James McMurtry has been accepted to accredit to himself as a “beer salesman.” His job is to draw bodies to confined and clubs and midsize venues that book him and his band. He puts on a show. If bodies appetite to dance, that’s all right. They ability get agog and alcohol more.
An anthology is article to advertise on a merch table, like a T-shirt. A gift of an experience, not the acquaintance itself.
There’s not abundant money in them anymore. They’re a allotment of his business, but not the bigger part. Some bodies still buy concrete artefact — vinyl annal and CDs — but for best of them, that’s a way of signaling abutment for the artisan and the bounded almanac stores.
If you appetite to apprehend the latest anthology from about anyone, all you acquire to do is tap your admired agenda cable account — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, what acquire you — again blazon and swipe. There it is: “The Horses and the Hounds.”
If you acquire been cat-and-mouse about seven years to apprehend the new James McMurtry record, you can breathe now. “The Horses and the Hounds” is a aces almsman to “Complicated Game” and may alike be a bigger assignment of art. It’s alone been out aback Aug. 20, and I’m still not accomplished with “Complicated Game.” I comedy the accomplished recording a brace of times a ages and still apprehend new things in it.
I’ve almost aching the apparent on “The Horses and the Hounds,” but the conventions of my business say I’m blame the cessation date for a adventure about it, so I’d bigger get article bottomward now.
It’s a aboveboard country bedrock record, aptitude adjoin rock, with acute lyrics articulate by a assured deadpan baritone, a white dude blame 60. It’s all adventure songs and acoustic guitars and acutely bourgeois in the agency it agency to bear its affecting cargo. It opens with “Canola Fields,” with the admirable line:
I was cerebration ’bout you crossin’ Southern Alberta
Canola fields on a July day
Are about the aforementioned chartreuse
as that ’69 bug
You acclimated to drive about San Jose
McMurtry isn’t a biographer like his acclaimed father, the backward Larry McMurtry, but his lyrics acquire article of the empiric absorption of a biographer and the compression of poetry.
A song lyric should be evocative, but should additionally complete like article somebody would absolutely say. Bad lyrics aftereffect aback addition tries to force a beat or goes deafened to meter. This happens to alike the best lyricists — as aback in Jackson Browne’s contrarily bright song “The Pretender” he sings “the accouchement actively delay for the ice chrism vendor” or aback Bruce Springsteen wrote “Secret Garden” — but it never seems to appear to McMurtry. He’s abnormally acclimatized in a way that suggests he counts syllables sometimes.
A acceptable lyric doesn’t neces- sarily acquire to acquaint a story. A lot of songwriters use words added as sonic ethics than as argosy of acceptation apparitional by association and allusion, but McMurtry may be the best at putting us in the arch of a appearance bent up in a accurate animal drama.
You get through one of his five-minute songs like “Carlisle’s Haul” off “Complicated Game,” and you feel like you’d apprehend a book about these characters, if you haven’t lived out their lives.
“Canola Fields” is about a assertive affectionate of nostalgia, a additional adventitious with addition you apparently should acquire gotten with in the wayback, except that, if you had, it apparently wouldn’t acquire formed accustomed how complicated everyone’s activity was aback then. It’s about “cashing in on a 30-year crush” and how you “can’t be adolescent and do that.”
Maybe you can’t be adolescent and address that either, admitting one affair that McMurtry would acquaint you about his songwriting action is that he’s not confessional. He’s added a new announcer attractive for specific absolute capacity about the bodies he’s absorbed in abundant to address about; bodies who assume to be flown-over Americans — banal to upper-middle-class citizenry of baby towns and baby cities removed from our cultural littoral aristocratic centers. That’s his work, not his biography. McMurtry’s characters anticipate their own thoughts; it would be a aberration to abash them with the artist.
“The Horses and the Hounds” is the latest anthology appear by James McMurtry.
I interviewed McMurtry once. The affair wasn’t a debacle, but wasn’t acceptable for either one of us. It can’t be accessible giving 100 interviews a year to journalists who are either aggravating to beating out a quick examination or argue their accountable that they’re somehow altered from every added biographer who has asked them questions that could be calmly answered by blockage the clips.
If you try to columnist him to allocution about his songwriting process, he’ll acquaint you he’ll apprehend a band in his head, and if it sticks there he’ll try to amount out who ability acquire said it and why. And that ability advance to a song. He acclimated to blazon $.25 of lyrics out on his phone, in the addendum application, in the banana sans font.
He writes the melody and the lyrics at the aforementioned time, again goes aback and does the chords.
I approved to get him to allocution about his guitars and guitar arena and how he achieves his alive sound, addition that aback anybody abroad asked him about his dad and his songwriting he ability balmy to a altercation about tools. Alike admitting he’s a absolutely acceptable amateur with an absorbing style, the rig-rundown guitar allocution action didn’t go anywhere. He was affable and professional, but steered the chat aback to his talking points, the aforementioned way any media-savvy amateur might.
(McMurtry has an acting resume — his about-face as advanced adolescent Randolph in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1974 adaptation of “Daisy Miller” is choice. Aback a ambitious suitor asks adolescent Randolph if he knows the appellation appearance — played by Cybill Shepherd — he deadpans, “I don’t apperceive her. She’s my sister.” He additionally played a cowboy in the 1989 miniseries “Lonesome Dove,” based on his father’s ballsy Western novel.)
Yet there’s actual little about McMurtry that presents as show-bizzy. Some ability booty his appropriate breviloquent mien as shtick, but if you were reared in Texas you’ll apparently acquire it as authentic. Lots of guys airing about in those genitalia cutting trucker caps and talking slow.
Just because McMurtry abounding Woodberry Forest School, an absolute all-boys clandestine academy in Virginia area he was a acquaintance of Marvin Bush, the adolescent brother of George W. Bush (whose administering he railed adjoin on his 2008 anthology “Just Us Kids”), that doesn’t beggarly he’s a preppie.
Or maybe we should booty apprehension of the actuality that alike the dullest of us accommodate multitudes. As Katharine Hepburn put it in “The Philadelphia Story,” the time to accomplish up your apperception about addition is never.
Trust the art, not the artist, and absolutely not the artist’s arranger or Wikipedia page.
James McMurtry (courtesy James McMurtry)
I came to McMurtry almost late.
I still bethink accepting a promo archetype — a vinyl anthology — of his admission album, “Too Continued in the Wasteland,” in 1989. Columbia put some beef abaft that effort, produced by John Mellencamp, who had affianced Larry McMurtry to address a cine for “Falling From Grace,” a cine Mellencamp produced and directed at the acme of his bartering success.
In 1987, the chief McMurtry gave Mellencamp a band of his son’s songs, and Mellencamp was impressed. He alleged up the kid and asked him if he could address more. McMurtry said sure, and they went into a collapsed and fabricated “Wasteland.”
“Hey, if it wasn’t for Dad’s connections, I wouldn’t acquire fabricated it anywhere,” McMurtry told Phoenix New Times in 1992. “It’s absolutely that simple.”
“Wasteland” could acquire been taken for the assignment of a dilettante, an brainy affluent boy in a assignment shirt, accomplishing his best to get out from below the aura of Daddy’s acceptability and money, and if he’d accustomed up afterwards a try or two and confused on to a career in academia or whatever, well, maybe that would acquire been fair criticism. (For the record, Larry gave his son a guitar, but James credits his English-professor mother with assuming him his aboriginal chords.)
His additional almanac on Columbia, “Candyland,” was better, but didn’t chart. I chock-full advantageous absorption afterwards that, admitting occasionally one of McMurtry’s songs would breach through. But it wasn’t until the 21st aeon and I saw him in a baby club that I became a fan.
And alike again I kept a little brainy basis agenda on Mc- Murtry that boarded him to a brand I anticipate of as NPR Music (an absolutely dismissive rubric, admitting some of my admired artists abide below it): a able artist and a songwriter in the Woody Guthrie-Bob Dylan attitude who is a little too acute to analytical evaluations that focus on his arcane ability while downplaying his musicality.
That was a misconception. McMurtry was added absorbed in arena guitar than annihilation abroad while he was at the University of Arizona in Tucson in the aboriginal ’80s; he capital to be Norman Blake or Doc Watson, a abundant flat-picker.
But his songs were what bodies paid absorption to and what led him aback to Texas and the Kerrville Folk Festival, area he was one of six winners in 1987. Alike after his father’s connections, he ability acquire carved out the affectionate of career he’s had, area he sells a reliable cardinal of units and plays aloof about as generally as he wants.
Or at atomic he did, until covid-19.
There are a brace of added songs on “The Horses and the Hounds” that rip me up.
One of them, “Jackie,” is an icy violin-driven flit about a blighted horsewoman who drives a barter to accomplish ends meet. Her credo:
I aloof got two rules, if my
conscience be known
Don’t lie to me, don’t bring
me annihilation home
Faithful’s a nice chat in
Sunday academy class
Life’s aloof too crazy for that
It’s heartbreaking, additional and abrupt and beautifully articulate in the asperous but annoyed articulation of a beggared friend.
Then there’s “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call,” a spoke-sung accessory to McMurtry’s best known-song, the clear methamphetamine travelog “Choctaw Bingo.” Actuality our hero and the woman he charge augment are trapped in a accurate amphitheater of hell — a Florida bank cabin on a 30-degree day.
They charge to get aback to Atlanta but the airports are socked in by the acclimate and the rental car has a collapsed and our advocate — who feels accusable for accepting airtight at the board agent — keeps accident his glasses.
While McMurtry is not big on the verse-chorus-bridge blueprint access to songwriting — he already offered the assessment that choruses care to be banned — actuality he’s hit the jackpot. “I accumulate accident my glasses” is the year’s bigger ear bastard for me.
If that’s not a accepted array of almanac analysis — I was already told that a almanac analysis should be no added than seven cavalcade inches continued — I assumption I’m sorry. “Complicated Game” is one of the bigger albums of the accomplished decade (a time aback the cultural bill of the anthology has decreased), and “The Horses and the Hounds” can adhere with it. I achievement it’s not addition seven years afore we acquisition out if McMurtry is activity to acknowledgment to the beggarly or abide at this new level.
For all his allocution of actuality a beer salesman, McMurtry is acting like this ancient anatomy still matters.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
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