Acclaimed rock and Americana singer-songwriter James McMurtry is headed for Whitefish and the Great Northern Bar and Grill later this month as part of a tour that will take him from his home state of Texas throughout the west.
In a rented van loaded up with bandmates, guitars and equipment, McMurtry will traverse thousands of miles from Arizona, up through California, Oregon and Washington, before he performs in Whitefish on Oct. 22. The tour then continues to Bozeman, before pivoting back west to Boise and then south to shows in Utah and Colorado.
As he gets ready to kick off his tour, McMurtry said these days just about everything is on his mind.
“You open up the internet, you got wars, we got floods, we got fires, we got … not a lot of great news these days,” McMurtry said.
Those issues won’t be disappearing, but for the next month, McMurtry will to some extent be preoccupied with life on the road. Generally, for every five days of performances, McMurtry said he’ll have a day off, usually a Monday, which is often spent driving. He noted that some performers, like Willie Nelson, prefer to play straight through a tour without nights off.
“Usually we roll out about 11, get breakfast. Drive four hours, or if it’s a six-hour drive then we gotta start a little earlier. The trick is to try to get into the next town around check-in time, check into the hotel and then you got an hour off before you’ve got to go to load-in. So, load-in, sound-check, go eat, come back, play, load-out, repeat this process six days in a row.”
This last spring McMurtry started hitting the road again in earnest, including fulfilling a solo run that had been bumped three times before because of COVID. McMurtry has played throughout Montana in the past and this will be McMurtry’s third time playing in Whitefish at the Northern, but his first there since 2017. And much has transpired since then.
The pandemic at one point left McMurtry streaming solo shows online from his kitchen table. In March of 2021, his father, the celebrated novelist and writer Larry McMurtry, died at the age of 84. And in August of 2021, James McMurtry released his 10th studio album, and his first in seven years, called “The Horses and the Hounds.”
“The Horses and the Hounds” has earned acclaim, with Rolling Stone calling it a “stunning new record.” Pitchfork, dubbing McMurtry “a songwriter’s songwriter,” described it as an “expertly written” album made up of “some of his most intense and humane work.”
A Texas Monthly reviewer wondered if McMurtry, now 60, might be nearing his peak “at the same age most artists become legacy acts.”
“This record has affected a lot of people more than some of my others. I don’t know if it has to do with, you know, they were shut in for a long time. A lot of this material is age specific. It’s Baby Boomer stuff, and those are the people that are really singing along,” McMurtry said. “The nature of any song’s popularity is the listener’s ability to hear his or herself in the song.”
Despite the impact “The Horses and the Hounds” seems to have had on listeners, McMurtry said that the 10-track album came together through his typical process helps him produce his narrative-driven style of music.
“I follow the words. I hear a couple lines and a melody in my head, and then usually I try to envision the character that would have said that. Then I can get the story from the character, I kind of work backwards. If I can get it into a reverse chorus structure then I can make a song out of it. I don’t start out to make a specific point in a song.”
“The Horses and the Hounds,” ranges across characters, moods, and stories, but begins somewhere across Montana’s northern border where in the song “Canola Fields,” McMurtry imagines a drive in southern Alberta that unspools the history of an interrupted relationship set against a background of age and mortality.
“Take my hand Marie, take a death grip on some part of me, keep me from drifting far out to sea or I’ll be lost out there,” McMurtry sings in the chorus.
In “Operation Never Mind,” McMurtry questions America’s wars and the disconnect he sees between public perception and their real cost.
McMurtry begins the song by singing “We’ve got an operation goin’ on, it doesn’t have to trouble you or me,” and eventually reaches a circular chorus of “No one knows, cause no one sees. No one cares, cause no one knows. No one knows, cause no one sees it on TV.” The song jumps from images of soldiers in uniform during halftime shows and seventh inning stretches, to thoughts of veteran suicide, and mundane scenes of mall trips and laptop games of Call of Duty that continue amid a backdrop of war that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
In “Ft. Walton Wake-up Call” a couple’s fight kicks off a seemingly unending parade of comedic mishaps and misfortune, from airline woes amid stormy weather, to burnt toast and coffee, a rental car with a flat tire, internet outages, a tanking stock market and, as is repeated throughout the track, “I keep losing my glasses.”
Tickets for the Saturday, Oct. 22 show can be purchased online here. Tickets are $20 in advance, or $25 at the door. Doors open at 8 p.m. and the show begins at 9 p.m.