James McMurtry: Landscape Artist

Finance is a factor. When James recorded for Columbia Records with producers such as John Mellencamp and Don Dixon, he could take his time in the studio experimenting with the songs. With his new album, though, he had to hop over to New Orleans or Lafayette for a few days to cut a few tracks and then hit the road again to make some more money.

As a result, he had to delegate a lot of responsibility to Louisiana’s C.C. Adcock for the overdubs, which came from the likes of Neville Brothers’ nephew/son Ivan Neville, Cajun great Dirk Powell and Tom Petty keyboardist Benmont Tench. After producing his last two studio albums himself, McMurtry turned to Adcock to handle this one.

“I had run out of tricks,” he explains. “What I knew about producing, I had learned from other producers, and I had used up everything I had learned. Record making for me is very different now than it used to be. It used to be we could sit in a studio for several weeks and see how the songs developed. But the mailbox money, the royalties aren’t there anymore, so I have to stay on the road.”

Staying on the road as much as he does, McMurtry sees a lot of the United States, and his new songs are set all over the place. “Carlisle’s Haul” describes illegal fishing in the Chesapeake Bay. “South Dakota” describes a cattle ranch in a prairie blizzard. “Forgotten Coast” describes living off the grid on the Florida Panhandle. “Long Island Sound” describes a transplanted Okie negotiating rush-hour traffic on the Whitestone Bridge. “How’m I Gonna Find You Now” describes a West Texan pushing his piece-of-shit car to the limit. “These Things I’ve Come To Know” describes a tattooed Cajun woman who likes the waltz and two-step.

“Any landscape is key to the story,” McMurtry argues. “Knowing the setting and the vocation of the people is crucial to staying in character. If you’re writing about the Chesapeake, for example, some of the people are going to be fishermen, it stands to reason. And if you make a living fishing, there are times you have to overfish to pay your bills. That’s where I cross wires with my narrator. I believe that fishing has to be regulated, but it’s hard to tell that to a fisherman.”

Few are the songwriters who fundamentally disagree with the narrators of their own songs – and fewer still who allow their narrators to have the final say anyway. Even fewer also provide such a contrary narrator with the perfect phrase for the song’s groove and tune. But McMurtry is determined to give his characters full independence and to support them with the best music he can construct, no matter how long it takes. That’s one reason Complicated Game is his first album of new songs in six years. But he insists that he’s writing these songs not for his audiences, not for his record company, not even for himself.

“I’m writing for my characters,” he says. “There seem to be some stories out there waiting to be told. I’m pretty lazy; if the characters in a song don’t keep me up at night, demanding the song to be finished, I’m not going to finish it. I’ve had that experience of creating characters, and then the characters write the rest of the song. Those characters have given me a living. My dad has had that experience with writing fiction.”

Peter Bogdanovich, the director who turned Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show into a classic movie, cast an 11-year-old James to play the title character’s kid brother in 1974’s Daisy Miller. Larry was in the middle of writing Terms Of Endearment, but he stalled out while visiting the movie’s shoot in Italy and Switzerland, James recalls. “My dad said, ‘I’ve got to get back to the States; my characters won’t talk to me here.’” Only later did the son understand what the father was talking about.

“What happens,” James explains, “is I get a melody and a couple lines of lyric and I have to guess, ‘Who said that?’ For example, once I had that line, ‘South of the Mason-Dumbass Line,” and I had to figure out who would say something like that.” It turned out to be Ruby, the owner of a Wyoming sheep farm who was saying goodbye to her drummer boyfriend who was going back to Nashville.

“That’s how all my songs start,” he adds. Having met these people in the song, McMurtry discovered a lot more about them: Ruby was getting old for the tough work of breaking colts and Carlos was a Gulf War vet with a creeping drug problem.

“Once I get a pretty clear idea of the character,” McMurtry adds, “I pretty quickly know what they will say. But the whole meaning of a song can change for the sake of better rhyme, a better meter or a better groove. It may not be what you set out to write, but when you step back from it, you realize it’s a better song. If it turns out to be a Nazi talking, you have to sing it, even though people will assume it’s you.”

Most of the characters on the new album are between their mid-40s and mid-60s, that no-man’s land between menopause and retirement. “I guess we’ll hold on a couple more years till the pension kicks in,” McMurtry sings on “Copper Canteen.” “I knew this town as a younger man,” he sings on “You Got To Me,” “… I lost the trail way back then.”

Each of these songs takes place in two different time frames: the present, when the hardware store’s in trouble or a wedding makes a man wonder what might have been, and the past, when young lovers frolicked in Chevy backseats or winter-break dorms. McMurtry moves so skillfully between the two eras that they eventually become entwined.

“I wouldn’t know how to write young anymore,” he admits. “I would have to be very careful to get the details right. I don’t speak computer the way the young do. I’d have to learn it if I have a song that comes along that requires it. I know nothing about the gaming culture that’s come along.”

There’s a lot of blood and guts in these songs. There’s deer blood on the tailgate in “Copper Canteen,” fish guts on the deck in “Carlisle’s Haul,” road-kill black bear in “Forgotten Coast” and the skinned hides of frozen cows in “South Dakota.” This is not a vision of rural America as a lost Eden.

“The pastoral thing has not been my experience of rural life,” McMurtry says. “If you’re going to depict it honestly, it’s going to get bloody and muddy. That’s part of my life. I hunt and fish; I don’t work cows, but I know guys who do. If you work with cows, you’re going to be sticking various things in them.”

He’s so busy playing music on the road that he doesn’t get to fish as much as he’d like to, not like the days when he and his stepfather would hike across the farmstead described in “Deaver’s Crossing” to go fishing for “March brown hatch” in the Shenandoah National Park. But he longs for it in ways that reveal something about his songwriting process.

“Fishing is such a guessing game,” he points out, “because you’re dealing with another world that you can’t see. You’re pretty well focused on the fish, and that takes you away from everything else. I like the pursuit, the pursuit of prey.”

This article appears in our March/April 2015 issue. Subscribe here.