THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “When his father died in 2021, James McMurtry went through his effects and discovered a rough pencil sketch of himself as a child. He thought it might make a good album cover.
“I knew it was of me, but I didn’t realize who drew it. I had to ask my stepmom, and she said it looked like Ken Kesey’s work back in the ’60s. She was married to Ken for 40 years.” The Merry Pranksters — Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators — stopped by often to visit Larry, his wife Faye and his very young son James. “I don’t remember their first visit, the one documented in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I was too young, but I do remember a couple of Ken’s visits. I guess he drew it on one of those later stops. I remembered it and thought it would be the perfect art, but I had to go back through the storage locker. It’s a miracle I found it again.” It’s a fitting image for an album that scavenges personal history for inspiration.
He held on to that drawing as he worked on The Black Dog And The Wandering Boy, his 11th. It’s a collection of rough-hewn story-songs and richly drawn character sketches that have elements of Americana — rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonica — but sound too sly and smart for such a generalized category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, it adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a recent resurgence as songwriters like Sarah Jarosz (who plays on the album) and Jason Isbell (who took McMurtry on tour) cite him as a formative influence.
For The Black Dog & The Wandering Boy, McMurtry called on his old friend Don Dixon, who produced his third album, Where’d You Hide The Body?, back in 1995.“A couple of years ago I quit producing myself,” McMurtry says. “I felt like I was repeating myself methodologically and stylistically. I needed to go back to producer school, so I brought in CC Adcock for Complicated Game, and then Ross Hogarth did The Horses & The Hounds. It seemed natural to revisit Mr. Dixon’s homeroom. I wanted to learn some of what he’s learned over the last 30 years.” McMurtry and his band worked to create something that sounds spontaneous, as though he’s writing the songs as you hear them.
They were open to odd experiments, weird whims, and happy accidents. In addition to his original compositions, the album features a pair of covers as bookends, Laredo (Small Dark Something), an opioid blues and testimony from a part-time junkie losing a weekend to dope by Jon Dee Graham, and Kris Kristofferson’s Broken Freedom Song. McMurtry says, “Kris was one of my major influences as a child. He was the first person that I recognized as a songwriter. I hadn’t really thought about where songs come from, but I started listening to Kristofferson as a songwriter and thinking, How do you do this? Kris had just passed not too long before we recorded Broken Freedom Song.”
McMurtry’s characters often face life-changing realizations, although theirs are often hard, sad and arrive at the end of life. Sometimes they find life savers, like a calling or a fond memory; sometimes they drown. Even the songwriter himself doesn’t always know what will happen or what will inspire him.
“You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character, maybe you can get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you can get a song. A song can come from anywhere, but the main inspiration is fear. Specifically fear of irrelevance. If you don’t have songs, you don’t have a record. If you don’t have a record, you don’t have a tour. You gotta keep putting out work.”
