Folk icon McMurtry to visit Macon on tour for new album

James McMurtry will bring the gritty meanderings of a songwriter who’s traveled backroads and dirt paths to the stage Sept. 24 at Macon’s Capitol Theatre.

“The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy,” McMurtry’s first new album in four years, is a collection of songs woven from loose lines that he says kept him up at night, stories pocketed from friends throughout life.

In “South Texas Lawman,” McMurtry pulls a story from the lines of a poem written by a friend. He touches on the topic of getting older while singing about a man who “hunts quail from horseback” and “cheats on both his wives.” 

A self-described fiction writer, McMurtry slips into different narratives and change characters like clothing. 

“The trick with the song is to stay in character, even if I don’t agree with the character,” he said, noting that to stray from the character results in a sermon not a song.

McMurtry has written from the perspectives of men and women, even drawing inspiration from man’s best friend — he wrote one of his favorite songs off the new album, “Back to Coeur d’Alene,” about his rescue dog, Mikey.

“Somebody mistreated him at some point,” McMurtry said.  “For a long time, he always seemed to wake up, thinking he was in trouble.”

Co-produced with Don Dixon and released June 20 under New West Records, McMurtry’s album title is a reference to hallucinations had by his late father, famous novelist and “Terms of Endearment” author Larry McMurtry.

If there’s anything that ties all 10 songs on the album together, McMurtry says it isn’t intentional and he never thinks about it.

Though some of his songs echo similar themes — like mentions of the Pentagon in both “Sailing Away” and “Annie” — McMurtry’s explanation is much simpler: “I wasn’t thinking about the other song, I was just looking for a line that rhymes.”

He said the writing process begins with a couple of lines and a melody, and if it seems to stick, he builds a character to help unravel the rest of the story. 

“I follow the words where they lead,” McMurtry said.

Some of his songs take a couple weeks to write, said the Texas-born musician, while others can take decades.

“The rule is, you don’t throw anything away,” he said, recalling an incident where his laptop fell off the hood of his car.

The device, which contained snippets of songs and lyrics, disappeared on Interstate 35 in Texas somewhere between Denton and Fort Worth, McMurtry said, likening the accident to the famous tale of Ernest Hemingway’s suitcase of lost writings.

The same roads that swallowed his laptop, however, are often where new material is born.

“If I’m at the wheel I’ll be turning a verse over in my head,” he said. “I listen to the white noise of the tires on the pavement. That’s how I can get stuff written.” 

McMurtry doesn’t listen to the radio while on the road, instead he searches for melodies amidst the white noise. 

“It’s sort of like if you hunt deer,” he said. “It’s better on a misty day because the deer will move around in that mist.”

McMurtry first dug his heels into the music scene with his granular depiction of Americana in his debut 1989 album “Too Long in the Wasteland,” produced by John Mellencamp.

Now on his 11th album, he is no stranger to the ebb and flow of the music industry. Musicians used to tour to promote their record sales, he explained, but now it’s flipped upside down.

“I make records when my tour draw starts to fall off,” he said. “I put out records to advertise tour dates.”

McMurtry’s tour will take him and his band throughout the country, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to New Orleans and all the towns in between. 

He enjoys playing certain songs live more than others and said the tracks he gravitates toward usually differ from the fan favorites. 

“The Color of Night” plays itself, McMurtry said. In the song, he describes the color of night as a “sixty watt bulb on a cinder block wall.” 

His easygoing twang tells listeners, “seems you miss what you’re missing more than you want what you’ve got / And I guess this beats boredom, but it hurts just the same.”

On “The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy” tour, fans gravitate towards “Sailing Away” and “Sons of the Second Sons,” he said. 

A hit song has to truly resonate with people, something that McMurtry said has eluded him, even with his most famous song, “Choctaw Bingo” which he called likeable but not relatable.

Some songs click better with listeners than others, such as “Canola Fields” off his 2021 album “The Horses and the Hounds.” 

The “relationship song” seemed to be more listener-friendly, said McMurtry, who remembers hearing concert-goers all the way in the back of the venue singing his lyrics. 

“That’s what makes a hit song,” he said. “When everybody thinks, ‘that could be me.’”

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