James McMurtry Performs at the Hotel Congress

“You can’t be young and do that.” So writes James McMurtry, closing in on 60, in the first song on his new album The Horses and the Hounds. You can’t be young only because it takes decades to live up to the vision of that song, “Canola Fields,” which takes in dozens of years and thousands of miles, speaking of love, fear, mortality, and wandering, among other things, and that has a stoic feel to it, as if to say, sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don’t.

McMurtry’s expansive vision comes naturally: he’s a Texan who looks out on a big horizon, after all, and his father was the noted novelist and part-time Tucsonan Larry McMurtry. Many of the younger McMurtry’s songs have a 30,000-foot view of things, whether he’s writing of the country folk who wind up going off to fight America’s secret wars—we don’t know about them, he notes, because they’re not on TV—or of a border rider who shoots his best friend for reasons we can only guess at. The songs are evocative of dusty, windy places, sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic, always memorable.

The Horses and the Hounds, McMurtry says, isn’t exactly a COVID album. Most of the tracks were laid down a couple of years ago. COVID, of course, got in the way of everything all the same. “I couldn’t go out and play for more than a year,” he says, “so I worked on the recording some more.” The result is a richly layered work that often sounds like—well, a horse trying to kick down the gate and head for the field, impatient and onrushing. Listen to “What’s the Matter,” a song that answers its own question, and its blaze of guitars and stomping drums, and you’ll get a sense of his impatience to get the show rolling again. (“Oh, yeah,” McMurtry adds, “and I had five different keyboard players, all of ’em on B-3!”)

James McMurtry will perform songs from his new album on September 5 at the Hotel Congress Plaza (311 E. Congress). For the vaxxed and masked—others need not apply, and proof of vaccination is required—McMurtry’s solo show will begin at 7:30pm. Tickets are $20 in advance or at the door. 

Category: Arts, DOWNTOWN / UNIVERSITY / 4TH AVE, Entertainment, MUSIC