James McMurtry Gives Us the Protest Album We Need

Though James McMurtry has been releasing albums consistently for three and a half decades, his tenth record, The Horses and the Hounds (2021), introduced the Texas musician to a new group of fans when it garnered positive reviews in publications such as Pitchfork, Slant, and Paste. McMurtry’s fine lyrical storytelling and ear for melody deserved a larger audience, and Horses was his most consistently excellent set of songs.

On his new album (and second for New West Records), The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy (June 20), McMurtry continues the songwriting renaissance he began on The Horses and the Hounds. Co-producing here with Don Dixon, who assisted on R.E.M.’s first two albums, McMurtry uses traces of his past to create this new set of songs. Once again featuring the hardscrabble, down-on-their-luck characters that McMurtry crafted so finely on past releases, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy is a meditation on growing old and death, one that doesn’t feel like aging gracefully is the best option.

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Over the course of 10 songs, McMurtry also explores this present moment in America. For example, “Sons of the Second Sons,” a slow burner that skewers not just Donald Trump’s authoritarianism but the country’s history of racism, slavery, and genocide that brought us here. On one level, the song feels like a tribute to the forgotten many who built the country on their backs, but look deeper and you see McMurtry blaming this population’s search for “a Caesar” on late-stage capitalism.

McMurtry’s sharp eye for sympathetic assholes can also be found on “South Texas Lawman.” The song’s protagonist is a ne’er-do-well cop who has extramarital affairs and wonders why he can no longer slap around someone in custody. But rather than villainize his protagonist, McMurtry traces his tragic end to a toxic masculinity that has long existed in the United States. Meanwhile, “Annie,” which features backing vocals by Sarah Jarosz, may seem a strangely out-of-date rebuke of George W. Bush, but the smoldering legacy of 9/11 lives on today.

The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy is also the first record since the 2021 death of the musician’s father, novelist Larry McMurtry. The title track gets its name from a pair of hallucinations experienced by the elder McMurtry as he slipped into dementia. The songwriter took his father’s delusions and joined them with a fictional narrator on a song that features taut guitar riffs and even namechecks Weird Al.

McMurtry found a new audience with The Horses and the Hounds, but this latest collection of songs feels more urgent. In a time when the ugly American specters of racism, machismo, and lack of accountability are screaming back, we need more salt-of-the-earth musicians like McMurtry, not only to tell things as they are, but to write the protest music this current movement is sorely lacking. 

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