James McMurtry Interview

How best to describe James McMurtry? Stephen King has called him “… the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation.” Co-producing his debut album, Too Long in the Wasteland, John Mellencamp noted that “James writes like he’s lived a lifetime.” In an interview with Hobo Trash Can, McMurtry joked, “I tend to look at the dark cloud behind the silver lining.”

There definitely was a wry candor to the questions I asked during an afternoon phone call. And while he looked for a quiet place in his home in Lockhart, TX as his two dogs barked, I asked if it was ok to record the conversation for accuracy.

“I prefer it,” He replied.

Born in Fort Worth, TX, raised in Leesburg, VA, McMurtry’s musical career started when his dad, Larry McMurtry, gave him his first guitar and his mom, Jo Scott, taught him three chords. From there he has maintained a long career as a singer-songwriter with a clear-eyed look at the ridiculous nature of life.

To start off our conversation I asked who he was taking on the road with him for his upcoming tour. He said in March it was mostly solo gigs. But starting in April he was bringing along Cornbread on bass, Daren Hess on drums, Tim Holt on guitar and accordion, and Betty Soo will be opening and doing a couple of songs with him. “She sang on the last record and she’s all over this new one, and I actually sang on her record this year.”

McMurtry knew the date (April 15th) of his Fine Line show for he will be arriving early to sign 2,300 LP jackets of his latest album, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy, at Noiseland Industries in Northeast Minneapolis.

I told him I listened to one of the songs “Pinocchio in Vegas” and asked how he goes about creating a song with so many levels.

He said he had the first verse lying around for a couple of years. “And I just started picking at it, seeing where it went… I’ll get a couple lines and a melody and I’ll ask, ‘Who said that’?”

I told him that his lyrics are so vivid, drawing in the listener, and asked if he works on the lyrics first.

“I get words and music together,” He replied. “So I don’t have to put words to music or music to words. I guess I’ve never really had words floating out there. I had to put music to words.”

He then added, “Sometimes music comes without words.”

“So you could be just strumming on your guitar and just working on melody and then…”

“Or not even with the guitar. Just driving down the road. Happens more often when I’m away from the guitar and I’ve got like road noise, jet noise, some kind of white noise for the melodies to hide in. It gives them cover.”

We then talked about the process of writing down his lyrics, mostly on a yellow legal pad with a black pen. He said for a while he worked on a laptop, but accidentally put it on the roof of his car, underneath a canoe. Forgot about it for a moment and… “Drove down the highway and lost several years of lyrics.”

He said that he remembered enough to make his latest album, then added, “I wrote a whole record, Complicated Game, on an IPhone 3 because the Notes App looks like a legal pad and the lettering kind of looked like cursive. Had real good luck with that until I dropped it and broke it to smithereens.”

In his recent Rolling Stone essay, McMurtry made an observation that we have lost our sense of humor as a country. The reason for the essay was him wearing a red dress at his concerts in Knoxville, TN to protest the state’s anti-drag proposal. I watched part of the concert and had to admit my immediate reaction was to laugh. I asked him if it is sometimes important to address heated subjects with humor?

He said he also wore the dress in Texas and Montana to protest those states’ proposals, him in a red dress and Betty Soo in a suit, adding “I didn’t look particularly female. I looked like a pasty old guy in a dress.”

He added, “Did the best we could and tried to make a splash. It helped for a little while… That’s all we can do as performers is draw attention to it.”

We then started talking about his hometown, Austin, TX, where he holds a weekly residency at The Continental Club when he isn’t on the road.

“Every batch of Austinites I ever met was complaining how much better it used to be. I really haven’t gotten used to the new Austin.”

He said he lives in Lockhart, which is thirty miles outside of Austin, not by choice. “People don’t move towards opportunity. They move to where they can afford to live.”

He called Austin a tech town, saying, “It’s not so much a place for music aficionados.”

I told him I recently read Elmore Leonard’s book Be Cool, which is a look at the music industry and how it is nearly impossible for a new artist to make any money. I asked if that was his experience, and if his longevity in the industry has made things easier.

“When I was starting out it wasn’t nearly as tough as it is now. It’s gotten way harder. You used to get mechanical royalties for songs that you got on somebody’s record which amounted to about a nickel per song per unit, but now you don’t even get that. Royalties for streaming are nothing. Royalties for downloads are nothing. Copyright law is so far behind technology that it will never catch up.”