Interview: James McMurtry discusses creativity, cancer companies and latest album The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy

No one could ever accuse James McMurtry of being fanciful. After all, the characters in his songs invariably are edged with such direct, keen-eyed realism, it seems like they’ve walked straight out of the diner or the back porch or the garage workshop and into the verses of his bleakly beautiful lyrics. Topics he deals with in, for example, his latest album “The Black Dog and The Wandering Boy“, like dementia or an aging Texas Ranger’s suicide or a would-be filmmaker’s desperate quest to scrape a living – the latter to a chorus line of “Gotta get known, gotta get known, gotta get known” – are hardly the stuff of exaggeratedly sentimental ballads, either. Not only that, McMurtry’s bookended his latest album with ‘Laredo (Small Dark Something)‘, a song by fellow-Austin artist John Dee Graham about a part-time dope fiend, and Kris Kristofferson’s heartrendingly downbeat ‘Song of Broken Freedom‘.

So you could be forgiven for thinking that on his latest album at least, McMurtry wasn’t exactly looking to flood the universe with any spare misplaced optimism. Or to give it a more positive spin, you could also say that 35-odd years into his career, McMurtry’s commitment to telling things how they are, not how we’d like them to be, remains unwavering, even if that means he remains outside the mainstream of commercial country music.

“I do believe that the myth sells better than the reality. And I don’t always sell the myth,” McMurtry told AUK in an interview earlier this year.

“I try to get closer to the reality than Nashville ever has, because, you know, they’re still selling this myth of rural America. You get songs like ‘Try That In A Small Town‘ – country singer Jason Aldean’s 2023 release – “where they push the notion that the small towns and rural America are somehow morally superior to urban America and [in fact] they’ve got drugs, they’ve got rape and incest, they got everything that they got in the city.”

Look back at all of McMurtry’s previous ten albums and you’ll see he’s been doing myth-debunking right the way back to when he started album-making with “Too Long In The Wasteland” back in 1989. For a prime example of what he calls “the classic McMurtry country song”, he cites ‘Lobo Town,’ a track from his 2002 album “Saint Mary of the Woods“. In ‘Lobo Town’ – and it’s surely no coincidence that’s the same name as an abandoned ghost town in west Texas – the narrator is part of a family that was once an upstanding pillar of the community, but whose last surviving member is now eking out a much more miserable, partly drug-fuelled existence.

Hard-working kind of men
There’s not a one left of them
There’s only me, there’s only mine
I guess we’re all the other kind

Throwin’ dice and dippin’ snuff
Out in a trailer, back in the brush
Sippin’ crown and smokin’ weed
Huntin’ hogs and cookin’ speed

That’s how we do it nowadays
No matter what the teachers used to say
Pass judgment if you dare
See if any of us care.

Not much moral superiority in that particular portrait of America outside the cities in there, or as McMurtry explains: “It’s got the rock groove, but it’s rural subject matter as I have known it. You know, I’ve got cousins that are strung out on meth. They cleaned up now, but that’s what happens in the country that I know, the America that I’ve seen. Most of the country people I knew were people who left, or that didn’t fit in the country like my father, like Max Crawford,” – the communist from central Texas to whom McMurtry dedicated ‘Levelland‘, probably his best-known song, and a devastating critique of claustrophobia induced by small-town normality. “They just wanted something else – and that’s the perspective,” he explains. “I always had an outsider’s perspective, which is an easy place to write from. Because you’re outside, you can see the whole picture. If you’re in the middle of it, you might not see it quite so clearly.”

But if writing from the outside about how life really is in ‘normal’ middle-of-the-road, flyover America, rather than idealising it, is one of McMurtry’s main modes of operating, then it’s always going to be the songs themselves by which they impact. McMurtry’s lyrical precision is often rightly praised as one of his greatest talents, but what makes those wondrously succinct verses even more remarkable is how, as he explains here, he uses seemingly chance expressions or phrases or moments as raw material for his content.

“My favourite kinds of songs are where I just get words out of nowhere,” McMurtry explains. Like ‘Back to Coeur d’Alene‘ – the song about the desperate ragtag crew of film-makers and other artists on his latest album – and on the last record [“The Horses and The Hounds“], ‘Fort Walton Wake Up Call‘. “Just really fun songs, because I’m just following the words. The words find the story.”

The most unlikely of circumstances can provide those words, too, as McMurtry explains about the initial kernel of thoughts and events that became one line of ‘Back to Coeur d’Alene‘: “We got two dogs, and the second one, Mikey, we got from Houston, I think he’s a hurricane rescue dog and he was traumatized early in life, I guess. So when he got here, the big dog would try to play with him, and he was just so shut down, he couldn’t play. Mikey seemed like he thought he was always in trouble. If he picked up a broom, he’d slink off to the corner. You know, it took a long time to loosen up, but he finally did, and now he’s bounding all up on the bed, and it’s like – James, get up, get up, nobody’s yelling at us. Looks like he’s so happy to be there now, so that’s how I had that line for the song about “Mikey comes to visit in the morning and says we’re not in trouble anymore.” Then I had an uncle, Carlton, who passed away not too long ago, so I took his name and applied that to a different character, too.”

So each time, the process is roughly the same, for all it can be some meth-ed out cousins or his rescue dog or the late Uncle Carlton who end up serving as McMurtry’s grist to his songwriting mill. It’s just a thought, but maybe that organic, unforced beginning to his lyrics is what makes them sound so natural whenever a finished song by McMurtry sees the light of day, no matter how intricate or hard-hitting (or, often, both), they are. “I start with a line,” he explains. “I hear the line and the melody in my head, and then I have to, then I think, well, who might have said that. So I look for a character to provide a narrator, and what else might that narrator say? What might that narrator do? Yeah, and then I just sort of follow the rhyme and metre, until it finds a story.”

There are unwanted downsides to McMurtry’s brilliance as a writer and knakc for exploiting unlikely material. For example, because his lyrics are so striking and original, in interviews questions about them often eclipse McMurtry’s interest and passion for the way in which his music actually finds its way into recordings. However, to hear him talk about the contribution Don Dixon – the produer who last collaborated with McMurtry on one of the high points of his career, the hugely recommendable “Where’d You Hide The Body‘” album from 1995 – made in the same role to “The Lost Dog and The Wandering Boy” it’s clear McMurtry’s equally meticulous and involved with the intricacies of the sound quality as well. In fact, when AUK asks McMurtry about the reason why he returned to working with Dixon after a 30-year gap, he gives his longest single answer – by far – of the entire interview.

“Don kind of taught me how to record,” he says. “I took my recording style from mostly him and Lloyd Maines”, – father of Natalie Maines of The Chicks, and a huge influential producer and musician in his own right – and maybe some of [John] Mellencamp’s tricks. But the thing about Dixon, he likes to record live, and he’s really good about knowing when the take is happening, and that’ll save you a lot of time because, you know, if I’m producing myself, I can’t really tell which was good. “ You know it might feel good in the recording room, but when I go in the control room and listen, I can hear where it’s lacking. So in that situation, I have to do like three takes and then go in the control room and listen to the three takes. Well, that listening takes 15 minutes. Whereas if I got Don in the control room, he knows when it’s going down, and we get to the end of the take, and he’ll say, you know, just punch that ending or punch this section, and you got it. So that saves us, you know, that saves us 15 minutes right there. We get a lot more done in the day.”

It’s not just about time-saving, either, although that’s likely always a consideration given the colossal amount of background work in general that goes into making a record, not to mention the price of hiring a recording studio. Weighing up the pros and cons of different recording processes, McMurtry explains that Dixon’s affinity with digital recording benefits the end product as well.

“I noticed like 30 years ago, it was a very different situation. We didn’t have Pro Tools,” – one of the standard instruments for record production these days. “The ‘Where D’You Hide The Body” record was done on a Sony digital machine, which was state-of-the-art then, so we had two of them. And the great thing that did was that we could edit without having to use a razor blade. We didn’t have to actually cut tape. So we got some cool stuff out of that.

“But there was a lot of anti-digital prejudice back then, you know. All the old guys, their ears were used to analog and they were used to the queuing for analog” – using a digital audio device called a DAW to act like an analog recording studio – “so there was this notion that analog was always better. Which, over the years, I discovered is not [true], some instruments prefer digital.”

McMurtry points to the piano as one such example, saying, “Digital is the way to go. That instrument likes some space around it, where analog kind of tends to push everything up into the mid-range. Don was already into that, you know, as soon as the CD happened and digital tape happened, he got away from analog and tried to figure out how to do digital right, and he figured out that the main thing is mic placement. You use as little EQ” – the process of adjusting the volume of different frequency bands within an audio signal – “as possible, and you just leave everything flat and place your mics, spend some time. And you can get as good a sound that way, you know, you can get as warm a sound as you could, with analog. So I paid attention when he told me that, and I knew that, you know, over the course of time, with all the development of technology, he’d be right with it.”

Finally, there is what you might call Dixon’s overall approach to recording, with McMurtry praising the producer’s clear-sighted but flexible working philosophy. “He’s not strict about anything. He uses what he thinks works best. So we record on Pro Tools like everybody else, and then he’ll take it back to his mixing room, where he’s got all kinds of different gear from all different eras. He’ll use some analog processors, so it’s difficult to recall a mix with him because you can’t just press ‘recall’ and have it come back. He has to remember where the dials are set on certain machines. But he’s got a good memory, so I think he made a good record.”

It’s often observed that there’s a lot of grim subject matter in McMurtry’s work, and even the eight-minute high-energy workout of ‘Choctaw Bingo‘ – the rowdy, sometimes hilarious account of a disfunctional family reunion, and one of his most enduringly popular songs ever since it first appeared back in 2002 – uses examples of the crumbling economy of rural working class America as one of its main lyrical motors. But to quote one of his own songs, ‘Carlisle’s Haul‘ off the “Complicated Game” album back at his own lyrics, “At the end of the rope there’s a little more rope most times.” In other words,  amidst all the crap that life throws at us, McMurtry seems to believe that some kind of solidarity or gestures of humanity or glimmer of hope may yet make it out there, and even in the case of the much-feared onset of dementia, like in the title song of his latest album, it’s not all automatically going to be a purely negative experience.

McMurtry’s already centred a song on his previous album, “The Horses and The Hounds“, on the topic: ‘A Decent Man‘, based on a short story by the Kentucky writer Wendell Berry. But while that is a much bleaker tale of a deranged man’s madness leading to his murder of his best friend, this time around in ‘The Black Dog and The Wandering Boy‘, the hallucinations are a much more neutral affair. At times, the narrator seems detached, almost scientifically so, about the whole idea of his own mental instability, as if it were happening to another person. It’s a striking perspective, highlighted by the punchy, heavy-rock feel to the song, but it’s also one which confirms McMurtry’s refusal to paint everything black, despite the a priori gloomy material. Even there, you might say, he’s being a non-conformist.

The black dog doesn’t bite
He just sits on the corner of the bed watching the things that haunt
They oughta both go away when I take my meds.
But they don’t.

It turns out it was one of his late father’s dementia-induced hallucinations that impacted McMurtry so strongly that it became part of the kickstart for the title song, he says. “My father passed at this point, and my stepmother asked if he’d ever talked to me about his hallucinations, and I said, No, she said, you don’t know about the black dog and the wandering boy, and I just thought it would be a good song title. This song is not about Larry, but I just took those and made them somebody else’s hallucinations.”

By avoiding using the family experience beyond the images themselves, McMurtry puts a certain distance between himself and the narrator, but that doesn’t mean he’s trivialising or belittling the experience of dementia: far from it. Rather, it simply gives the narrator a chance to speak on their own account, providing a different, sometimes very surprising, kind of perspective on their condition:

The sun’s comin’ up, and it’s seven in the mornin’
Another drink wouldn’t hurt
Sittin’ outside on Mama’s front porch
Watchin’ the squarеs go to work.

“I stole that line from Keith Ferguson,” – the bass player from Austin blues-rock band The Fabulous Thunderbirds who died in the late 1990s of liver failure, aged 50 – McMurtry explains with his usual diffidence, as if keeping a a single line back for 30 years before finding the right time to use it in a song was wholly unremarkable, and not yet more evidence of his immense writing talent. “My ex-bass player used to hang out with Keith some, and they’d sit out on Keith’s mother’s front porch and watch the squares go to work, in Keith’s words. I didn’t know Keith myself, but I don’t mind stealing his line.” But by giving it to those suffering from mental illness and making it form part of their narrative, McMurtry’s doing something at which he’s always excelled as a songwriter: providing a voice to those parts of society that all too often go unheard.

Yet another compelling element about “The Black Dog and The Wandering Boy” is its range of subjects. There’s the harrowing introspection and loneliness that rips through ‘The Colour of Night‘, for one thing – another of multiple highlights on the 10-track album – but McMurtry also looks at much bigger social pictures too, like the aftermath of 9/11 on ‘Annie‘, or how the US was built, for better and for worse in ‘Sons of the Second Sons‘. Rather than the uplifting, unthinking treatment that topic often receives in country music, the latter is definitely not pretty hearing – albeit with that gritty heartland rock base that McMurtry has nailed to a “T”. Rather while it pays a kind of tribute to the unsung forefathers that created the nation, it also points out how much of it was done by means and with consequences that do them do no credit at all.

“It’s not so much about second sons in the family, it’s just American history,” he says. “I mean, a lot of the early industrialists here are the result of European primogeniture. You know, the patriarch would die and the estate went to the eldest male heir, and what’s the second son gonna do? Maybe he’s got a little money from his family, but he can’t own anything. So you go to the New World and do the best you can, with the help of the peasantry and slavery, and I think that’s about slavery and genocide as much as anything else. Then there’s a reference to the ‘Jim Crow car’ in it, [because] you know, we thought we fixed everything with the Civil Rights Act. But guess what? Racism was still here.”

It’s not just about the past, either. McMurtry’s analysis of the state of the nation contains a great deal of caustic despair at the direction the US is heading now, too:

Nowadays we’re feelin’ stressed
It’s all for us and damn the rest
Tellin’ each other have a blessed day
All camoed up and standin’ tall
Buildin’ bombs and border walls
As all collective conscience falls away
And they wave those stars and bars
Is that really who we are?

Moving to the opposite end of the spectrum on the same album in another song, in ‘Sailing Away‘, McMurtry creates a song which is born in part straight out of his own experiences, the times when he was regularly getting lost when on tour in Washington. He builds it into a much deeper experience and self-doubt, “wondering if I’m even worth the paper I’m printed on,” as he puts it in a typically pithy line. “I rhymed Pentagon with printed on, and I had to find a song to put it in. It took years to build that song around that line. But that’s something that does happen,” he explains. “You get over by the Pentagon and for some reason, at least in the early days when you had those Garmins and Roadrunner satnavs on the dash, you’d get near the Pentagon and it got scrambled. Even before satellite systems, I always got lost in that region of DC, it’s not easy. It just seemed like a lot of my life I’ve been stuck in rainstorms over there trying to get to the Birchmere or whatever club I was playing.”

But as ever with McMurtry, no matter how close to home he gets, it’s notable how keen he is to put other voices and other elements into the picture. It feels kind of appropriate, too, that if one song is partly inspired by his father’s hallucinations, in the same album, McMurtry pays tribute to the artist that brought him into songwriting in the first place, Kris Kristofferson, with a cover of ‘Song of Broken Freedom‘ to round out the album.

“He was the first one that was, you know, was identified to me as a songwriter when I was a child,” McMurtry says about the role Kristofferson played in his life. “I didn’t really pay attention to where songs came from until Kristofferson, and that’s when I started thinking, how do you do this? How do you put these words together and make that happen, right? Which ties back into this record because Kris had just passed away. We did one tracking session in May and another one sometime in the fall, and I think he had just passed right before I finished ‘Back to Coeur d’Alene’.

“So I started reading all the obituaries, and I hadn’t known that he had been disowned by his family when he quit the military. And then the army offered him a nice job at West Point teaching English Lit. because he was also a Rhodes scholar before he went in the army. But instead, he resigned his commission to go to Nashville and be a songwriter, and his family disowned him. It was a military family, and they wanted nothing to do with the kid who was writing country songs. His mother wrote him a scathing letter about how disappointed she was,” – something that generated a verse in the ‘Back to Coeur d’Alene‘ song, too:

Mama’d get to drinkin’, call me worthless
She lost a couple of uncles in the war
When I said I’m never goin’ in the service
Mama never talked to me no more
Mama never talked to me no more.

As for why he chose that particular song of Kristofferson’s to cover, his explanation is typically McMurtry-esque in its succinctness. But his two phrases say everything that matters about his motivation, all the same. “I just always liked it, and, you know, it’s not one that everybody knows. I listen to pretty much everything he ever wrote.”

But apart from the semi-hidden tribute in his own words on ‘Back to Coeur d’Alene’, and the final song cover on “The Lost Dog and The Wandering Boy“, it turns out McMurtry had his own moment of connecting with the great writer in his live performances as well. Going to a Kristofferson concert aged nine gave him the first impetus as a songwriter, and there was a link, too, decades later to that same event when he played in the same concert hall – albeit, as McMurtry also recounts, when the hall had a very different name.

“My stepdad was a Kristofferson fan. He got tickets and took my mother, me and a friend of mine. We all went there,” he said.

“It was a place in Richmond, Virginia, called The Mosque, which, after 9/11, changed its name. I forget the tobacco company, but it’s what used to be Philip Morris, you know, the one that packages Marlboro cigarettes. So they can name it after a cancer company, but you can’t have anything Muslim in it,” he says with wry humour.

“I actually got to play on that stage opening for Jason Isbell, after it changed the name, but it still had all the kind of very faux Muslim decoration in there. I made a comment on that stage about it. But it was cool to be able to, you know, stand there where Kris stood there, years before.”

The connections remain, but where McMurtry remains in a class of his own, perhaps, even more than a giant of songwriting like Kristofferson, is his intense attention to local detail. He’s so thorough about that process that even when he got a detail wrong, as he explains with an anecdote about ‘Ruby and Carlos‘ – one of the most moving paeans to lost loves that you’ll likely find anywheree, which is on his “Just Us Kids” album – that only shows how much getting those specifics nailed down for good actually matters to him.

“I thought ‘Ruby and Carlos‘ was set somewhere up in the Teton Valley of Idaho. But there’s a reference to a Coggins test, which is an equestrian thing that everybody in the South and Southwest knows about, but apparently, they don’t test for it in Idaho. Somebody would call me and say – you know, yeah, I know what you’re talking about, but up here they don’t do that. But fortunately, if you go further south down the Rockies, you get into Western Colorado and down there. They have the same aspen trees [as in the song], they got potato fields, and they test for Coggins. So I guess if anybody asks, I can say it’s set in Moska, Colorado.”

As for the why this attention to getting the specifics matters so much to him, he explains drily, “You want to put in enough details to make them [the public] think you know what you’re talking about.” That kind of wry self-deprecation was something that Kristofferson also had in spades, as it happens. But so, too, was the point of view of a perpetual outsider, the slicing through social hypocrisy and complacency, the dry wit and fine irony in the lyrics, the exploring of perspectives of those – like the mentally ill, the lonely and battered and economically deprived, the sons of the second sons – that all too often get lost in what McMurtry would call ‘the myths’ that Nashville produces, but which he keeps very much at the front and centre of his work.

It’s interesting to note that lots of these facets also belong to one of Kristofferson’s own sources of inspiration in Bob Dylan – “If it wasn’t for Dylan, we’d still just be writing all those surf songs,” he once said. But they also belong in McMurtry’s writing, too and in these murkiest of times for all of us, when it comes to keeping the wrong sorts of myths and mythmakers at bay, that’s no small matter for anybody.