Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Road Warrior
James McMurtry rides (to Fayetteville) again!
Ihaven’t put the dress away, but I won’t be wearing it,” says James McMurtry during a podcast with What’s Up! McMurtry’s fans and news hounds alike may remember that the singer and songwriter previously traded his jeans and flannel for a red dress to oppose anti-drag legislation in places like Tennessee.
“We kind of won that round, it seems like, but I don’t imagine they’ll quit,” he says in his low Texas drawl.
McMurtry is on the road again and will stop for an 8:30 p.m. March 30 show at George’s Majestic Lounge with his band — Tim Holt on guitar, Cornbread on bass and Darren Hess on drums.
BettySoo, who joined McMurtry earlier this year for a live eTown podcast recording at the Momentary in Bentonville, is still touring with McMurtry and the gang and joining in for the occasional song. He points out that she was on his latest album, the critically acclaimed “The Horses and the Hounds” that came out in August 2021.
Last year, McMurtry told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Phillip Martin that he was hoping to get another album out before the election this November. He’s looking at recording some new material with his former collaborator Don Dixon, who produced McMurtry’s 1995 album “Where’d You Hide the Body” along with albums by REM and The Smithereens.
“I always have this fantasy that I’m going to get all the songs written before it’s time to record, and it just never happens. I always wind up doing my homework on the school bus,” he says. He’s hoping that they can get together in early May.
As he told Martin in September, McMurtry makes money on the road, and Fayetteville is a good stop, he says.
“The road is the only real income stream for musicians right now. Radio play doesn’t make anything, [and] there’s no real record sales,” he says.
“The road is our living, so it’s not so much songwriting in how we pay the rent. It’s getting even worse. I know guys that did pretty well pitching songs for HBO series, trailers and things like that. Well, now they got AI. [It’s] much easier to use an AI program to write a theme song. You don’t have to pay them or give them royalties. That’s pretty much eliminated the last major revenue stream besides touring.”
For now, McMurtry plans to keep touring and writing songs from the road.
“The whole game is just don’t get knocked out of the game and stay in business. Keep going down the road; it’s really the only thing we can do.”
He reckons that the towns he sees from the dashboard will still find a way into his lyrics.
The son of late novelist Larry McMurtry, storytelling is in his blood, although he maintains that prose — the realm of his late father — and songwriting work different muscles.
“They’re both fiction,” he clarifies. “My songs are total fiction. They’re made up.”
He says that he knows the difference between a song and a good story when he “can sing it without cringing.”
His songwriting process usually involves working with a melody that comes to him — sometimes while he’s driving toward his next show.
“I keep just turning a verse over in my head until we get to the hotel and then check everybody in and go up to the room and write it down before I forget it,” he says. “Several of the songs on the last record were that way. I wrote them [during] the last couple of tours.”
Even for a seasoned songwriter such as himself, the process still takes time.
“I get a verse one day, and then I might get into the second verse the next day. The choruses are always a hard problem for me,” he says, but “I just keep fishing till I find something.”
Recently he says that he’s been writing the chorus first, which is way harder.
“It’s really hard for me to build a verse into an existing work, but we’ve got to keep learning.”