James McMurtry

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James McMurtry is an American rock and folk rock/americana singer, songwriter, guitarist, bandleader, and occasional actor.

August 25, 2021

By Mary Andrews

James McMurtry has released a new album, The Horses and the Hounds, and he is ready to tour again. Thanks to the pandemic, this will be a short tour and he will make a stop at Tucson’s Club Congress on September 5. McMurtry is very familiar with Tucson since he made Tucson his home during his college years.

McMurtry is the son of famed American novelist and screenwriter, Larry McMurtry. His accomplished works include the Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning Lonesome Dove and Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain.

James has followed in his father’s footsteps in writing his epic songs. His thought provoking and eloquent songs are like novels in five-minute segments, depicting Americana, past and present.

This is McMurtry’s first release on New West Records out of Nashville. Fans are anxiously anticipating the next concert filled with songs from his new album. We were able to catch McMurtry as he is getting ready to tour. Here’s what we learned.

Mary Andrews: You have just released an album of new compositions in the last week. How has it been received thus far?

James McMurtry: They tell me it’s out now. It’s gotten pretty good reviews across the board. Everybody I know seems to like it.

MA: How is this album different from your previous records?

JM: Several of my previous albums I produced myself. This one is produced by Ross Hogarth and he’s spends a lot more attention to detail than I did. He pushed me to get better vocal performances than I ever got before.

MA: Are your new songs a product of your travels?

JM: Some of them, yes. “Canola Fields” for sure. I never would have known what a Canola field was if I hadn’t been touring back and forth across Western Canada at various times of the year. That’s where they grow that stuff and, in the summer, it has an amazing yellow blossom that makes it look like a chartreuse carpet.
We didn’t know what the stuff was. One time we went through there in November, when they were harvesting, and they were raking the stuff up. It looked like a bunch of tumbleweeds, just like you would see in the hay fields in rows at a certain time. I thought, ‘What are they doing with all those tumbleweeds.’ They had these weird machines that would vacuum up the row with this reverse conveyor thing that fed the rows into the mouth of this machine that would spit stuff out the back. So, we figured they must be collecting some kind of seed. We passed a field one day that was empty that had a sign that said canola processing with a phone number. That’s how we pieced it together. It didn’t occur to us to just ask somebody what it was. We were just trying to get to the gig.

MA: Is this a pandemic album? I remember speaking with you a couple of years ago and you were already recording a couple of songs for this album.

JM: No, we tracked it in June of 2019 in Santa Monica and we spent the rest of that year doing overdubs. Ross would get busy with other jobs. We were on the road a lot just trying to make a living. I had to make two trips back to LA to do vocals because the first pass of the final vocals was destroyed by wood smoke. I didn’t realize that that haze looming over Van Nuys wasn’t just regular haze, you know San Fernando haze. It was smoke from the fires. That just tears your throat up sometimes. I had to go back in December when the smoke had dissipated. I had to walk around with a mask. That’s actually when I started wearing a mask was during that smoke.

MA: Would you call your music rock ‘n roll? There are some amazing guitar licks on the new album.

JM: Sometimes it is. On this record, it certainly is rock. David Grissom is the guitarist on the album and he is a powerhouse.

MA: You are coming to Tucson very soon. You come through here fairly frequently and of course, we are always happy to see you.

JM: We are doing the Crescent Theatre in Phoenix. I was supposed to do the Musical Instrument Museum, but they wouldn’t accept my safety protocol, which is a mask and Vax card. Now they do. They changed their policy. I guess enough of us were demanding that now that the business is starting to shift. If the businesses don’t adopt stricter protocols, the business will end up shutting down again.

MA: There are about 15 or 20 venues that have gotten together and have adopted that protocol.

JM: That’s good because here in Texas they’d get in trouble because Governor Abbott is now using the TABC of beverage control to attack any business that sells alcohol to tow his line of no mandates of any kind. I heard the Kerrville Folk Festival was kind of in trouble. The TABC said if you are going to mandate masks you can’t sell beer. They said ‘fine we’ll just do BYOB.’ Turns out they are still in trouble because you can’t have a music festival without emergency services. The hospitals in Kerr country are full of unvaccinated Covid patients. I guess the way Abbott is going to own libs is by filling the hospitals up with dying rednecks. So, we can’t have our music festival. It’s a weird strategy.(McMurtry is scheduled to appear at the Kerrville Music Festival the first weekend, October 1-3.)

MA: Didn’t you say that your father was in Tucson a couple of years ago?

JM: Yes, he passed away in March in Tucson.

MA: What did your father think about your music?

JM: He seemed to like it just fine.

MA: A very common denominator in your music is that you have an innate ability to observe typical things in American life and that leads people to recognize themselves in your songs. It seems to be working for you.

JM: That’s the idea. You want the listener to recognize themselves. I’m glad that it works.

MA: Many of your songs are off the beaten path. And you seem to travel to all these places.

JM: I’ve traveled all over North America and Europe. I haven’t traveled anywhere else. I haven’t toured in Japan or Australia or any other place like that.

MA: What is your favorite song on the album?

JM: Probably “Canola Fields.” We worked on that the longest. There’s a lot of them. “Jackie” is another one of them I thought was good. We’ve been playing “What’s a Matter” for a long time. It was supposed to be on the last record.

MA: What does the horses and the hounds represent?

JM: To me it represents inner demons. We have to turn and face them at some point. It could be anything to the listener. I don’t know.

MA: You mention turning a ‘big rig’ around to face the horses and the hounds.

JM: They seem to think they are chasing an innocent quarry, somebody on foot. If you come back at them with a semi, maybe they will get out of your way.

MA: What are your three favorite albums of all time?

JM: I guess Waiting For Columbus (Little Feat), Bring It All Back Home (Bob Dylan), and probably Live At San Quinton (Johnny Cash).

MA: What influenced you the most to go into music?

JM: Probably watching Kris Kristofferson on stage and his band having a really good time. Probably around 1973.

MA: What is next for you?

JM: I don’t know. It depends on what’s next for all of us. I had to cancel my whole Eastern tour in September because of safety protocol. I’m not doing very many dates right now. I’m just doing Arizona and New Mexico, about a week. New Mexico has a pretty high vax rate, about an 80% vax rate. Arizona seems to be wearing their masks.
It’s a global pandemic, but we don’t have a global health organization with any funding or muscle or “teeth.” We are going to keep getting these variants because half the world can’t get the vaccine. Half of the Americans don’t want it.
Anybody that remembers polio, I remember one person my age that walks with a limp because of polio in my area. My mother’s generation was a different story. They didn’t have the vaccine. My grandfather was a health official for the city of Florence, South Carolina and he had to shut down the swimming pools in the summer to keep it from spreading. He was really unpopular, but he did his job. The city backed him. You don’t have that now. You try to mandate anything and it’s considered government over reach.
Nobody balked at taking the polio vaccine. We took it. When we saw that it was paralyzing (people), we took it. Now we have intubating machines rather than iron lungs.

MA: Let’s talk a little bit about current events. I always enjoy hearing your take on what’s going on. Things seem to be pretty bad right now.

JM: I don’t know. If you compare it to any time in history, there’s been a lot of bad times. My grandparents lived through the dustbowl, the great depression. They probably thought that was pretty bad.

MA: President Biden is catching a lot of flack now.

JM: Well, he caught the hot potato. He’s the one that had to pull out of Afghanistan. Somebody would have to. You could see that the minute we went in. For a while, nobody thought they could (pull out). I don’t know if my supposition is anyway correct, but I look at a map and I look at the top of the map. I see Kazakhstan with all that oil in it. Only the Chinese have access to it because they share a border and they can pipe it straight across. Looking at the bottom of the map and there is KarachI on the coast and you can pull in a tanker. In between is mostly Afgan territory which is mountain less and full of hostile people. There’s not an ideal pipeline route. You know Rex Tillerson was beaming about it when they first went in. He was CEO of Exxon at the time. When Bush went in, it was a different world. They wanted to go into Iran. That would have helped them get in and there’s a lot of oil there. In the twenty years we have been there, a bunch of country boys in Southern Oklahoma figured how to pack shale and get oil out of it. Suddenly we are exporting oil. We are exporting liquid natural gas. We are exporters instead of importers largely. I don’t think that Iraq oil is going into our gas tanks. It’s probably going into those tankers going into Saudi. It’s a power structure now if we ever needed that pipeline route, we probably don’t anymore. We’re getting out and the correlation does not imply cause. I definitely see a correlation there.

MA: Is there anything you would like to mention about the new album?