James McMurtry
Schedule
Sat, 18 Jul, 2026 at 09:30 pm
UTC-07:00Location
53688 Pioneertown Road Pioneertown CA 92688 | Pioneertown, CA
Advertisement
DISCOVER: JAMES MCMURTRYweb [https://www.jamesmcmurtry.com/] | Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/artist/52BKc9OtCbQstAAPTIvLGH?si=V7_C0oUIQ321gESjDka8OA] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/jamesmcmurtryofficial/] | Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/JamesMcMurtry]
A Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback while keeping a secret second family. A mechanic lies among spare parts on the floor of his garage, wondering if he can afford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and a wandering boy, humming “Weird Al” songs in his head.
These are some of the strange and richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtry’s eleventh album, The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, McMurtry teases vivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that draw from Americana—rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, and traces of banjo and harmonica—yet feel sharper and more distinctive than the genre suggests. Funny and sad, often in the same breath, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has seen a resurgence, as younger songwriters like Sarah Jarosz and Jason Isbell cite him as a formative influence.
As varied as they are, these story-songs find inspiration in fragments from his family’s past: a stray sketch, an old poem by a family friend, and the hallucinations experienced by his father, writer Larry McMurtry. “It’s something I do all the time,” he says, “but usually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer does, McMurtry collects small ideas and holds onto them for years—sometimes decades.
“South Texas Lawman” grew out of a line from a poem by family friend T.D. Hobart. Driven by gravelly guitars and a loose rhythm section, it’s a careful study of a man whose feelings of obsolescence push him toward drastic action in the final verse. “Dwight stayed at our house back in the ’70s, when we lived in Virginia. During one visit, he wrote this poem about his father’s attitude toward South Texas. He wrote it on cardboard, and I came across it recently. There was a line about hunting quail on horseback—that was the seed of the song. I’ve lost the poem since then.”
The rumbling title track, a kind of off-kilter blues, features two mysterious figures who appear only to those slipping from reality, yet it’s never grim or especially despairing. Instead, McMurtry namechecks a “Weird Al” deep cut and depicts a tortured soul who doesn’t have to work a nine-to-five. He finds defiant humor in a situation that contrasts with the gravity of its source material. “The title of the album and that song comes from my stepmother, Faye. After my dad passed, she asked if he had ever talked to me about his hallucinations. He’d gone into dementia for a while before he died, but hadn’t mentioned seeing things. She told me his favorite hallucinations were the black dog and the wandering boy. I took them and applied them to a fictional character.”
Soon, McMurtry had enough material for a new record. “It happened like all my records happen. It had been too long since I’d had something the press could write about to get people out to shows. It was time.” What was different this time was the presence of his old friend Don Dixon, who produced McMurtry’s third album, Where You’d Hide the Body?, back in 1995.
“A couple of years ago, I quit producing myself. I felt like I was repeating myself methodologically and stylistically. I needed to go back to producer school, so I brought in CC Adcock for Complicated Game, and Ross Hogarth did The Horses & the Hounds. It seemed natural to revisit Mr. Dixon’s homeroom. I wanted to learn some of what he’s learned over the last thirty years.”
During sessions at Wire Recording in Austin, McMurtry observed Dixon’s grasp of digital recording technology and his instinctive approach to tracking. “What Don’s really good at is sensing when it’s happening. He can hear when it’s going down. If I’m producing myself without him, I have to do three takes and then listen back, which can take fifteen minutes. Dixon’s ability to know in the moment is crucial—it can save a session. You only have so many hours in the day and only so much energy.”
Working with his trusted backing band—Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt on guitar, Daren Hess on drums, and BettySoo on backing vocals—they aimed to create something that feels spontaneous, as though the songs are being written in real time. They embraced odd experiments, strange whims, and happy accidents, such as the cover of Jon Dee Graham’s “Laredo,” which opens the album. It’s an opioid blues—a portrait of a part-time junkie losing a weekend to dope.
“We were playing a benefit for Jon Dee at the Hole in the Wall in Austin, and thought it’d be good to play one of his songs. We rehearsed it in the studio, and it sounded good. The drums were ready, the sounds were up—so we figured, might as well record it.”
“Laredo” is one of two covers that bookend the album, the other being Kris Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedom Song.” “I did that one a few weeks after our initial sessions. It was just me and BettySoo at first, then we added drums and bass later. Kris had just passed not long before we recorded it, so I guess that’s why I was thinking about him.”
Like Hobart’s poem, it’s inspiration pulled from deep within his life. “Kris was one of my major influences as a child. He was the first person I recognized as a songwriter. I hadn’t really thought about where songs came from until I started listening to him and wondering, ‘How do you do this?’ He was the second concert I ever saw—I was nine. He and the band were having such a good time, and that really solidified for me that this was what I wanted to do.”
Once the album was mixed, mastered, and sequenced, McMurtry remembered a rough pencil sketch he had found among his father’s belongings. It seemed like it might make a good cover.
“I knew it was of me, but I didn’t know who drew it. I asked my mom, my stepdad, and finally my stepmom, Faye, who said it looked like Ken Kesey’s work from the ’60s. She was married to Ken for forty years.”
Kesey’s Merry Pranksters often visited the McMurtry family. “I don’t remember their first visit—the one documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—I was too young. But I do remember a couple of Ken’s visits. I guess he drew it on one of those later stops. I had to dig back through a storage locker to find it again. It’s a miracle I did.”
It’s a fitting image for an album that scavenges personal history for inspiration. Even McMurtry himself doesn’t always know where the songs will lead.
“You follow the words where they take you. If you can get a character, maybe you get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you get a song. Songs can come from anywhere, but the main inspiration is fear—specifically, fear of irrelevance. If you don’t have songs, you don’t have a record. If you don’t have a record, you don’t have a tour. You’ve got to keep putting out work.”
DISCOVER: BETTYSOO
web [https://bettysoo.com/] | Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/artist/1zyOUBRKVnM6VbtzYE4piR] | Instagram [https://instagram.com/bettysoo] | Facebook [http://facebook.com/bettysoomusic]
***P&H POLICIES***
- A valid government-issued photo ID is required for entry.
-Lineups, times and stage are subject to change.
-Any ticket suspected of being purchased for the sole purpose of reselling can be canceled at the discretion of P&H and/or See Tickets.
-Under 18 must be accompanied by an adult at all times.
-No refunds
Advertisement
Where is it happening?
53688 Pioneertown Road Pioneertown CA 92688, 53639 Pioneertown Rd, Pioneertown, CA 92268-9685, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
