
James McMurtry – The Horses and the Hounds
New West Records – 20 August 2021
Marking his first release in seven years, The Horses and the Hounds is James McMurtry‘s label debut for New West Records. He is reunited with producer Ross Hogarth, who engineered his first two albums some 30 years earlier, and guitarist David Grissom. The album serves as a reminder that, as you would expect from the Austin-based son of the late Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry, he’s one hell of a storyteller.
Opening with Canola Fields, which features Charlie Sexton on high strung guitar and John McFee’s banjo, it immediately conjures thoughts of John Stewart, Warren Zevon, Tom Russell, John Prine, Guy Clark and other dusty-voiced Americana greats who often semi-talk rather than directly sing the lyrics. The song strikes a note of reflection as the sight of the yellow fields prompts a recollection of the 60s, he in a white Lincoln (a “party on wheels with suicide doors”) and the object of his unrequited affections driving a chartreuse Volkswagen Beetle around San Jose, a musing on getting older (“we all drifted away with the days getting shorter/seeking our place in the greater scheme/kids and careers and a vague sense of order”) and a fond memory of briefly “cashing in on a thirty year crush” in a “corner of a cross town bus”.
Kicking up the guitar chords, If It Don’t Bleed again looks back in time to when “I never had a fear and I never had a doubt” and growing older never crossed your mind (“I never saw the future fading right into the past/talking to the wallpaper, wandering the halls/I burned a lot of bridges and I dropped a lot of balls/it’s a wonder I can ever go back to anyplace I’ve been”), but, although “now it’s all I can do just to get out of bed/there’s more in the mirror than there is up ahead”, refusing to live with regrets (“seeking salvation isn’t part of my general plan/save your prayers for yourself”) because “you don’t get it back so give it all you got while you still got a more or less functional body and mind”.
Things take a political swerve with Operation Never Mind, a Zevon-like wry tale of covert black ops (“we won’t let the cameras near the fighting that way we won’t have another Vietnam”) that’s essentially about how what you don’t see and don’t know doesn’t trouble you and that “the country boys will do the fighting now that fighting’s all a country boy can do”, parading polished PR heroes (“Lord don’t they look the best when we trot them out at halftime or the seventh inning stretch/they stand up in their uniforms and help us sell the show”) to mask the ugly truths.
Set to a waltz-time sway and laced with cello, Jackie again weaves a short story narrative, here of the titular character who owns “half a section in the short grass at the foot of the plains/grows broomweed in the dry times, ragweed when it rains/it’s all she’s got left that the lawyers don’t claim”, making ends meet by trucking and breaking horses but who dies when she “jack knifed on black ice with an oversized load”.
While McMurtry primarily writes his own stories, anchored by Daren Hess’s drums, the drawled Decent Man is based on a short story called Pray Without Ceasing by rural Kentucky writer Wendell Berry about a farmer who, in a fit of depression brought on by the failure of the land, shoots his best friend because “for the unfairness of it all, surely something had to die”.
Interestingly, the strummed slow march sway Vanquero, part-sung in Spanish, links back to his father and was inspired when McMurtry got a text saying Bill Whitliff, who scripted and co-produced the Lonesome Dove cattle drive mini-series, had died, the song, about a Mexican cowboy, taking the title of Whitliff’s book of photographs of cow-workers on a ranch in northern Mexico.
Again striking a Zevon-styled, gutsy swagger, co-penned with David Grissom, the title track returns to a tale of loss – of love, home and direction – and the narrator being pursued by and finally confronting whatever demons are on his trail while, written with Hess with cello and Bukka Allen on accordion and organ, Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call, which swings from being stuck at the airport by the weather to driving the backroads to Atlanta with a fractious partner (“honeymoon’s over less than enchanted”), adopts a rap-styled delivery and evokes a similar swampy narcotic feel to Three Dog Night’s Mama Told Me Not To Come with its repeated chorus line “I keep losing my glasses”.
It heads to a close with What’s the Matter, a driving tempo, Stonesy riffing number fuelled by how life on the road takes its toll on relationships (“I get to travel and you gotta stay home/you’re gettin’ tired of raising them kids alone”) as the narrator sings “the dryer’s broke down and the kids all cryin’/it’s pouring down rain and there’s clothes on the line/I don’t know what to tell you, don’t know what to say/how’m I gonna fix it, I’m a thousand miles away” as those rosy romantic visions of youth become grey clouds twenty years down the line. It ends, almost as a continuation, with the bluesy, mid-tempo swaggery sway of Blackberry Winter that, Sexton on bouzouki and Harry Smith on mandolin, titled from an expression meaning a late spring cold snap, paints a picture of restlessness in a brief relationship that’s come to the end of the road (“I can’t find much to say as you play with that loose strand of hair/if you had you a tail you’d be twitching it”), but, when it’s clear there’s no changing her mind (“your bags are all packed, you’re not coming back that’s for certain”), offers an upbeat benediction rather blame as he ends “I hear the horn blow, the train’s pulling out I hope you find somebody there to tell you no…leave the rocks in the road stay away from the river Virginia”. When McMurtry released his debut, Too Long In The Wasteland, back in 1989, he was hailed as a blazing new talent with the ability to capture a wealth of meaning and emotion in just a few words. Thirty-two years later, he’s burning brighter and fiercer than ever.
Pre-Order / Stream: http://newwst.com/horsesandhoundsWE