is the place listeners of a certain age find ourselves; the song could be a bastard of “Convoy” with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s female backing chorus.
