James McMurtry spends hundreds of hours in the van each year, traveling America’s highways to the 100-plus shows he and his band annually perform.
The van hours, however, aren’t just down time. The travel, McMurtry says, provides inspiration for his geographic, detail-filled songs.
Take, for example, “South Dakota,” the story of a young military veteran returning to the small town and family farm from Complicated Game, his critically acclaimed 2015 album:
“There ain’t much between the pole and South Dakota/ Barbed wire won’t stop the wind/ You won’t get nothin’ here but broke and older/ If I was you I might re-up again.”
“I get a couple lines and a melody and then I think, ‘Who said that?’” McMurtry says. “I try to create the character who said that, then I go backward to the story, sometimes.”
While he frequently writes songs, McMurtry didn’t make Complicated Game until he had to. His trigger for a new album: things slowing down on the road.
“I didn’t make a record for four or five years because we didn’t need to,” McMurtry says. “Then the club cycle, the attendance started falling off, so we made another one. That’s what [albums] are for now. We make ’em so guys like you write about them and write about us and people know we’re coming to town.”
Coming to town is now McMurtry’s stock-in-trade. Album sales have dwindled, the payment for artists from digital downloads is far smaller than that for physical products, and money from streaming is almost non-existent, he says.
“That’s the way the music business is now,” McMurtry says. “We’re on the road half the year. When we’re home, we do work around here and I have regular gigs in Austin. It’s the only way to make money anymore. The mailbox money isn’t there anymore. … It was a completely different world when I started out.”
That was 29 years ago, when his debut album, Too Long in the Wasteland, was released by Columbia Records.
But he’d been playing guitar since his dad, novelist Larry McMurtry, gave him a guitar at 7 and his mom taught him a couple chords.
“I wanted to be Johnny Cash when I was growing up,” McMurtry says. “By the time I was supposed to be grown up, I learned there were people who wrote songs for other singers. I was going to move to Nashville to be a songwriter.”
About that time, John Mellencamp was directing and acting in a movie, Falling From Grace, from a script written by McMurtry’s father.
“I pitched him (Mellencamp) a tape, hoping he’d want to record one of my songs. That way when I got to Nashville, somebody would rent me an apartment because I’d have money coming in,” McMurtry says. “He didn’t want to record any of the songs, but he produced an album for me. He got me the deal with Columbia Records.”
McMurtry did two more albums for Columbia and three studio discs for Sugar Hill, the last one coming in 2002.
“Every record after that, the budgets kept getting smaller,” McMurtry says. “We learned how to do it on the cheap. We figured out we could tour in a van and make money. We were well prepared when Napster cut the head off the music business.”
But the music business isn’t the only thing McMurtry has watched change over the years.
“The political system is upside down, like the music business,” he says. Many of McMurtry’s songs, like the working-class anthem “We Can’t Make It Here,” are pointedly political.
In the last dozen years, McMurtry has released just three studio albums, 2005’s Childish Things, which won the Americana Music Association’s Album of the Year award, 2008’s Just Us Kids, and then Complicated Game.
Songs from Complicated Game make up a good portion of McMurtry’s current set. But there are some songs he and the band have to play every night.
“‘Choctaw Bingo’ and ‘Levelland’ are fairly mandatory in some places,” he says. “There are some places where they don’t get ‘Levelland,’ like Maine, for example. We basically play the same set for a while, then we change it and play that set for awhile.”
Then McMurtry and his three compatriots get back in the van and head down the road, driving as many as eight to 10 hours between towns to play shows. If he’s lucky McMurtry will maybe find inspiration for a song on the way.
On the Bill: Leo Kottke & James McMurtry. 6:30 p.m. Thursday, June 14, Chautauqua Auditorium, 900 Baseline Road, Boulder. Tickets are $28-$43 ($35-$40 for concert members).
