[NPR.org]

By James McMurtry

All Things Considered, April 19, 2008 - On Saturday, April 19, nearly 500 independently owned record stores across the country are celebrating Record Store Day. Hundreds of artists are giving in-store performances, and many stores will commemorate the event with giveaways to thank loyal shoppers.

Here, singer-songwriter James McMurtry shares a few memories of hanging out — and awkwardly self-promoting — in record stores.

I'm sure there must have been record stores in Houston in the late '60s, but I don't remember ever being in one. I was a small child then, and my father bought our records at the drug store on Bissonnet, where we also ate cheeseburgers and drank malts. The drug store carried what records we thought we needed — Johnny Cash at San Quentin, Batman, The Beatles' Revolver.

I still have a couple of old mono LPs purchased at the Bissonnet Drug Store, including Bob Dylan's self-titled first album, on the back cover of which are the italicized words, "This Columbia High Fidelity recording is scientifically designed to play with the highest quality of reproduction on the phonograph of your choice, new or old. If you are the owner of a new stereophonic system, this record will play with even more brilliant true to life fidelity. In short, you can purchase this record with no fear of its becoming obsolete."

I remember my father installing a stereo needle in our mono record player so that the new stereo records wouldn't skip. Of course, we couldn't hear them in stereo, but he didn't care; he just wanted the damn things to play.

The day my second record, Candyland, was released, I was playing at The Bottom Line in New York City. It was 1992; CDs were marketed in the environmentally unfriendly but highly visible long box, and they had just become the top-selling format, having finally overtaken the cassette.

I walked a block down the street to a huge Tower Records and tried to find my record. It wasn't in the rock section where I thought it should have been. I searched every nook and cranny of the store and finally found the country section, a space smaller than the kitchen of a typical Chelsea walk-up.

In one of the bins, there was a card that read "James McMurty [sic]," but no records. I walked to a pay phone, called my manager at his Upper West Side office, and asked him if he could prevail upon someone at Columbia Records to please get some CDs down to Tower before my show. I checked back three hours later and found a half-dozen or so copies of Candyland behind the same misspelled card, but now in the rock section, right between Don McLean and MC 900 Ft. Jesus. It pays to know the right people.

I may have spent as much time in record stores hawking my own wares as buying music. I used to have to do in-store performances in nearly every market. The bright side of the demise of the record store is that I don't have to do as many in-stores as I used to. Record stores are uncomfortable venues for live performance, too brightly lit, and in-store performances are attended almost entirely by day people who won't be at the show later.

When I toured solo, in the early '90s, I would often race to the in-store to find that there was no PA. I would be expected to stand there, in front of a stack of my records, singing to an acoustically dead room that completely trapped what little sound I could put out. People would carry their Michael Jackson records right by me on their way to the register, as if I were a mime on the street.

Once, at Albums on the Hill in Boulder, Colo., I was told to play in front of the store. In the middle of a song, a guy came down the sidewalk, listened for a second, and threw a quarter in my case. I finally learned to insist on being allowed to stand on the counter next to the cash register. That way, my voice could project over the bins, and commerce would have to come to a halt for the short duration of the performance.

I don't miss the big chain record stores. I found them to be sterile places. A few of the independents are still hanging on despite the competition from downloads. I hope they make it.

We are losing all manner of stores, not just record stores. My father has been an antiquarian bookseller for more than 40 years. His trade has died. The old shops, with collectors and book scouts shuffling to and fro between dusty stacks, are gone.

When the stores go, the community goes. Those scouts, collectors and dealers all knew each other. Over the decades, they learned each other's tastes and wiles until the trade took on an aura of sport, complete with friendly rivalries and bitter feuds. It's hard to imagine such an interesting culture evolving in cyberspace.

Record stores are physical locations where people actually meet face to face and interact. To remain human, we need that interaction: Conversations that aren't recorded, transactions that aren't automatically entered into a database for purposes of future commerce, facial expressions that convey shades of meaning one could never express with a key stroke.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89774100

“McMurtry might be the best topical writer performing right now and (Just Us Kids) finds him at his finest.” —Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers

“You’d be hard-pressed to find amore hard-boiled depiction of hardscrabble ‘00s life on the edge of recession.” (4 stars) —BLENDER

“...reveals McMurtry’s sensitive brilliance as a chronicler of quiet desperation.” —PASTE

“emboldened by the reception to 2004’s acerbic (and increasingly relevant) ‘We Can’t Make it Here,’ McMurtry ramps up the polemics on Just Us Kids.” —USA TODAY

“music that's haunting but familiar, much like the struggles he depicts.” —WASHINGTON POST

“Texastentialist panorama of gray-sky lucidity and neon highway jungles...” —VILLAGE VOICE

“an important, angry addition to his impressive career.” —PERFORMING SONGWRITER

“McMurtry locates again and again an element of humanity that saves his angriest screeds from easy pigeonholing. Politics may be personal for some, but McMurtry is the rare breed of musician who at his best finds ways to blur the difference, effectively and affectingly.” (4 stars) —AUSTIN CHRONICLE

“McMurtry cuts through all the crap when describing the state of America these days. Call McMurtry’s music what you will, just don’t call it kids’ stuff.” —POP MATTERS

“noir-ish story spinner James McMurtry plows the dark, bluesier side of the country field.” —PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS

“As the years pile on, James McMurtry sings with ever more authority and deserved cynical grace...With each album, (he) finds more to say and a stubborn, uncompromising way to say it.” —iTUNES

“brave, smart, and pithy music that captures James McMurtry at the top of his game.” —ALL MUSIC

“Brainy music with a ton of heart.” —DETROIT FREE PRESS

“more energized than ever.” —TEXAS MONTHLY

“Wry observations and mordant wit seem to be McMurtry literary traits, and by now singer-songwriter James has, in his own field, proven himself the peer of his distinguished novelist father, Larry, on those counts. . . it explores who we are and how we live in America today with all the punch of a documentary film exposé or bold tabloid headline.” —TEXAS MUSIC MAGAZINE

“The new James McMurtry album Just Us Kids isn’t good, it’s terrific. Simply outstanding. My early candidate for album of the year, though it’ll make few best-of lists because not enough music critics seem to have a clue about his brilliance.” —ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

“His songwriting is clear and precise, and he proves once again that he is not afraid to take on the powers that be.” —VINTAGE GUITAR

“Tough but tender Texas raunch 'n' roll, thoughtfully rendered and determined to say what needs to be said. If Just Us Kids doesn't show up in full force on the Best of '08 lists come late December, shame on someone.” —PUREMUSIC

“Thus far in 2008, no CD has been better.” —ATLANTA MUSIC GUIDE

“Another bold, in-your-face set from McMurtry” —ELMORE

“McMurtry’s songwriting is in a class by itself.” —METROMIX

“Just Us Kids is also one of those discs that proves why albums still matter — a collection in which songs inform each other, setting tones and moods. I’ve been listening to it for a month or so and keep getting drawn deeper into McMurtry’s musical stories. It’s that good.” —LINCOLN JOURNAL-STAR

“As usual, McMurtry is that keenest of literary songsmiths.” —LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

“... one satisfying and relevant piece of work.” —PASADENA WEEKLY

“The ability to combine the emotions he does on this disc, and it's not just righteous rage, but also love and sorrow and joy and passion, is something that astounds me. I can string words together – McMurtry can make them speak.” —ABOUT.COM - COUNTRY

“He may have called it Just Us Kids, but for this reviewer, all I see when listening to this powerful dynamic record is the Edvard Munch painting ‘The Scream’ so go buy this magnificent record, embrace The Scream.” —BLOGCRITICS

“a new batch of songs, the to-the-bone, plain-spoken, topical, sometimes political songs that have opened ears of fans ranging from novelist Stephen King to people who populate the live-music joints of the world.” —SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

“This album captures a spirit of the times.” —SWAMPLAND.COM

“ the songwriter walks the line between realism and cynicism, if there’s actually a line there. Just Us Kids continues his streak of well-done, socially conscious records.” —FORT WORTH WEEKLY

“McMurtry is at the top of his game here, and that is an amazing accomplishment.” —PIONEER PRESS (50 Chicago metro newspapers)

“Although the controversial nature of his latest work might polarize fans, James McMurtry has done a fine job of doing what he does best--using his well-honed songwriting talent to spark critical thinking among listeners worldwide.” —LIVE DAILY

“Like his father Larry, James describes the essence of people living life in the world rather than on top of it.” —SHARKBITTEN.COM

“Depicting their hard lives is a form of protest music for McMurtry, which leaves the songs flinty, ornamentless and devastatingly to the point.” —OFFBEAT

[Kansas City Star]

Texas singer/songwriter James McMurtry’s latest album, “Just Us Kids,” gets released April 15. Stephen King has described Fort Worth, Texas, native James McMurtry as “the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation.”

The son of acclaimed author Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment), James grew up on a steady diet of Johnny Cash and Roy Acuff records. Smart and aware, singer-songwriter McMurtry’s latest album, “Just Us Kids,” will be released April 15.

1. The latest book or movie that made you cry?

I think the last time I cried while reading was after I’d read a passage in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. The narrator, the sheriff, was recounting a dream in which he was on horseback, traveling through cold mountains in the dark. His deceased father rode past him without speaking. The sheriff could see that his father was carrying glowing coals in a horn, and he knew that somewhere out there in the dark the old man would be waiting for him beside a warm fire.

2. The fictional character most like you?

James McMurtry.

3. The greatest album, ever?

“Rock of Ages,” the Band.

4. “Star Trek” or “Star Wars”?

“Star Wars.” Cooler costumes.

5. Your ideal brain food?

Heather Woodbury’s multi-character, one-woman plays are excellent brain food. She elicits raucous laughter and pensive silence, nails all the accents and leaves you wondering how the hell she came up with that stuff.

6. You’re proud of this accomplishment but why?

A lot of talented people seemed to want to work on this record (“Just Us Kids”), and they later seemed happy to have done so.

7. You want to be remembered for … ?

Oh, perhaps … not screwing up my son any worse than I was screwed up. Of course, we don’t get remembered for what doesn’t happen on our watch.

During the waning years of the Carter presidency, Israel invaded Lebanon. The often-portrayed-as-spineless Jimmy Carter told the Israelis to go home if they still wanted spare parts for their jets. The Israelis pulled back and waited for Reagan, who let them roll into Beirut and create one unholy mess. Reagan sent in the U.S. Marines as a “symbolic presence.” Over 300 of those Marines died when a truck bomb blew up their barracks and a few more died from sniper fire.

When Walter Mondale suggested that perhaps the intervention had been a bad idea, since the troops had been sent in more or less for the hell of it with no clear military objective, he was accused by the Reaganites of saying the troops had “died in vain.” Anybody remember what didn’t happen under Carter?

8. Of those who’ve come before, the most inspirational are?

Those who have been enough of a threat to the status quo as to invite assassination, most recently, Benazir Bhutto. She was not the champion of democracy some of us claimed she was. When she was in office, her government was rife with corruption, but she was legitimately elected because she could inspire the people. The power to inspire is always dangerous to those who have it.

9. The creative masterpiece you wish bore your signature?

“Angle of Repose.” I believe Wallace Stegner won a well-deserved Pulitzer for that book.

10. Your hidden talents … ?

I’ve become a better cook than I thought I would.

11. The best piece of advice you actually followed?

“Return all your phone calls, even if the guy you’re calling is a flake.” Duane Moore to his son, Dickie, in Larry McMurtry’s Duane’s Depressed.

12. The best thing you ever bought, stole or borrowed?

My best purchase was of an Old Town Sport Canoe. I’ve had that boat since about 1993, and it has required zero maintenance. It’s a square stern canoe with oar locks and a keel. It tracks well when loaded down, so I can haul a lot of gear over a lot of water. It’s made of polyethylene, so it’s quiet and extremely durable. And it’s just stable enough that I can stand amidships while bowfishing.

13. You feel best in Armani or Levi’s or … ?

I’ve never worn Armani. I might like it just fine.

14. Your dinner guest at the Ritz would be?

I assume this is some kind of celebrity crush question. Laura Dern comes to mind.

15. Time travel: where, when and why?

France, mid-1920s. A time of plenty and a culture that knew what to do with it.

16. Stress management: hitman, spa vacation or Prozac?

None of these sound appealing. Deer hunting and spring turkey hunting work best for me.

17. Essential to life: coffee, vodka, cigarettes, chocolate or … ?

Coffee seems to be necessary. I can’t find my balance without it.

18. Environ of choice: city or country and where on the map?

As much as I like to hunt and fish, I’d still rather reside in a city where I can walk down the block and enjoy a decent glass of red wine while conversing with a stranger. I think an apartment in the West Village and a woods cabin in western Pennsylvania would be ideal places between which to divide my time. Austin is improving, but it’s still not the city.

19. What do you want to say to the leader of your country?

Who is the leader of my country? Does he have a name? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Dick Cheney is our leader. To him I would say, kill all the pheasants you want, but please quit killing so many people.

20. Last but certainly not least, what are you working on now?

I’m not working on anything other than the promotion of “Just Us Kids.”

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/story/563925-p2.html

Tour begins on Tax Day release of Just Us Kids; includes NYC, Chicago, Toronto, Boston and more

AUSTIN, Texas ­ Singer/songwriter James McMurtry and his band will embark on a national tour to support his new album, Just Us Kids, on Lightning Rod Records. ³We tour so we can make albums. We make albums so we can tour,² said McMurtry. He backs up that statement with a 27-city tour beginning on the April 15 release date. McMurtry will play a pair of hometown shows at Austin¹s Continental Club before hitting the road for the seven- week run of dates.

The early buzz surrounding Just Us Kids suggests that McMurtry has followed his award-winning 2005 album, Childish Things, with another masterpiece. ³(James McMurtry¹s) new one Just Us Kids, is gonna blow your socks all the way off and back onto the sheep what made Œem,² declared HarpMagazine.com. Texas Monthly called McMurtry ³more energized than ever.² Drive-By Truckers frontman Patterson Hood declared that ³McMurtry might be the best topical writer performing right now and (Just Us Kids) finds him at his finest.²

The album debuted at #8 on the R&R Americana airplay chart dated Monday, March 24.

TOUR DATES:

April 15 - AUSTIN, TX ­ Waterloo Records (in-store performance)

April 15 & 16 - AUSTIN, TX - Continental Club

April 18 - HELOTES, TX - Floore's Country Store

April 19 - HOUSTON, TX - Continental Club

April 25 - SAN MARCOS, TX - Cheatham Street

April 26 - DALLAS, TX - Granada Theater

April 28 - LEXINGTON, KY - Woodsongs

April 29 - STATE COLLEGE, PA Lulu¹s

April 30 - TEANECK, NJ - Mexicali Blues

May 1 - NEW YORK, NY - Bowery Ballroom

May 2 - BOSTON, MA - Johnny Ds

May 3 - NORTHAMPTON, MA - Pearl Street

May 4 - BAR HARBOR, ME - Criterion Theatre

May 6 - BURLINGTON, VT - Higher Ground

May 7 - TORONTO, ONT - Horseshoe Tavern

May 8 - DETROIT, MI - The Magic Bag

May 9 - CLEVELAND, OH - Beachland Ballroom

May 10 & 11 - CHICAGO, IL - Martyr's

May 12 - MADISON, WI - High Noon Saloon

May 13 - MINNEAPOLIS, MN ­ TBA

May 14 - OMAHA, NE - The Waiting Room

May 15 - KANSAS CITY, MO - Knuckleheads

May 16 - BLOOMINGTON, IL - New Lafayette Club

May 17 ­ MADISON, IN - Ohio River Music Fest

May 25 ­ HORSE SHOE, NC Deerfields Amphitheater - Asheville Music Jamboree

May 31 ­ PHILADELPHIA, PA ­ AAA Non-Comm Radio Convention

June 6 ­ WASHINGTON, DC/ALEXANDRIA, VA ­ The Birchmere

# # #

James McMurtry's MySpace page (where you can download an mp3 of ³Cheney¹s Toy²): http://www.myspace.com/jamesmcmurtry

James McMurtry's official website: http://www.jamesmcmurtry.com

Lightning Rod Records official website: http://www.lightningrodrecords.com <http://www.lightningrodrecords.com>

For more information on James McMurtry, please contact conqueroo: Cary Baker € (323) 656-1600 € cary@conqueroo.com

Or Lightning Rod Records: Logan Rogers € (615) 423-2038 € logan@lightningrodrecords.com

[Texas Monthly]

Just Us Kids

LIGHTNING ROD

The title track may lament the fact that even arrested adolescents grow old, but, if anything, JAMES MCMURTRY sounds more energized than ever. On JUST US KIDS (Lightning Rod), he and his longtime rhythm section—Daren Hess, Ronnie Johnson—have solidified their sound into a low, tribal rock growl, with McMurtry’s fierce guitar work leading the way. The Austinite doesn’t couch his tales in metaphor; he tends to come right out and say what’s on his mind. This might seem a ham-fisted approach in the hands of a lesser talent, but McMurtry knows how to tell a story. The music just helps thicken the stew. Buoyed by the success of his 2005 single, “We Can’t Make It Here,” which tapped into a wellspring of societal discontent, Kids’ politically minded tunes (“God Bless America,” “Cheney’s Toy”) follow suit. While they don’t make their point quite as eloquently, they don’t play like forced sequels either. Still better are the all-too-human characters that populate “Hurricane Party,” “Bayou Tortous,” “Ruby and Carlos,” “Freeway View,” and “Fire Line Road”; you’ll not only get to know them, but you’ll find them hard to leave behind.

BY JAMES MCMURTRY

My SXSW 08 duties began at 11:30am Wednesday. I meet Kathi, my manager, at the Dell Lounge in the Convention Center. We're there for an interview with Variety.com. My publicist told us this would be a good idea. Kathi and I are skeptical, because we're the only ones there – no cameras, no lights, no busy people. Just as we're about to bail, a woman from Variety appears and escorts us upstairs to a room full of cameras, lights, and busy people. I'd planned to try and save the world with this interview.

The front page of The New York Times reports that Adm. William Fallon, commander of U.S. Forces in the Middle East, has been forced to resign for disagreeing with the Cheney administration about the feasibility and morality of attacking Iran. I remember that Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was forced to resign after informing Cheney that he would refuse an order to deploy nuclear weapons against Iran. The administration said they were forcing him out a because he had made disparaging remarks about gays in the military, as if they cared about gays one way or the other.

I have it worked out in my head. I'm going to present my points slowly and coherently, like Rush Limbaugh, only with a brain and a conscience. I'm going to start with the central issue, that war with Iran means nuclear war, because we don't have the conventional forces to pull off such an attack, even if it were the right thing to do.

The coffee kicks in, I'm holding a mic, and someone is talking in an audible but choked voice. It's me saying something like: "Big war coming!!! Bad! Fallon gone, must save world. Please help save world!!!"

The busy people are unfazed. They offer polite thank-yous and escort us out.

We proceed to the Conqueroo/GuitarTown showcase at Mother Egan's. Conqueroo is the company of my publicist Cary Baker, who's backstage directing traffic. My band straggles in and inspects the back line, muttering the occasional harrumph. The gear exceeds our expectations. Ronnie's not able to blow up the bass amp, despite his best efforts. I digress briefly into politics right before the last song. I stay on message this time, even remembering to mention that striking Iran means we go nuclear.

At 3:30pm, I'm in a room at the Hyatt, in front of another camera, this time for VPRO, public radio for the Netherlands, I'm told. I don't know why they have a camera, must be a new kind of radio. I open with "Just Us Kids," forgetting to change the word "bullshit" to "crap," as would be required by FCC obsessed American radio.

After the song, I ask if this is a problem. I'm told they have no FCC in the Netherlands. I proceed to voice my fears of the Cheney administration's intentions regarding Iran. The Dutch are taken aback. "Do you really think they would do it?" they ask. Oh yeah, you bet your ass.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A602407

[HITS]

As involved and hectic as SXSW is, sometimes small things make a big impression. Tonight as planned I saw Austin music stalwart James McMurtry at Antone's. After a modest but direct set drawn largely from new material, I meandered up to the side of the stage to say hello, maybe sheepishly remind him of our professional paths crossing 12 odd years ago and thank him again for "Rachel's Song," which remains in my rotation to this day.

As I was waiting I couldn't help but notice the utterly military precision with which James was taking down his gear and packing. Like lightning, he had struck two amplifiers, a brace of guitars, his mike, a pedalboard and DI box, and some other assorted gear. As you watch, you realize that this is a guy who has done this night in, night out for decades and has honed this process with the utmost professionalism.

Zooming back, it's an interesting message about what it takes to hammer out a career in this business. While not all paths are as Spartan as the generally roadie-less confines of the Americana charts, the principle is probably the same—the more polished your machine is, the longer it will last.

Read full article here:

http://www.hitsdailydouble.com/news/newsPage.cgi?news07026m01

[Huffington Post]

By James McMurtry

I kept remembering a quote, "Euphoria spreads across the face of our nation like the broad grin of an idiot."

I was certain it was H.L. Mencken who had penned that line, but repeated Google and Wikipedia searches proved fruitless, as did a cursory search for a collection of Mencken's essays that may be under something on the floor of one of my apartments. My father said the quote sounded more like Mark Twain than H.L. Mencken. I don't even want to start searching Twain.

I remembered the line as I was staring at a video screen in a voting booth at the local elementary school. I had come to the school to vote in the Texas Democratic Primary. I had come to vote for Barack Obama because popular wisdom said we needed to select a candidate and avoid a contentious convention, because Obama had the momentum, because all my friends are voting for Obama, because Obama has a better website than Clinton does, the mark of superior savvy in the realm of what's happening now.

I have not heard Obama speak. I have not been touched by his inspiring spell. I went to his site and clicked on "issues." I did the same with Clinton's site. Her home page put me off somewhat, lists of credible people who endorse her, links to videos, a tinge of desperation. Obama's home page is more poker-faced, homey pictures of the man with wife and kid, cool sort of sepia tint. Click on "issues" on either site, and the words that come up are nearly identical. Clinton's a bit tougher on health care, favoring mandatory coverage for adults. They both like the cap and trade thing for global warming.

Neither candidate has that much experience. I don't like Clinton's fear tactics; they remind me of Bush's fear tactics. I don't care what either candidate would do in the event of an emergency phone call in the White House at 3 a.m. They might do right, they might do wrong. No head of state can keep his or her population safe, if they could, there'd be no bus bombings in Israel. I'm concerned with the average. Which one of them is going to make the right decision, on a full range of issues, most of the time? Which one of them is better at making deals, which one of them is going to work harder?

I looked at the names on the screen in the voting booth and I clicked on Clinton's with barely a second's hesitation, a visceral, unstoppable and inexplicable action, like a douser's witching stick arcing downward toward the hidden well. Voting is a weird thing.

I don't think the battle is really going to hurt the Democrats. As long as they are battling, they'll own the press. McCain is no story, and he won't know whom to swing at for a while. I could have voted for McCain once, but he lost me with the "Bomb bomb Iran" gaffe, a gaffe which should have instantly disqualified him from the race, and would have if the mainstream press had any sense of responsibility. It might have been funny had it been a line in a Mel Brooks movie. Presidential candidates, aspiring to be world leaders, aspiring to be respected by other world leaders, can not be so reckless. McCain obviously has some loose wires up top. Hopefully, the press will take issue the next time he short circuits.

I can't say there's anything about Obama that puts me off other than the euphoria surrounding him. But I am suspicious of euphoria. Some say we need a leader with the capability to inspire. Maybe so. If Obama can inspire his way to a nomination, he'll get my vote, and I'll pray he can keep inspiring well past election day. He'll need to inspire all of us to pitch in and dig our way out of this mess. There will be no savior. We'll have to save ourselves, regardless of who's in the White House. And for now, I'm backing Clinton for her grit, her ability and willingness to move against that euphoric tide.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-mcmurty/obama-euphoria_b_90724.html

[Wired]

By Lewis Wallace

AUSTIN, Texas -- When geeks and music freaks flood this city each year for the South by Southwest festival, sometimes the locals get a little bit bent.

"We used to refer to it as 'South by So What,'" said singer/guitarist James McMurtry after a steaming Saturday-night set at Momo's. But now McMurtry, an Austin songwriter known for the gutsy realism of his Americana anthems, has embraced the visibility that comes with the sometimes-maddening influx of outsiders.

"It seems to help," McMurtry said.

Cranking out his home-spun blues rock on a half-dozen guitars, McMurtry and his band, the Heartless Bastards, worked a late-night crowd with the steady grace of honky-tonk heroes. Whether grooving on the dance floor or swaying in front of the stage, the crowd responded to McMurty's murky swamp soundtrack.

The songwriter -- who has been playing guitar since his father, novelist Larry McMurty, got him an ax at age 7 -- has been recording for the past two decades. His ninth album, Just Us Kids, will be released April 15 on Nashville-based Lightning Rod Records. After starting out on major labels, McMurtry moved to indies. "I get less visibility and more money ever since," he said.

McMurtry also sings the praises of independent music stores like Austin's Waterloo Records & Videos. "Guys like me, we still sell hard product," he said. "The only ones left are independents."

McMurtry's clearly embracing SXSW, as he plays four festival events this week: the Guitartown/Conqueroo Party, 1 p.m. Wednesday at Mother Egan's Irish Pub; the American Songwriter magazine party, 3:15 p.m. Thursday at the Tap Room; the Americana Music Association showcase, midnight Thursday at Antones; and Mojo's Mayhem, 2:20 p.m. Saturday at the Continental Club.

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/sxsw-moving-bey.html

[Harp Magazine]

By James McMurtry

So Dave Grohl’s running for president? Now maybe we’ll have a candidate who wears his cynicism on the outside and won’t blather on ad nauseam about his faith in God (why do Democrats now have to do that, too?). He should already be a seasoned candidate. He’s ridden a zillion plus miles in a bus, once in a while getting off the bus to shake hands with fat people who weasel in between the roadies and handlers to tell him how far they drove to see him and then demand a piece of his soul for their effort. After a while, kissing a baby might be about like signing a tit, one more mile marker.

The American political system is splintering, much like the music business. In the pre-convention phase of this election, it appears as though all the candidates, regardless of their party affiliation, are independent, each playing to his or her niche. Huckabee has the Bible thumpers and Chuck Norris, Giuliani has 9/11, Obama has Oprah and a chunk of the Corn Belt (lots of war dead out there), and Clinton has the Manchester and Portsmouth soccer moms, thanks to her timely display of something appearing to be sensitivity. (Why must candidates appear personable? Competence and diligence should be way more important). Grohl could walk right off with the blond dreadlocked trustafarians and a good pile of the new voters, 18 and up; he’d be a player.

There’s a problem though. Mr. Grohl is an independent candidate who will draw from the left and center. He won’t take any votes away from the likes of Mike Huckabee and he won’t win. I don’t like the thought of having to vote for Hillary, but if she takes the nomination, she has my vote, and I don’t want any Naders this time. I also remember Wallace, Anderson, and Perot. Usually, with the exception of Perot, independents hurt the Democrats. Not now please, Dave.

Some countries do well with more than two major parties. I can see how a multi-party system improves a society. The victorious party has to make deals with some of the losers in order to consolidate power. Our survival as a species on this earth will depend on all the humans learning to deal with one another. But right now, in the United States, we need a Democrat in the White House. The Republicans have gone too crazy. We can’t survive any more of them.

We lower flags a lot these days. The first time I remember seeing a flag lowered to half mast was on the day President Eisenhower died. I don’t know, but I suspect the President would be spitting mad at the current field of his party brethren. Why do they look to Reagan as their hero? Ike was the man. He took us across the English Channel and drove us to Berlin while Reagan was making training films. He started the interstate highway system, expanded Social Security, and sent us into space, made us the nation they still try to tell us we are now. He warned against the rise of the military-industrial complex. He was the first of the three Texas-born presidents. And he lies in a grave in Abilene, Kansas, more or less forgotten.

http://www.harpmagazine.com/articles/detail.cfm?article_id=6719

By Tjames Madison

LiveDaily Contributor

Singer/songwriter James McMurtry will give away digital copies of his new, politically charged song in time for next week's Super Tuesday presidential primaries.

The Texas native will make the song, "Cheney's Toys," available on Super Tuesday via both his MySpace page and his record label's website. The day before the primary elections, the song will go online as eMusic's Daily Download.

"Cheney's Toys," which follows McMurtry's 2005 anti-George W. Bush anthem, "We Can't Make It Here," references both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in its lyrics, telling the story of a US soldier returning from Iraq, blind and suffering from brain damage.

Along with the free download, McMurtry and his label are encouraging fans to create their own videos for the tune and post them online. The singer will choose his favorite from all the entries, with the video's creator winning an 8GB Apple iPod Nano. See McMurtry's website for more information.

The new song appears on McMurtry's forthcoming studio album: "Just Us Kids," the singer's eighth solo effort, arrives in stores April 15. The set follows 2005's "Childish Things."

McMurtry has a handful of live dates lined before the album drops, including Saturday night's (2/2) appearance in Austin, TX.

http://www.livedaily.com/news/13602.html

Written by Honest Tune

Singer/songwriter James McMurtry is once again making a political statement through his music. On his new song “Cheney’s Toy”, McMurtry picks up where he left off with his controversial anthem “We Can’t Make it Here.” “Cheney’s Toy” reminds us that the war in Iraq is still going on — with veiled references to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and the stark image of a soldier who returned from the conflict, blind and brain damaged.

In order to make sure people get the message, McMurtry is giving away the song for free on February 4 exclusively through eMusic’s Daily Download. On the Super Tuesday primary day (February 5) fans will be able to download the mp3 from McMurtry’s MySpace page and Lightning Rod Records’ website (links below).

McMurtry and Lightning Rod Records are encouraging fans to use the free mp3 to create their own videos and post them online. McMurtry will choose the best videos and post them on his official MySpace page and website. If needed, fans can create videos using slideshow applications at RockYou.com. Creators of each of the top five video creators will receive t-shirts and autographed copies of McMurtry’s new album, Just Us Kids (in stores April 15, 2008). McMurtry’s choice for the best overall video will also receive an 8 Gb Apple iPod nano with video capabilities. Fans can send links to their videos to mcmurtryvideo@gmail.com.

“We Can’t Make it Here” reverberated wildly across the internet and the airwaves, igniting a grassroots firestorm that has brought legions of new fans to the singer/songwriter’s work. Fan-made videos of “We Can’t Make It Here” have been viewed more than 170,000 times on YouTube.

“Cheney’s Toy” at eMusic: http://www.emusic.com/album/11149/11149934.html

James McMurtry’s MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/jamesmcmurtry

RockYou slideshow application: http://rockyou.com/index.php

James McMurtry’s YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/JamesMcMurtry

Lightning Rod Records mp3 link: http://lightningrodrecords.com/justuskids.html

Source: http://www.honesttune.com/content/view/727/1/

[Country Standard Time]

James McMurtry will release a new disc in April on a new label.

"Just Us Kids" comes out April 15 on Lightning Rod Records with a dozen new songs.

McMurtry, who previously got political on "We Can't Make It Here," included "Cheney's Toy" on his ninth CD. The song is about the war in Iraq. The lyrics of "God Bless America" call out the corporate profiteering and government cronyism in leading the country to war.

The self-produced album includes The Faces's Ian McLagan's piano playing and Austin singer/songwriter John Dee Graham with a guitar solo on "Fireline Road." The rhythm section is McMurtry's longtime road band, Daren Hess and Ronnie Johnson.

"Just Us Kids" is the first release for Nashville-based Lightning Rod Records, distributed by Thirty Tigers/RED. Label president Logan Rogers previously worked as director of A&R for Compadre Records on the release of McMurtry's last two albums. "Working with James McMurtry has been a career highlight for me. He is a phenomenal artist with tremendous integrity, and I can think of no better debut release for Lightning Rod Records," said Rogers.

McMurtry and his band will launch a national tour in support the new music.

http://urltea.com/2hi0

[The Nation]

The Most Valuable Progressives

Let down by a dangerous Republican White House, a compromising Democratic Congress and a distracting and dysfunctional mainstream media, progressives persevered in 2007, laying the groundwork for what we can only hope will be the different and better politics of 2008. The list of heroes and champions is endless, but here are some of the MVPs -- Most Valuable Progressives -- from the activist, political, media and cultural spheres of the last full year before the last full year of the Bush-Cheney interregnum:

* Most Valuable Teaching Moment: When fundamentalist Republicans made a stink about the fact that newly-elected Minnesota Congressman KEITH ELLISON, the first Muslim elected to the House, would not be swearing his oath on their version of the scriptures, Ellison trumped them with history. He placed his hand on an edition of the Koran that had been donated to the Library of Congress by a student of Islam and all the world's great religions: Thomas Jefferson.

* Most Valuable Activist Group: At a time when Congress and the White House seem to have agreed that there will always be more than enough money for defense spending, the terrific Caucus4Priorities campaign of IOWANS FOR SENSIBLE PRIORITIES has kept alive the concept of a peace dividend. The group -- a grassroots project of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, the national group founded in 1998 by BEN COHEN of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, has used creative tactics and old-fashioned people power to make an issue of wasteful Pentagon spending. In doing so, they've succeeded where the media has failed in forcing presidential candidates to discuss budgeting in deeper and smarter terms. "We aim to redirect 15% of the Pentagon's discretionary budget away from obsolete Cold War weapons towards education, healthcare, job training, alternative energy development, world hunger, deficit reduction," the organizers explain. "This 15% cut, or $60 billion dollars, on obsolete weapons systems and the further proliferation of nuclear weapons does not include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in no way impacts homeland security or our defense. We have the money; let's spend it on sensible priorities!"

* Most Valuable Activist: TIM CARPENTER of PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATS OF AMERICA did not just argue that progressives should stay and fight within a Democratic party that seemed to let them down at every turn in 2007. He showed them how to do it by leading PDA's aggressive and unblinking campaigns for rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, impeachment of Bush and Cheney, a single-payer national health care plan, media reform and a real response to climate change. PDA won the confidence of Congressional Progressive Caucus members, with House lefties such as Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters and Raul Grijalva joining its board. Much of the credit goes to the tireless, humble yet unyielding Carpenter.

* Most Valuable Think Tank: LIBERTY TREE: Foundation for the Democratic Revolution is staffed by young, smart thinkers with roots in green and student politics who push the limits of the debate about how to repair elections, reform education and renew the spirit of 1776. Fellows such as BEN MANSKI and KAITLIN SOPOCI-BELKNAP go beyond narrow interpretations of both the Constitution and what is possible in a republic to explore what real democracy would look like at the international, national, state, regional and local levels. Read their great journal and visit them at: www.libertytreefdr.org

* Most Valuable Crusade: When no one else seemed to be getting serious about challenging the Bush-Cheney administration's taste for torture, THE WORLD CAN'T WAIT movement developed an orange campaign – appropriating the color of the jump suits worn by detainees – to highlight popular opposition to violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. As the torture issue came front and center, DEBRA SWEET and other World Can't Wait activists – most of them veterans of the pre-war Not In Our Name movement -- were already there with a smart, uncompromising challenge to untenable practices and an untenable status quo.

* Most Valuable Internet Site: When people ask about how and where to follow what is happening with the movements to end the war in Iraq, to prevent a war with Iran and to hold to account those who launched one mad war and now seek to initiate another, the answer is always www.AFTERDOWNINGSTREET.org site. Constantly updated by the indefatigable DAVID SWANSON, the site is fresh -- there were even six posts on Christmas Day -- and it features local actions (via YouTube) as well as national interventions. Because it is so thorough and so engaged with local and regional protests and events, the AfterDowningStreet site provides the best illustration of the extent to which mainstream media has neglected the most vital movements of the moment.

* Most Valuable Congressman: ROBERT WEXLER, D-Florida, was appropriately savage in his Judiciary Committee questioning of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Wexler almost single-handedly restored the separation of powers. Then, after Ohio Congressman DENNIS KUCINICH forced House consideration of his proposal to impeach Vice President Cheney, the Florida congressman grabbed the issue and organized a push by key members of the Judiciary Committee to open hearings on the veep's high crimes and misdemeanors. If he keeps this up in 2008, Wexler could yet force the House to be what the founders intended: a check and balance on executive lawlessness.

* Most Valuable Senator: Vermont Independent BERNIE SANDERS boldly battled the Bush administration on the international stage by traveling to Costa Rica before that country's fall referendum vote on whether to accept the Central American Free Trade Agreement. As the Bush administration was making all sorts of threats in order to scare Costa Ricans into capitulating to a neo-liberal agenda that serves Wall Street rather than workers in the U.S. or Latin America, Sanders arrived with the news that the U.S. government includes more than just a White House, and that the Constitution permits not just the president but the Congress to have a say regarding trade policies. Sanders put the White House on notice that its lies and bully tactics would no longer go unchallenged; hopefully, others in the House and Senate will join him in reasserting the strong legislative stance that is essential to transparent and democratic policy making with regard to a troubled economy.

*Most Valuable Commissioner: MICHAEL COPPS may have been on the losing end of the FCC's December vote on whether to knock down barriers to media monopoly in cities across the country. But the dissident commissioner's brilliant detailing of the threats posed to minority ownership, cultural diversity, local news gathering and journalism laid the groundwork for legislative and legal challenges that will upset the 3-2 decision that saw Copps and Commissioner JONATHAN ADELSTEIN stand up to Rupert Murdoch and the Bush White House. Said Copps in his blistering dissent: "Today's decision would make George Orwell proud. We claim to be giving the news industry a shot in the arm--but the real effect is to reduce total newsgathering. We shed crocodile tears for the financial plight of newspapers--yet the truth is that newspaper profits are about double the S&P 500 average. We pat ourselves on the back for holding six field hearings across the United States--yet today's decision turns a deaf ear to the thousands of Americans who waited in long lines for an open mike to testify before us. We say we have closed loopholes--yet we have introduced new ones. We say we are guided by public comment--yet the majority's decision is overwhelmingly opposed by the public as demonstrated in our record and in public opinion surveys. We claim the mantle of scientific research--even as the experts say we've asked the wrong questions, used the wrong data, and reached the wrong conclusions."

* Most Valuable National Radio: RACHEL MADDOW has survived the changes at Air America and thrived. Why? Because she's smart enough to be serious when called for and hilarious when necessary. She's also got a spot-on sense of what it means to be a progressive in an era when the Democratic party often fails to uphold progressive values. She's anti-Bush, and even more scathingly anti-Cheney, but she does not skimp when it comes to holding Democrats to account. Added bonus: Maddow's got a taste for cultural stories that makes her early evening show far broader in scope than most talk radio.

* Most Valuable Local Radio: ARNIE ARNESEN is the New Hampshire radio host all the candidates want to talk to: sort of. Everyone knows Arnesen is smart and fair -- she's a lefty with a libertarian streak who once was the Democratic nominee for governor but who minces no words about the two parties. She's got equally smart and fair listeners. The "trouble" is that Arnesen pulls no punches. She expects her guests to scrap the soundbites and answer questions in full sentences with full ideas. It makes for great radio; indeed, listening to politicos struggle to keep up with her is part of what makes covering the New Hampshire primaries fun. When is some radio network going to be smart enough to take Arnie national?

* Most Valuable Television: MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann is essential viewing that provides a nightly dose of reality to a nation still kept in the dark by most media. But broadcast television remains the vast wasteland that does the most to deaden our discourse, and that is why BILL MOYERS JOURNAL remained the essential antidote to what ails the body politic. Interviews with JEREMY SCAHILL, MARTIN ESPADA, SCOTT RITTER, BARBARA EHRENREICH , LORI WALLACH AND JON STEWART – along with Olbermann and Stephen Colbert, a savior of cable – were among the highlights of 2007. He also devoted an hour to an impeachment discussion featuring Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein and this reporter, a commitment that other broadcast or cable program have yet to make.

* Most Valuable Political Book: NAOMI WOLF's THE END OF AMERICA: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green). When Wolf started writing about the drift of the United States toward fascism, she was dismissed by some as another casual commentator blowing off some anti-Bush steam. But her detailing of the parallels between steps taken by the current administration and moves made by the 20th century's most notorious dictators to transform democracies into authoritarian states is convincing as it is chilling. And Wolf is not just complaining; she's the "face" of the American Freedom Campaign's important drive to identify and confront assaults on basic liberties and the system of checks and balances.

* Most Valuable Political Album: "KALA" by M.I.A. The Sri Lankan singer -- daughter of a prominent Tamil militant -- speaks truth when she declares: "I put people on the map that never seen a map." This is way beyond world beat. Maya Arulpragasam stirs up a global gumbo of ragga, ganna, soca, dancehall, electro, punk, Bollywood and hip-hop, mixes in heaping helpings of attitude and insight and serves it raw. If there is such a thing as refugee rock, this is it – like the best of Rachid Taha and Tinariwen, only edgier and with a scorching case of "Bird Flu."

* Most Valuable Political Song: "GOD BLESS AMERICA" by JAMES McMURTRY. Written on the cusp of 2006/2007 and circulated on the internet (www.jamesmcmurtry.com) over the past year, no song caught the zeitgeist better than this one – except perhaps McMurtry's previous take on oil wars and the fundamentalisms of Bible-thumping Christians and Weekly Standard-thumping neo-cons. Every McMurtry song has a million-dollar stanzy; in this one it's: "You keep talking that shit like I never heard/ Hush, little President, don't say a word/ When the rapture comes and the angels sing/ God's gonna buy you a diamond ring…" Watch for McMurtry's upcoming album with "God Bless America." It'll be a great send-off for the little President who couldn't.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=264240

[San Jose Mercury News]

FOURTH ANNUAL FESTIVAL DRAWS MUSICIANS OF MANY STYLES

By Andrew Gilbert

As far as musical labels go, singer-songwriter is about as vague as they come. The term can easily refer to a twangy country vocalist, a jazzy chanteuse, a bluesy belter or a confessional folky with a jones for old-time American roots music.

All those styles and a good deal more will be represented at the 4th Annual Songwriters Festival, a magnificently eclectic all-day event Sunday at Montalvo Arts Center's Garden Theatre. Sponsored by KPIG-FM and assembled by renowned producers Lee Townsend and Wayne Horvitz, the festival offers the region a rich array of talent, as if a slice of South By Southwest teleported from Austin to the South Bay.

Performing with their own bands, the program's 10 artists range from revered veterans to up and comers, from Nashville's Buddy Miller, the country star whose incisive songs are ensconced in the books of Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams and Trisha Yearwood, to Seattle's Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter, a young band with a gritty alt-country sound spiked with a rock 'n' roll sensibility.

Two of the better-known artists on the bill are blues-dre nched guitarist Kelly Joe Phelps, who has spent much of the past year opening for Lucinda Williams, and the great Seattle singer Robin Holcomb, a brilliant tunesmith with a highly poetic style. Etienne De Rocher, whose well-crafted songs and sweet, expressive voice have won him an avid Bay Area following, is the festival's only local.

James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards tour as a power trio slinging a rootsy rock sound informed by a populist political vision. The son of the celebrated westerns writer Larry McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove" "The Last Picture Show"), the bandleader gained widespread notice with his 2004 protest tune, "We Can't Make it Here," a vivisection of the American psyche in dire straits. Where McMurtry tackles America writ large, Paul Sprawl works from the grass roots up as an itinerant musician whose rambling ways generate material for his picaresque musical tales.

"Paul is an unsung one-man band, a guitar player and singer and songwriter," says Townsend, who's in the midst of producing Sprawl's second album and whose credits include albums by Bill Frisell, John Scofield, Loudon Wainwright III and Charlie Hunter. "He mostly plays solo. He's a vagabond performer who travels the country incessantly playing little gigs."

Rounding out the program are Tony Scherr, a charismatic New York City guitarist-vocalist who has recorded extensively with Norah Jones (while also working widely as a bassist with Bill Frisell, Willie Nelson and Sex Mob); Seattleite Karen Pernick, a smoky singer with a gift for penning moody, soulful tunes; and Austin-raised fiddler Carrie Rodriguez, an emerging star with a stripped-down country sound distinguished by her frank sensuality and emotional insight.

"The No. 1 criterion for all the people invited is that they're all complete originals," Townsend says. "They kind of complement each other, in that some of them are more linear storytellers, and some more a little more opaque. At the same time, there are some rousingly good instrumentalists. Think about Buddy Miller and Kelly Joe ripping on the guitar, and the way Carrie tears it up on fiddle. There's a lot of dimensions and depth to these artists. They all have their own undeniable charisma. It's one compelling personality after the next."

While most of the artists featured at the festival have spent years honing their craft, Rodriguez is a relative newcomer. As a teenager she aspired to a career as a concert violinist, until family friend Lyle Lovett invited her to sit in with him, and she decided to abandon her studies at Oberlin for the Berklee College of Music. Obsessed with bluegrass and western swing, Rodriguez blossomed under the tutelage of Chip Taylor, who recruited her for his band after hearing her perform at a record store during South By Southwest.

The veteran songwriter (whose hits include "Wild Thing" and `Angel of the Morning") hired her as both a fiddler and a vocalist, though she was a novice singer. Before long, they were touring the country together and writing tunes, a musical partnership that produced three acclaimed duo albums. Last year, she released her debut under her own name, "Seven Angels on a Bicycle" (Back Porch), a breathtaking album that further documents her creative connection with Taylor, who co-wrote almost every track. While her music is marked by hard-won wisdom, Rodriguez is still very much a work in progress.

"I couldn't have imagined I'd be doing what I'm doing today," she says. "One thing led me to another. Songwriting is so new for me. I'm just starting, really."

The album has a strong jazz undercurrent, with improvisers such as guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Kenny Wollesen and bassist Viktor Krauss. But Rodriguez has been letting her music morph on the road. Her touring band features acoustic bassist Kyle Kegerreis, electric guitarist Hans Holzen and drummer Brannen Templeman, who were already a close-knit ensemble after several years of backing Chip Taylor. On the road with Rodriguez since last summer they've become her co-conspirators, transforming the album's beautifully textured songs into something raw and dangerous.

"We're all creating something together," Rodriguez says. "I don't want to emulate what's already been done. With my band, we just try to make the songs our own. It's more of a rock 'n' roll sensibility than the album. Opening for Lucinda Williams gave me that inspiration. The music started evolving and getting crunchier. And now I'm really enjoying the process of writing a song and hashing it out on the road, letting it find its shape."

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_6696067?source=rss&nclick_check=1

[ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL]

By Dan Mayfield

Journal Staff Writer

It's a rare protest song that doesn't come off as a sermon or an exercise in admonition.

In James McMurtry's case, it just makes you sad when he sings "We Can't Make It Here."

Of course, that song talks about all the things nobody likes to admit happen in America: people being forgotten about, jobs leaving, empty stores, racism, veterans who can't afford health care.

"We Can't Make It Here" has taken on a life of its own. Though the CD with the song on it, "Childish Things," sold 50,000 copies, the blogosphere has latched onto McMurtry's song and bloggers have written about it like it's a modern-day "Born in the USA" or "Fortunate Son."

Fans have made several unofficial videos and posted them to YouTube.com. Almost 50,000 people have played the song on McMurtry's MySpace.com page, and "Childish Things" is McMurtry's first Top 40 record.

"One of the interesting contrasts, the song 'We Can't Make It Here,' I put it out as a free download right before the 2004 election," he said. "In those days, the president's approval rating was above 30. I put out an acoustic version and I did a solo version and I went to KGSR radio in Austin, and the morning DJ would play anything. Before I got home, I got nasty e-mails into my Web site.

"A lot of people really have their identities tied up with George Bush," McMurtry said.

The success of "We Can't Make It Here" has inspired a follow-up with the song "God Bless America" that instead of just pointing out horrors, points the finger at big business.

McMurtry is the son of famous novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry. "I started gigging out in Tucson when I was a student. I was gigging up," McMurtry said. "My plan was going to Nashville to be a staff writer for one of the labels. I didn't think real big. I didn't think about making my own songs. I knew guys in Austin making it."

But when John Mellencamp directed and starred in the 1992 film "Falling From Grace," which was written by Larry McMurtry, James McMurtry passed his demo along.

Mellencamp, as the story goes, loved it and produced McMurtry's demo "Too Long in the Wasteland," which is the only other record McMurtry has made that hit the Billboard charts.

McMurtry said that he knows he wouldn't have made it as a songwriter in Nashville, though he writes his own songs.

"There's nobody else recording them," he said.

James McMurtry

WHEN and WHERE: In Albuquerque on Thursday, July 19, at 8 p.m. at Puccini's Golden West Saloon; in Santa Fe on Friday, July 20, at 7:30 p.m. at the Santa Fe Brewing Co., 27 Fire Place; in Taos on Saturday, July 21, at 6 p.m. at the KTAOS Solar Center, #9 State Road 150.

HOW MUCH: Albuquerque: $15 and $20; Santa Fe: $15; and Taos $12 and $15. Visit www.jamesmcmurtry.com for more

http://www.abqjournal.com

[New Orleans Gambit Weekly]

By Alison Fensterstock

James McMurtry sang me a song. We're talking about country artists who write political songs -- or maybe we were talking about Americana artists who write narrative songs -- but either way, Kris Kristofferson came up, and the next thing you know, he sang me a full two-and-a-half verses over the phone of Kristofferson's heartbreakingly simple ballad "Broken Freedom Song." In it, Kristofferson lays out the quiet devastation war (and life in general) can wreak at home in a kind of tight-focus montage, flipping quickly through a series of snapshots that leave the listener feeling so lonely and bereft that it seems possible that nothing will ever be okay, ever again.

The characters that come to life in the brief cameos of "Broken Freedom Song," it becomes clear, are kinsmen not far removed from the cast that populates McMurtry's latest, Childish Things, which came out last year on Compadre Records. McMurtry is a ragged-voiced roots-rocker with mean electric guitar chops, who deals in close-up storytelling. His style owes a lot to John Prine, though without much of the folkie's warmth. Prine criticized cheerfully when he got political, with rib-poking songs like "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven," and always seemed to look on from afar, with a distance-softened love for the working-class Americans he mythologized. McMurtry, while at least equally talented, is pretty unforgiving in the pictures he paints of everything from the embarrassing state of the nation to the microcosmic horror of a family holiday.

McMurtry's father, of course, is the author Larry McMurtry, who collected the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his post-Civil War, pre-transcontinental railroad novel of transition in the American West, Lonesome Dove. Larry wrote many more very thick works of fiction that I, and lots of other people, read all of. McMurtry pere was a well-known, accomplished scholar of the West, but his gift as a storyteller lay in bringing to life the grand sweep of history via the tales of individuals who were, often, haplessly unaware that "history" was what they were a part of. McMurtry fils, although his medium is an apple to the epic novel's orange, shares that talent -- and with the added application of twangy rock 'n' roll, is capable of making a listener want to boogie-woogie and drive extra fast all while -- often -- being ultimately depressing as hell. One of the finest songs on the album is the opener, "Elephant" -- a song that seems like a nostalgic slice of Americana until the final verse, when it's revealed that the rural child begging to be allowed to go to town for the circus is actually a teenager of age to fight -- and is aware this might be his last chance to see the fantastic thing. (It also turns out that "see the elephant," the oft-repeated phrase in the song, was actually an early 20th century euphemism for visiting the prostitutes who followed the traveling shows, but anyway.)

The big song on Childish Things is the scathing commentary "We Can't Make It Here," which rips with disgusted, pull-no-punches precision through every node of rot eating away at the general constitution of the country, from the Iraq war to outsourced jobs ("Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today / No, I hate the men sent the jobs away / I can see 'em now, they haunt my dreams/ All lily white and squeaky clean.")

"It was my first foray into political songwriting," says McMurtry. "I had avoided that because I thought my songs would turn into sermons and nobody wants to listen to them." He wrote the song just before the 2004 election, recorded a solo acoustic version, and took it down to a morning show DJ he knew in Texas to put on the air.

"By the time I got home I had hate mail," he said. But oddly enough, it turns out that, allegedly -- incongruous as it might seem -- W. himself has McMurtry on his iPod.

"Now, that was reported in The New York Times in the summer of 2005," McMurtry remembers in an amused, cranky drawl. "I don't know why it was newsworthy, except Katrina hadn't happened yet and Cindy Sheehan was all over the front page. What it looked like was as if some rich guy came to Austin and asked his friends to fill it up with some cool local music. It had the Gourds on it and Alejandro Escovedo and people I don't think Bush gave a damn about. They left the Alan Jackson on, so as not to alienate the Git-R-Done crowd." At last year's Americana Music Association awards ceremony in Nashville, by the way, McMurtry apparently had to be fetched from the bar around the corner and herded back to the Ryman Auditorium to collect his award. So he's our kind of people.

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2007-05-15/mus_sounds.php

[THE NATION via YAHOO]

Opinion

Give a Pulitzer to James McMurtry

John Nichols

President Bush has used "signing statements" to assert a supposed "right" to bypass provisions of new federal laws. Without Savage's groundbreaking reporting, the signing statements issue would still be off radar. He deserves this Pulitzer, and he should get another one for breaking the story of how more than 15O graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University have been handed high-powered federal government positions since President Bush took office in 2001 -- including Monica Goodling, the former top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who resigned in disgrace after asserting her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before Congress about his role in the burgeoning U.S. Attorneys scandal.

But the American writer who should have gotten a Pulitzer for producing journalism that truly reflects the zeitgeist is Texas songwriter James McMurtry.

McMurtry's songs have always had the literary quality that might be expected from the son of author Larry McMurtry, himself a 1985 Pulitzer winner for his novel Lonesome Dove.

In 2006, however, McMurtry reframed his writing to tell the story of George Bush's America. And he frequently beat the mainstream media to the punch.

Well before serious attention turned to the scandalous treatment of veterans of the Iraq War by the Veterans Administration, McMurtry wrote his song, "We Can't Make It Here Anymore," which opens with the lines:

Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign Sitting there by the left turn line Flag on the wheelchair flapping in the breeze One leg missing, both hands free No one's paying much mind to him The V.A. budget's stretched so thin And there's more comin' home from the Mideast war We can't make it here anymore

Or consider the opening lines of another new McMurtry song, "God Bless America," which anticipated the debate about war profiteering, military contractors and mercenaries that have exploded with the publication this spring of Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books]:

Look yonder comin', mercy me Three wise men in a SUV Corporate logo on the side Air-conditioned quiet ride

That thing don't run on french fry grease That thing don't run on love and peace Takes gasoline make that thing go Now bring your hands up nice and slow

McMurtry's recent songs make linkages between the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq and its dramatic neglect of fundamental issues at home that are far more vivid than anything you will see on the evening news, and far more potent than most of what you'll hear from even the president's most virulent critics. "We Can't Make It Here Anymore" is smarter examination of the damage done by corporate-sponsored "free trade" policies than anything you will hear on Capitol Hill.

Now I'm stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store Just like the ones we made before 'Cept this one came from Singapore I guess we can't make it here anymore

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I'm in Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today No I hate the men sent the jobs away I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams All lily white and squeaky clean They've never known want, they'll never know need Their sh@# don't stink and their kids won't bleed Their kids won't bleed in the damn little war And we can't make it here anymore...

McMurtry is honored in the current issue of Esquire magazine as the nation's "Best Agitator." But I'd still give him the Pultizer, if only for one line from "God Bless America":

You keep talking that sh@# like I never heard Hush, little President, don't say a word..

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070417/cm_thenation/1186910_1

As a young boy growing up in Texas, James McMurtry wanted to be Johnny Cash. His mother taught him to play a few chords on the guitar and he started writing songs around the age of 18.

Seven albums later, Childish Things was named Best Album of 2006 at the American Music Awards. "We Can't Make it Here," a grim lament about economic conditions in the United States, was also named Best Song. (And when you listen to it, you can hear Johnny Cash's influence in every intonation.)

Long before the album was released, McMurtry offered "We Can't Make it Here" as a free online download, just before the 2004 election.

"It instantly got more attention than anything I'd done on a CD in 10 years," he says. "I was completely surprised by the power of the Internet."

For McMurtry, songwriting begins with two lines and a melody. "If it keeps me up at night I finish the song," he says. "If it doesn't I just leave it."

A self-described misanthrope, McMurtry says he's learned over the years to play to an audience rather than at them. Still, his favorite part of touring is playing chords for sound check, when he is alone with the sound of the notes.

During a recent visit to NPR's Studio 4A, he talked to Scott Simon about his music and offered a tune or two on his 12-string guitar.

Audio link — hear the 13-minute interview at this URL:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7548171

Hear him on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday”

Saturday: February 24, 2007

50 minutes after the first or second hour...interview & performance

Winner: “BEST ALBUM” and “BEST SONG” at 2006 Americana Honors & Awards

What the press (and the occasional author or actor) is saying about James McMurtry:

“The truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation…” -- Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly

“This guy can tell a story and boy you really feel like you've been there the entire time.” – Matthew McConaughey

“James McMurtry can compel you to boogie while you consider the plight of his characters.” – Rolling Stone

“You have to listen to the words, but the words do come with the melodies. And the musical whole is spellbinding.” — Blender

“’We Can’t Make It Here’ is a seven-minute state-of-the-union mantra that looks at the Bush claims of economic recovery and finds nothing but smoke and mirrors.” – Texas Monthly

“Thundering voice of prophetic social conscience.” – Paste

“McMurtry's unsettling, brutally eloquent protest song We Can't Make It Here depicts a blue-collar worker crushed from the outside by the shifting forces of a changing economy and eaten from within by bitterness and rage.” – USA Today

“The album’s unmistakable centerpiece is “We Can’t Make It Here,” a seven-minute saga that seems like an antiwar song but is really a more general jeremiad about busted promises.” – The New Yorker

“While the voice of McMurtry may not be the envy of the pop world (think Lou Reed with a nasal twang), it's just right for his short-story songs. It's filled with portent and warning, like the sound of a high howling wind sweeping menacingly across the prairie. It's a voice you notice, a voice you can't ignore.” – Chicago Sun-Times

[Boston Phoenix]

By JIM SULLIVAN

Dave Alvin and James McMurtry, Paradise Rock Club, January 25, 2007

It was a night of workingman’s blues at the Paradise last Thursday. Hard battles fought in song. Some won, some lost. Maybe some fans were gained or secured. About 270 had their fill during a three-hour roots-rock workout that was both a respite from and a reminder of real life. Singer-songwriter David Alvin, who’s put in time as a Blaster and as a member of X, set the rootsy tone with his backing quartet, and James McMurtry — he of the Bush-bashing, CEO-whacking “They Can’t Make It Here” — followed on a tour that’s seen the two share the spotlight. “It doesn’t matter,” Alvin said after his set. “It’s roots music. . . . The audience is totally disparate. James and I are similar, but not similar in many ways.”

True enough: Alvin conjures desperate characters in songs whose grim lyrics are often offset by sharp guitar hooks and buoyant organ melodies, whereas McMurtry draws on muted cries of pain from the heartland for his more linear storytelling. He’s not given to big melodic peaks and valleys, relying instead on little details in both his words and music. He can and did rock, but his strength is as a wordsmith, and that in part is why the terse anthem “We Can’t Make It Here” carried the night. Written prior to Bush’s election in 2004, it hasn’t lost any of its bite.

“He’s really negative,” said Leigh Montville, a sportswriter (formerly Globe, now Sports Illustrated) and biographer who was in the crowd. Not wanting to be misunderstood, he added, “But he’s great.”

In his black hat and beard, the long-haired McMurtry cruised up and down bittersweet alleys, sometimes at too even a keel. Still, his steady-ahead approach had a cumulative appeal. “It’s been a lot of fun, folks,” he deadpanned at the end. Alvin and his guys cranked out a smoking set of what Little Feat once called “Old Folks Boogie.” Keyboardist Joe Terry had his synth dialed to Hammond B-3 and guitarists Chris Miller and Alvin himself kept the musical good times rolling even as bad times surfaced in the lyrics.

[Albany Times-Union]

By CASEY SEILER

A member of the working press, I didn't have to pay for my ticket to the James McMurtry/Dave Alvin show Saturday night at Revolution Hall in Troy. Those who did, however, will henceforth be able to brag that they got more bang for their buck -- or 22 bucks, to be precise -- than any audience really deserves. Apropos of two songwriters who excel at tales of the disreputable and the felonious, this double feature would have been a steal at twice the price.

McMurtry, accompanied by two members of his regular backing band, the Heartless Bastards, kicked things off with a set that drew heavily from his most recent studio album, 2005's "Childish Things." With Warren Zevon chain-smoking in heaven and Randy Newman busy at the movies, McMurtry is surely our sharpest practitioner of politically barbed noir songwriting, as evidenced by rockers like "Bad Enough" and "Red Dress," and the furious, wide-screen state-of-the-nation rap "We Can't Make It Here." He's also become an ace guitarist, adding cinematic solos to almost every tune.

"That space in front of the stage isn't a security zone -- that's for dancin'," McMurtry dryly advised the audience before launching into "Choctaw Bingo," his epic account of a family reunion on the Texas-Oklahoma border complete with crystal meth, automatic weapons and taboo urges involving first cousins. Another rich narrative tune, "Holiday," built to a verse -- delivered a cappella -- in which McMurtry narrates from behind the eyes of a soldier waiting at the airport gate on Thanksgiving. It brought the crowd to a hush.

In natty leather jacket and a red knotted neckerchief, Dave Alvin looked every inch the elder statesman of California alt-country, a role he's grown into over the two decades since his departure from the punk-rockabilly act the Blasters. Fronting the five-piece Guilty Men with his blistering blues-based guitar, Alvin was loose and amiable from the moment he took the stage, tossing off one-liners and jabbing blues runs like a combination of Dean Martin and B.B. King.

>From his new album "West of the West" -- a selection of classic songs by other California-reared songwriters -- Alvin pulled Jackson Browne's "Redneck Friend" and a gorgeous version of Merle Haggard's "Kern River." Alvin played his own Western epic, "Abilene," and reminded the audience that the song received one of its first live performances at Pauley's Hotel in Albany.

The roadhouse rumble of "Ashgrove," "East Virginia Blues" and the Blasters' classic "Marie Marie" sat well next to the domestic anthem "Fourth of July" and the tender "Border Radio." The Guilty Men have no weak links, although keyboardist Joe Terry and guitarist Chris Miller (who brought out lap steel for several songs) are clear standouts.

"Thanks for staying up late," Alvin said as 1 a.m. approached.

You're very welcome -- and let's do it again soon.

Casey Seiler can be reached at 454-5619 and cseiler@timesunion.com.

Music review

DAVE ALVIN/JAMES McMURTRY

When: 9 p.m. Saturday

Where: Revolution Hall, Troy

The crowd: 300 vocal patrons, most of them north of age 40

Length: McMurtry: 95 minutes; Alvin: 105 minutes

http://www.timesunion.com

[JimSullivanInk.com]

"Childish Things," James McMurtry's eighth album, came out in the fall of 2005, but it's still the current album. Which is to say, he's out on the road touring behind it. He and his band stop at the Paradise Thursday Jan. 25, sharing the bill with Dave Alvin. Does McMurtry - the highly praised son of acclaimed novelist Larry "Lonesome Dove" McMurtry - get a sense of "breakthrough" on this one? "It's defintely got a lot more attention," he says, during a tour stop in Annapolis. It's sold more than 40,000 copies."The business is growing a little bit. The material feels fresh. A lot of people are catching on to it." McMurtry says he didn't have "any idea" this would push his career along as it has, and says his main goal in making the record was "just trying to get it down. The goal is just to finish a song. When you can sing it without cringing. I cringe when it doesn't tie up, sounds like a song but really isn't."

The song that got the most attention - and still is - is "We Can't Make It Here," a complex, visceral, angry song about dashed American dreams, about young kids being used as soldier-pawns, about factories shutting down and jobs being outsourced. McMurtry first played an acoustic version of it before the 2004 election on an Austin, Texas radio station and says by the time he got home he had all kinds of hate email. He put an MP3 on the web in 2005 and it garnered even more attention. It is the centerpiece song of "Childish Things." And it's a song Stephen King wrote about by saying "this may be the best American protest song since 'Masters of War,' calling McMurtry "the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation." McMurtry doesn't mind that praise. "Oh yeah," he says, "people listen to that guy."

Thing is, McMurtry has an uneasy relationship with "protest" songs. (In this, and his sharp-eyed vision, he reminds me of the late great Warren Zevon.) "I've mostly avoided that," he says. "It can really drag you down, turn your songs into sermons, if you're not careful. But at end of 2004 nothing, there was nothing else I could do. I live in Texas, I don't vote Republican, so my vote doenst count, but I had a microphone."

"A lot of people didn't like that song, there wasn't so much anti-war feeling," says McMurtry,"but the pendulum swung. It's not specifically anti-Bush. (It's about people who) played by the rules and still got screwed."

McMurtry is a hero of the alt-country movement, but he'd rather just be called a rock 'n' roller. He got a guitar when he was 3, and was taught chords at 7 - just about the time he decided he wanted to be Johnny Cash. His first concert, Richmond, VA. 1969, was Johnny Cash with the Carter Family and the Statler Brothers, just after "A Boy Named Sue Came Out." (Coincidental trivia: Johnny Cash was my first concert too, same tour, different city. Bangor, Maine.) Ask if there's any father-son combo in the art/music world comparable to him and his dad and McMurtry says, "No, not sor far as I know." What did he learn from Larrry? "An eye for detail. I heard him tell a lot of stories." McMurtry and Alvin are flip-flopping the opening-headlining roles and the Paradise wasn't sure who was on first Thursday. Whoever they are - and you should certainly catch Alvin if it's him - starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $20.

http://jimsullivanink.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=355&Itemid=38

[San Francisco Bay Guardian]

From where we're sitting, anti-Bush jabs were de rigueur in 2006

BY K. TIGHE

The stage floods red, and the guitars churn. This rock is southern grit — a real heartland affair. Onstage, a man with straggly black hair steadies his guitar and returns to the microphone stand: "They've never known want, they'll never know need/ Their shit don't stink, and their kids won't bleed/ Their kids won't bleed in their damn little war/ And we can't make it here anymore." The crowd goes off, the band keeps up, and then James McMurtry puts down his guitar.

This is pretty much what preaching to the converted looks like. I should know — I'm up here every night, and I see it all the time. By day I'm a writer, but nights still find me on my balcony perch behind the lighting board at the Great American Music Hall. My voyeur point offers nightly opportunities to study the mechanics of crowds. From here, I've learned that hippies twirl, hipsters stand with arms folded, punk rockers still mosh — well, they try — and any alt-country audience worth its salt drains all the Maker's Mark early in the night.

Still, there are two things that happen during every show. The first, somewhat annoying thing is that at some point someone in the band will say something like "Hey, this place used to be a brothel, you know." This false statement is typically followed by a joke, statement, or inflammatory song about the Bush administration. The San Francisco crowd — regardless of what kind of night it is — will always go crazy.

McMurtry is at that point in the evening — only he's played here enough times to forgo the cathouse comment, and he skips right to the hard stuff. "We Can't Make It Here Anymore" is nothing short of an anthem, a wartime confession that things these days are pretty fucked up. This marks the third time I've witnessed a crowd encountering this song. From above, I can see the now-familiar shudders — I see the guitar chords grabbing at the guts, the lyrics pulling at the guilt, and the eyes glazing over with the most dutifully civic of queries: how the hell did we get to this point?

Music has long been a vehicle for dissent. In fact, the protest genre's history is so strong that some of its most revolutionary battle cries ("The times they are a-changin’," "God save the queen," and "Fuck the police") have become pop culture cliches. Sticks and stones and all of that, but it turns out the right words can pack one hell of a punch.

A few months ago during the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park, a known dissenter rewrote an old song, Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues," in front of more than 50,000 listeners. It was Fleet Week in the city, and fighter jets roared overhead as Billy Bragg led his crowd through the chorus of "Bush War Blues," a sea of middle fingers fiercely stabbing at the air.

It seems that we are all tangled up in the newest wave of protest music — and it's quite a stretch from the "Kumbaya," peacenik days of yore. Today's troubadours are mobile.

Bragg, McMurtry, and countless other hard-touring artists are playing festivals, midlevel clubs, and bars from coast to coast — resulting in a revolution being waged on stages throughout the land, a series of battles fought one song at a time. I can't help but think, as I watch the crowd down below, that at this very moment somewhere in this country, a 13-year-old kid is being shoved into a dark and sweaty all-ages venue. The band onstage is yelling about blood and oil, telling him he's going to die for his government.

The vocalist gives a "fuck you" to our commander-in-chief before launching into another indecipherable, out-of-tune 45-second song. The room goes wild. And the kid, for perhaps the first time, realizes that there is a movement afoot.

http://www.sfbayguardian.com/

[Santa Cruz Metro]

James McMurtry gets in-your-face with the Bush administration

By Tom Lanham

Sure, the Dixie Chicks might've grabbed all the headlines--even a feature-length documentary, Shut Up & Sing--for their little Bush-bashing escapade in England a few years ago. But other Texas songwriters have been on the anti-neocon frontlines, as well, quietly fighting the good fight and taking a similarly scary degree of flak for their efforts.

Like Austin twangsmith James McMurtry, for example. The well-read son of Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry has generally shied away from politics for most of his two-decade career. But in 2004, a few weeks before the presidential election, he felt every bit as angry as the Chicks' outspoken Natalie Maines. So he decided to take action.

McMurtry hastily recorded an acoustic version of a topical dirge he'd written, "We Can't Make It Here," then headed down to local radio station KGSR and got his DJ friend to spin it during morning drive time. Which turned out to be one big Dixie Chick-size mistake.

The "here" in question, of course, was Anytown, America; The point of view: Middle-class Everyman. Like the hard-put Wal-Mart employee who despises the "lily-white" men "who sent the jobs away/ They've never known want, they've never known need/ Their shit don't stink and their kids won't bleed/ Their kids won't bleed in their damn little war/ And we can't make it here anymore."

Delivered in the singer's deep ursine rumble, the track (now featured on his recent Childish Things release for the Compadre label) sounds daunting, downright threatening in places. And that's exactly how many AM commuters took it on the morning of its debut: As a threat.

"Before I even got home from the station, I had some nasty emails on my website that got forwarded to me," McMurtry chuckles in retrospect. "People did not wanna hear it at that time, in that year. Middle America hadn't gotten as sick of the war by then as they are now. Now people in Kansas and Iowa are just tired of seeing the coffins come back."

The fallout wasn't restricted to the Internet. McMurtry endured his share of onstage heckling, as well.

"I remember one guy in San Antonio giving me the double thumbs-down and booing. But he didn't realize that he was in the middle of a crowd of Veterans for Peace, the guys who ran Cindy Sheehan's camp. So when the Veterans for Peace had a national meeting in Dallas, they invited me to come up and play 'We Can't Make It Here' to kick everything off."

Undaunted, this overnight activist decided to offer the track for free on his website, sans album. The response was overwhelming. "As a download, the song got more attention than most of what I'd put out on CD in the last 10 years," he notes, in a loping laconic drawl. "So it kinda gave us some momentum when we got the rest of the record done."

What originally motivated the dissertation? Frustration, McMurtry responds, in a heartbeat. "I guess my vote really didn't matter that much, being in Texas. So what've I got? I've got a record deal, I've got a microphone. So you do whatever you can.

"And I've always had something to say, but that's not always a good idea as a basis for a song. Songwriters with something to say tend to drag their songs down. To make a good song you usually have to kinda give the song its head, and for the sake of rhyme and meter you might change something, you might wind up saying something that you yourself wouldn't say. But if the song says it, it's cooler that way. If you're brave enough, that's how ya do it. And with 'We Can't Make It Here,' I had to try to get some of my point across, because the situation had just gotten too weird."

McMurtry pauses for a protracted sigh. "I mean, we grew up thinking we wouldn't have to be involved in politics, that this thing was gonna stay within a certain framework that we considered sane. But it's no longer sane. And if we want the picture to be sane again, we all have to get involved."

McMurtry, 44, speaks slowly, deliberately, considering every last word. He approaches composing the exact same way. Horror writer Stephen King has called him "the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation," although McMurtry is the first to admit he's far from prolific. He has 10 tracks already penned for his Childish Things follow-up, but he plans on tinkering with them well into mid-'07. "I'm gonna have to pick at this one for a while," he reckons. How does he know when a record is finished? He chortles. "Either when you're absolutely out of money, or you're absolutely out of time. Like when you're up against a hard deadline, and you just have to let go of it."

The self-produced Childish Things covers the same dusty heartland terrain as much of Steve Earle's work, with solemn covers of Peter Case's "Old Part Of Town" and (in a duet with Joe Ely) the classic grizzly yarn "Slew Foot." But the title track, in which the protagonist promises to "put away childish things," hides some humorous irony. Yes, McMurtry is a dad now (his 16-year-old son Curtis plays baritone sax on the album). But--as an entertainer who literally sings for his supper--he hasn't really shelved childhood at all. He acknowledges that, in some respects, he's living a Peter Pan existence. "And I've touched on that theme a few times. There was a song called 'Racing Through the Red Light' several records back that had a verse about 'Mama said get your face to the fire/ Put the guitar down, put the clothes in the dryer/ Put the guitar down, quit making it ring/ A little bit of hope is a dangerous thing.' But I really wouldn't do anything else but this. I mean, there are times when we all get frustrated with our jobs, and I suppose if I had something else I could do this well, I might just try it. But I don't, and there's probably a good reason for that."

Fans would most likely see it the same whimsical way. And besides, McMurtry adds, the recent midterm elections have given him reason to rejoice. In his own laid-back style, of course. "Things are better than they could've been, that's for sure," he assesses. "But I'm a little bit wary of Pelosi--I think she may turn out to be the Gingrich of the West. But I believe she'll flame out quicker than Newt did and then they can just get on with it. She's doing the same thing within the Democratic party that Bush is doing nationally--she's picking fights that she just can't win, and what's the deal with that?"

Shut up and sing? Nope--not McMurtry. He's thrown his hat in the political ring for good now. Don't believe him? Check out his website, he invites. "I've got a new song on there called 'God Bless America,' and anybody can download it for free right now and figure out pretty quick what it's about. It's a little more in-your-face kinda thing. I'm no fan of the Bush administration, but a lot of what the narrator of 'We Can't Make It Here' complained about really took wing under Clinton, so it was more of a general overview of the mess we were in. But this next one?" He cackles wickedly. "It really is an anti-Bush song, and it's really going for the throat. The first one was an editorial--this one is more like a sharp political cartoon."

http://www.metrosantacruz.com/metro-santa-cruz/11.29.06/james-mcmurtry-0648.html

Ryman show’s politics as diverse as musical styles

By PETER COOPER

Friday night’s 5th Annual Americana Honors & Awards show at the Ryman Auditorium opened with funk and moved through folk, soul, bluegrass, jazz and country and lots of places in between.

British rock icon Elvis Costello, New Orleans soulster Allen Toussaint, Nashville songwriting great Rodney Crowell, singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, virtuoso acoustic instrumentalist Sam Bush and deep funk band The Dynamites all took the Ryman Auditorium stage on an awards night that was every bit as diverse as a typical Grammy evening.

The politics were as diverse as the music. While contemporary country and rock stations tend to stay away from pointed political commentary, the smaller, more jagged Americana world has no trouble with strident views on any side of the fence.

James McMurtry won album of the year (Childish Things) and song of the year (“We Can’t Make It Here”) for music that attacks the American political, social and military status quo.

Charlie Daniels — whose songs include right-leaning sentiments such as “This ain’t no rag, it’s a flag, and we don’t wear it on our heads” and “You know what’s wrong with the world today? People done gone put their Bibles away” — received the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award.

Neil Young, whose latest album includes the lyric “Let’s impeach the president for lying,” won out as artist of the year.

“Americana” is loosely defined as “American roots music based on the traditions of country,” but Friday’s show spread beyond that, encompassing territories best described as “the things that aren’t on mass-market commercial radio but deserve an airing.”

Daniels reveled in a show that featured a disparity of sounds and viewpoints. “I’m deeply honored to be recognized for freedom of speech. I exercise mine every day,” he said, before accepting an award that had previously been given to luminaries Johnny Cash, Steve Earle, Judy Collins and Kris Kristofferson. “Patriotism is not blind allegiance to any ideology or political party. Nobody is right all the time. Reasonable people will sit down and work together.”

McMurtry, the son of novelist Larry McMurtry, thanked his dad onstage for lending him a sports coat suitable for the occasion. Backstage, he noted the chance-taking aspects of Americana stations that have allowed his “We Can’t Make It Here” on the airwaves. “It’s very brave of them to play that,” he said. “Also, it’s a 7½-minute record. So they’re breaking their own mold there.”

More Americana stalwart artists reside in Nashville than in any other city, yet most awards Friday night went to musicians who reside outside Music City. Of the yearly, non-career achievement awards, only The Greencards’ emerging artist win and Kenny Vaughan’s top instrumentalist prize went to Nashville area residents.

Vaughan, who has performed and/or recorded with respected singer-songwriters, including show host Jim Lauderdale, Marty Stuart, Rodney Crowell, Lucinda Williams, Kim Richey and Patty Loveless, also received a lifetime achievement award. Vaughan is a riveting guitarist, capable of melodic flights and of acrobatic solos. He also has an unflappable stage presence that Marty Stuart found fit to remark upon.

“If Kenny were a car, he’d be a Nash Metropolitan,” Stuart said. “If he were fabric, he’d no doubt be sharkskin.” Stuart went on to call Vaughan “a genius who does most of his thinking with his heart.”

Other lifetime achievement awards went to Sugar Hill Records founder Barry Poss, producer/engineer Allen Toussaint (presented by Costello), performer and famed singer-songwriter Alejandro Esco-vedo and Nashvillians Mickey Newbury (the songwriter received the posthumous President’s Award) and Rodney Crowell.

Toussaint, a fixture in the Crescent City who has made significant marks as a songwriter, producer, piano player, arranger and recording artist, performed with Costello, who remarked on the oddity of an Americana category that’s wide enough to reach across oceans.

“I don’t know how it is an English guy got up here at the Americana awards,” he said, before talking of his love for American-born music and of the impact that Toussaint has made on American popular music.

Crowell’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting was introduced by Vince Gill, who sang a guitar/vocal version of Crowell’s “’Til I Gain Control Again.”

“I’m honored that you’ve recognized a body of work that I’ve put together over the last 30 years,” Crowell said. “I’m assuming that I have an invitation to continue, to keep trying to make it work and keep trying to make it rhyme.”

The awards are to be broadcast by Sirius and XM satellite radio stations, as well as by BBC Radio 2 in Europe and Voice of America across the world. Buddy Miller served as band leader, and he led a finale sing-along of Bob Dylan’s folk classic “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Kieran Kane, who performed as part of a trio with Kevin Welch and Fats Kaplin, said Americana’s atypical blend of roots music struck him as quite sensible.

“It seems there’s a common thread that runs through all of this,” Kane said. “It’s organic music. It’s not processed.” •

Read full article

Fredheads dig soggy fest

By JOYCE MARCEL, Special to the Reformer

Monday, June 12

ROCKINGHAM -- Nothing like mud and driving rain at a music festival to haul out the Woodstock comparisons, and they were all over the place at the Fred Eaglesmith-Roots on the River Festival Saturday at the Everyday Inn in Rockingham.

The all-day-and-well-into-the-night concert was a mess of waterfalls streaming off tents, ankle-deep mud, straw (trying to soak up the mud) and wet, happy people having a ball hooking up with old friends, making new ones, barbecuing, drinking alcohol and listening to some of the finest alternative roots music in the nation.

Keeping us on our feet was the job of James McMurtry (yes, the son of famous author Larry), as sardonic and angry a folksinger as you can find. He plays a kind of feral feedback folk, all fuzzy and angry and reverberating and deeply lovely. The crowd loved him. To close his set, he brought back on-stage Straw, her red hound Henry, Morlix and Hubbard to do a heavy metal folk rendition of "Highway to Hell" that rocked the tent.

THE REFORMER (VT)

http://www.reformer.com/headlines/ci_3927027

By Dan DeLuca

Inquirer Music Critic

War! What is it good for?

Absolutely nothin'!

Edwin Starr got it wrong. "War," the Motown singer's 1970 hit, is not good for "absolutely nothin!' "

War - or at least the ever-more-unpopular war in Iraq - can be good for at least one thing: protest music.

As presidential approval ratings spiral downward, pop artists are letting loose antiwar and anti-Bush salvos, and venting their frustration with everything from the Hurricane Katrina aftermath to the mounting death tolls in a three-year-old war with no end in sight.

"People are just writing about the things that are around them," says Boots Riley of the Oakland hip-hop group the Coup. "And people are getting more comfortable saying they're against the war."

There isn't a groundswell to rival the golden years of protest music during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the '60s and '70s.

But war is good for Neil Young, who has shaken himself awake with Living With War, the cranky, noisy song cycle he rushed out this month. The Canadian citizen and longtime U.S. resident makes his feelings plain in the song "Let's Impeach the President."

It's good for Pearl Jam, the Seattle rockers led by Eddie Vedder, whose fired-up new album damning the Iraq war as "World Wide Suicide" is their best work since their mid-'90s heyday.

And it's good for the Dixie Chicks, the country-pop superstars who take an unapologetic stance on "Not Ready To Make Nice," the lead-off single from Taking the Long Way, which will be released Tuesday. The album is their first since 2003, when singer Natalie Maines brought on an avalanche of criticism by saying she was "ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas."

Criticizing George W. Bush during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was a real risk, and earned the Chicks the ostracism of the country music establishment - not to mention death threats. But three years on, nobody seems afraid to target a president whose approval rating has dropped to a record low 31 percent. And like Stephen Colbert at the White House correspondents' dinner, pop singers across the musical spectrum are taking shots at the chief executive.

Some of the dissenters are unsurprising. Though just last year Young was in a becalmed, elegiac mood on his Prairie Wind album, he's made a career of abrupt about-faces, and his protest-music pedigree reaches back to "Ohio" in 1970.

Bruce Springsteen, who spearheaded the Vote for Change tour in 2004, went on the attack last month in New Orleans, where he dedicated a rewritten version of Blind Alfred Reed's stock-market-crash song "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" to "President Bystander." And the Boss has been including both the Irish antiwar anthem "Mrs. McGrath" and Pete Seeger's "Bring 'Em Home" in his live shows in Europe.

Bohemian artists such as the Flaming Lips, who are not known for overly political music, have little to lose with alt-rock audiences by releasing a song like "Haven't Got A Clue," which - referring to Bush - rhymes, "Every time you state your case, the more I want to punch your face."

But criticism has also come from unexpected quarters. Frustration over Katrina has opened up a domestic front alongside the antiwar protests. Country music's first couple, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, both from Gulf Coast states, let Bush have it in March, calling the lack of progress in Louisiana and Mississippi "embarrassing" and "humiliating" and "bull-."

Perhaps the most unpredictable example is "Dear Mr. President," which marks the emergence of Pink - the Doylestown native born Alecia Moore - as a protest singer "who might actually get played on terrestrial radio," as it was put by politically minded rock historian Dave Marsh.

In her (less-than-stellar) song written with the Indigo Girls, Pink goes after W. with guns blazing:

"You've come a long way," she sneers, "from whiskey and cocaine."

Do all these disparate acts airing their discontent add up to a new flowering of protest music? Not necessarily. It's not blooming out of the fertile soil of a social movement, as it did in the '60s.

As Riley points out, artists such as James Brown and Marvin Gaye released politicized songs like "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" and "What's Goin' On" only "after years and years of political struggle."

With the Internet and their own celebrity on their side, today's protesting pop acts have the power to get their messages out. But as they try to force a cultural tipping point, they risk preaching to the converted.

"With Vietnam, you had a movement," says Marsh. "Now you don't have a movement. You have a president with low approval ratings, and a bunch of songs."

Pop music is not monolithic, and not everybody's out to get W. Bush was backed by country acts Brooks & Dunn and Lee Ann Womack in 2004. Boston alt-metal band Godsmack, whose album IV entered the Billboard chart at No. 1 this month, have allowed their songs "Awake" and "Sick of Life" to be used in military ads. "Somebody in the Navy loves this band," singer Sully Erna told Arthur magazine. "I'm proud of it."

Earnest message-mongering can be deadly dull, a musical buzz-kill - once again, the Indigo Girls come to mind. But a dose of high dudgeon can come as a welcome shot in the arm to a serious-minded storyteller. A case in point: James McMurtry's "We Can't Make It Here," as riveting an antiwar, anti-Bush, anti-rich-white-guy song as any out there in 2006.

And the Coup's superb new album, Pick a Bigger Weapon, is full of expertly crafted agit-funk songs like "Head (of State)" and "BabyLet'sHaveABabyBeforeBushDoSomethingCrazy" that are shot through with humor and convey an unmistakable point of view.

For Riley, the protest songwriter's role "is to make the anthems for the battle, to give people that unity of thought." The important thing "is to make it personal. It can't just be all sort of ideas spelled out. I have to put the real passion and feeling I have in my life in my music."

Tom Gabel, of the Florida-based punk band Against Me!, concurs. He wrote the band's current single, "From Her Lips to God's Ears (The Energizer)," a series of questions for Condoleezza Rice, after seeing Bush speak to students on Martin Luther King Day in 2005.

"I found the whole thing hypocritical," he wrote in an e-mail from a tour stop in Zurich, Switzerland. "For a man claiming to be trying to bring freedom though war, to be honoring a man whose life was about achieving freedom through nonviolence."

"I don't know what the key to writing a great political song is," the singer says. "But the one thing I think is important is, don't preach - it doesn't work. It has to be something that everybody can relate to and understand... . So that's the perspective I try to write from, a human being's perspective."

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/14619435.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

By MICHAEL HOINSKI

Published: March 12, 2006

AUSTIN, Tex. -- WHEN you get older, you've got to force yourself to have fun," James McMurtry, the 43-year-old roots-rock singer and songwriter, said earlier this month as he drove his pickup north out of Austin to Louie Mueller BBQ in Taylor and then to neighboring Granger Lake to drop a line.

His brimmed hat kept his brown locks from blowing in his face while he drove with the window down. Meanwhile his arms worked overtime to master the impossibly loose steering wheel. The odometer read just over 187,000 miles.

In his trademark gritty murmur, Mr. McMurtry said, "It drinks oil like a sieve, but other than that it's pretty good." The American flag sticker on the dashboard presented a paradox.

Here's a guy who denounced the Bush administration in "We Can't Make It Here," a seven-minute state of the union that, Stephen King wrote, "may be the best American protest song since 'Masters of War.' " Still, Mr. McMurtry remains true to the red, white and blue. And like his fellow Texan Willie Nelson he appeals to Democrats, Republicans and the disenfranchised.

"I'd like to have that much influence without having to be that famous," he said. At Louie Mueller's, a cavernous old joint with browning business cards on the wall, Mr. McMurtry ordered a plate of brisket. Bobby Mueller sliced a sample chunk off the slab and plopped it on Mr. McMurtry's butcher paper. Seemingly content with what he tasted, Mr. McMurtry ordered a Shiner Bock to wash it down. Later, at the table, he regretted not ordering sausage: "That's what they do around here."

Next Saturday Mr. McMurtry will celebrate his birthday by playing a show at Jovita's during South by Southwest, Austin's annual music festival. This comes six months after the release of "Childish Things," an album that has outsold everything he has released in the last decade.

Its success has less to do with being the only child of Larry McMurtry, whose screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain" won an Academy Award, and more to do with his performance last summer at Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan's antiwar base near the Bush ranch in Crawford.

"They characterized them as placard-wielding, antiwar activists, which they were," Mr. McMurtry said of the news media's description of the activities in Crawford. "But they were also veterans. You know, they could have said that, and given the movement a whole lot more credibility. But they chose not to." Just then Mr. McMurtry pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store in the middle of nowhere and said, "I've got to get some minnows." Inside, he asked if the fish were biting. The clerk put down her cigarette and replied, "If it stays hot, all hell's going to break loose."

It stayed hot, but nibbles were scarce. The sonar hoisted onto the side of his canoe didn't help. Nearing sundown, Mr. McMurtry rowed his canoe ashore to cast from the bank. His knee-high galoshes completed the image of a man who could have walked out of the surrounding woods as inconspicuously as he had into Louie Mueller's.

But looks are deceiving: Mr. McMurtry is an intellectual good old boy. Before long he reeled in a catfish, which he skinned on the spot. "I usually scrape a spoon across them to get rid of the scales, but they fly off and get in my hair," he said.

For someone who doesn't smile much, he obviously was having fun. "That's dinner for me and my boy," he said. "I've got a little chili at home to go with it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/fashion/sundaystyles/12NITE.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[Idaho Statesman]

The V.A. budget's stretched so thin/And there's more comin' home from the Mideast war/We can't make it here anymore/ That big ol' building was the textile mill/It fed our kids and it paid our bills/But they turned us out and they closed the doors/We can't make it here anymore/ Some have maxed out all their credit cards/Some are working two jobs and living in cars/Minimum wage won't pay for a roof, won't pay for a drink/ If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO/See how far 5.15 an hour will go/Take a part time job at one of your stores/Bet you can't make it here anymore.

Light-hearted anecdotes aren't what earned James McMurtry a reputation as a gritty, evocative storyteller or ˜ as author and music addict Stephen King once wrote ˜ "the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation."

Yet even for McMurtry, this phone interview initially feels a tad dour. The 43-year-old Texan is stuck on tour in Eugene, Ore., waiting for a flat tire to be repaired. Plus, it's noon, and he's famished.

But bring up the subject of politics, and McMurtry perks up with a different sort of hunger.

During the 2004 presidential election, he released a controversial, unusual MP3, "We Can't Make It Here." Controversial because the song painted a bleak portrait of a troubled America savaged by poor economics and leadership. Unusual because McMurtry had always been put off by musician activists.

Not anymore. "We Can't Make It Here" became a smash with fans. It's the cornerstone of his latest album, "Childish Things." It's also the tune that is most likely to get a vocal reaction during concerts, McMurtry says.

"I hope it doesn't turn out to be the song of my career," McMurtry admits. "But it has helped, and I did it because I felt I had to. I've been reluctant to mess with political songs because they usually turn into sermons. ...

"But I noticed that Steve Earle songs are not sermons. He gets his point across effectively. I thought I could at least try it. Then I wanted to get it out before the elections, just in case somebody wanted to think."

McMurtry has been bitten by the activist bug. He joined Earle last year for a free concert at "Peace Mom" Cindy Sheehan's anti-war demonstration outside President George W. Bush's home in Crawford, Texas. And now that he's taken the change-the-world plunge, politics will continue to be a part of his songs: "If I can write any," McMurtry says. "I've written other political songs that didn't turn out so well, so I didn't use them."

The smart bet is that McMurtry will find the words. The son of "Lonesome Dove" author Larry McMurtry, James got his start as a musician in the 1980s, then got his break after his father penned the screenplay for "Falling From Grace," a movie starring and directed by John Cougar Mellencamp. After hearing a demo tape, Mellencamp enthusiastically produced McMurtry's 1989 debut album, "Too Long in the Wasteland." Other critically acclaimed CDs followed with eye-grabbing titles such as "Where'd You Hide the Body" and "Walk Between the Raindrops," illuminating McMurtry's talents for wordplay and guitar tone, as well as a singing style not unlike Mark Knopfler's.

Predictably, mainstream fame has eluded McMurtry. Nevertheless, his fans are a devoted lot, ranging from everyday Americana diehards to Hollywood celebrities. Actor Matthew McConaughey and girlfriend Penelope Cruz were recently spotted boogying and singing along at a sold-out show. And during the presidential election, The New York Times reported that President Bush had a McMurtry tune on his iPod, "Valley Road."

McMurtry isn't so sure that Bush is listening: "But I got a mention for it, so ... I'll take it," he says.

McMurtry and his backing band, the Heartless Bastards, are beginning to formulate his next studio album but haven't set a release date. McMurtry has a unique songwriting method.

"Basically, I work from a scrap pile," McMurtry says, "and when it's time for a record, I see which scraps are closest to being done. And whatever gets done first gets on the record."

One thing is certain: Midway through his career, a potentially lethal new protest musician and activist has been awakened.

"Now I don't have any choice but to be one," McMurtry says. "We all don't have much of a choice, I don't think. ... Things got weirder than I think any of us ever thought they could get."

http://www.idahostatesman.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060210/ENT03/602100311&SearchID=73235231223113

Texas singer-songwriter has grabbed attention with song's social commentary

JASON KELLNER

RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL

In 1989, when singer-songwriter James McMurtry released his debut album, Columbia Records probably hoped he'd be the next John Mellencamp or Bruce Springsteen -- the guy who championed the working class and sold millions of albums. Mellencamp was even tapped to produce that debut, and McMurtry played Farm Aid last year, the benefit concert that Mellencamp helped start in 1985.

McMurtry, who's lived in Austin, Texas since 1989, never reached the status of Mellencamp or Springsteen. He didn't have the looks, his songs didn't come neatly packaged with hooks to hang a hit on, and they were often too long for radio play. He hasn't recorded for Columbia in 10 years.

But that never mattered to music lovers like author Stephen King, who's raved about McMurtry a number of times in the pages of Entertainment Weekly. It didn't matter to critics, who often defied unremarkable album sales with glowing reviews.

"It's had a great effect, 'cuz people listen to guys like (King)," McMurtry said from a tour stop in Tuscon, Ariz. "They want to find out why Stephen King gives a damn." King's endorsement has certainly helped, but so has a topical song, "We Can't Make it Here," from his 2005 album "Childish Things." In our interview, McMurtry was a man of few words, offering short answers to the questions posed. But this seven-minute story-song follows a character living in a rotting American industrial town, his job has been outsourced, he now works at Wal-Mart and is barely able to feed his family. It's full of words -- none of the verses or choruses are repeated -- but McMurtry says a lot about America's current state of affairs. He released the song as a free download during the 2004 presidential elections, and it got people talking. Some praised him, some ridiculed him.

The song doesn't have a beat that makes your head bob, or an irresistible hook that plants itself into your brain, but like any good protest song, the lyrics draw the listener in.

"The bar's still open but man it's slow/the tip jar's light and the register's low/the bartender don't have much to say/regular crowd gets thinner each day/some have maxed out all their credit cards/some are workin' two jobs and livin' in cars/minimum wage won't pay for a roof, won't pay for a drink/if you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO/see how far $5.15 an hour will go"

"That's the most topical song I've written and shown to people," McMurtry said (get a free download at www.jamesmcmurtry.com). "It's very hard to write a political song. They turn into sermons real fast."

But that didn't stop influential radio stations from picking up the song. WXRT in Chicago added it to its playlist after abandoning McMurtry's work in the mid-1990s. "(We Can't Make it Here") is not being worked as a (radio) single," McMurtry said. They just wanted to play it in all its 7-minute glory. It's pretty amazing. I'm very pleased it gets any reaction at all. It seems to get really extreme reactions. People either love it or hate it."

Although the song seems to directly target the Bush administration, McMurtry said the song isn't anti-Bush.

"It's anti-what's-happening-now," he said. "A lot of the stuff the character complains about really took wing under the Clinton administration. This outsourcing, Clinton really got that going. It was probably starting before him, but he didn't get in the way of it because he was going to pick fights you can win, and you can't win against the corporations when they're really motivated."

All that reality might seem like a downer for the concert setting, but McMurtry rocks it up enough to exp