BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//360exp//Events//ES METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/London TZURL:http://tzurl.org/zoneinfo-outlook/Europe/London X-LIC-LOCATION:Europe/London BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:19700329T010000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=-1SU END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:19701025T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=10;BYDAY=-1SU END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE TIMEZONE-ID:Europe/London X-WR-TIMEZONE:Europe/London BEGIN:VEVENT UID:973f5a68-a7d1-499d-80ee-d3e7ac394c10@360exp.net SEQUENCE:0 DTSTAMP:20260815T204116 DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20261006T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20261006T190000 SUMMARY:James McMurtry LOCATION:Twyford St Mary's Church DESCRIPTION:Plus support from Betty Soo - A Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. A mechanic lies among the s pare parts on the floor of his garage and wonders if he can afford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and a w andering boy and hums “Weird Al” songs in his head. These are some of the strange and richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtry’s ele venth album\, The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy. A supremely insightful an d inventive storyteller\, he teasesvivid worlds out of small details\, set ting them to arrangements that have the elements of Americana—rolling gu itars\, barroom harmonies\, traces of banjo and harmonica—but sound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the same breath\, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence as young songwriters like Sarah Jarosz and Jason Isbell cite h im as a formative influence. As varied as they are\, these new story-songs find inspiration in scraps from his family’s past: a stray sketch\, an old poem by a family friend\, the hallucinations experienced by his father \, the writer Larry McMurtry. “It’s something I do all the time\,” h e says\, “but usually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer w ill do\, McMurtry collects little ideas and hangs on to them for years\, s ometimes even decades. “South Texas Lawman” grew out of a line from a poem by a friend of the McMurtry clan\, T.D. Hobart. Driven by gravelly gu itars and a loose rhythm section\, it’s a careful study of a man whose f eelings of obsolescence motivate him to take drastic action in the final v erse. “Dwight’d stay at our house way back in the ‘70s\, when we liv ed in Virginia. During one visit he wrote this poem about his father’s a ttitude toward South Texas. He wrote it down on cardboard\, and I came acr oss it recently. There was a line about hunting quail on horseback\, and t hat was the seed of the song. I’ve lost the poem since then.”The rumbl ing title track\, a kind of squirrelly blues\, features two mysterious fig ures who appear only to those slipping from reality\, yet it’s never gri m nor 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 a defiant humor in the situation at odds with the gravi ty of the source material. “The title of the album and that song comes f rom my stepmother\, Faye. After my dad passed\, she asked me if he ever ta lked to me about his hallucinations. He’d gone into dementia for a while before he died\, but hadn’t mentioned to me anything about seeing thing s. She told me his favorite hallucinations were the black dog and the wand ering boy. I took them and applied them to a fictional character.”Soon M cMurtry had enough of these songs for a new record. “It happened like al l my records happened. It’d been too long since I’d had a record that the press could write about and get people to come out to my 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 ne eded to go back to producer school\, so I brought in CC Adcock for Complic ated Game\, and then Ross Hogarth did The Horses & the Hounds. It seemed n atural to revisit Mr. Dixon’s homeroom. I wanted to learn some of what h e’s learned over the last thirty years.” During sessions at Wire Recor ding in Austin\, McMurtry observed firsthand Dixon’s grasp of digital re cording technology as well as his instinctual approach to tracking. “Wha t Don’s really good at is being able to sense when it’s happening. He can hear when it’s going down. If I’m producing myself and I don’t h ave him\, I have to do three takes and then go in and listen to them. List ening to those three takes can take about 15 minutes. So Dixon’s ability to know when it’s happening is crucial\, because it can cut 15 minutes out of the day. That can really save a session\, because you only have so many hours in the day and only so much energy. Working with McMurtry’s t rusted backing band—Cornbread on bass\, Tim Holt on guitar\, Daren Hess on drums\, BettySoo on backing vocals—they worked to create something th at sounds spontaneous\, as though he’s writing the songs as you hear the m. They were open to odd experiments\, weird whims\, and happy accidents\, such as the cover of Jon Dee Graham’s “Laredo” that opens the album . It’s an opioid blues: testimony from a part-time junkie losing a weeke nd to dope. “We were playing a benefit for Jon Dee at the Hole in the Wa ll there in Austin\, and we thought it’d be good if we played one of his songs. We rehearsed the song in the studio\, and it sounded good. The dru ms were ready. We’d already got the sounds up. Might as well record it. ” “Laredo” is one of a pair of covers that bookend The Black Dog & t he Wandering Boy\, the other being Kris Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedo m Song.” “I did that one a few weeks after our initial sessions. It wa s just me and BettySoo\, then we added drums and bass later on. Kris had j ust passed not too long before we recorded it. I guess that’s why I was thinking about him.” Like Hobart’s poem\, it’s a bit of inspiration excavated from deep within his own life. “Kris was one of my major influ ences as a child. He was the first person that I recognized as a songwrite r. I hadn’t really thought about where songs came from\, but I started l istening to Kristofferson as a songwriter and thinking\, How do you do thi s? He was actually the second concert I saw. I was nine. He and the band w ere having such a good time\, and that really solidified for me that this was what I wanted to do with my life.”Once the album was mixed\, mastere d\, and sequenced\, McMurtry recalled a rough pencil sketch he had found a few years earlier in his father’s effects. It seemed like it might make a good cover. “I knew it was of me\, but I didn’t realize who drew it . I asked my mom and my stepdad\, and finally I asked my stepmom\, Faye\, who said it looked like Ken Kesey’s work back in the ‘60s. She was mar ried to Ken for forty years.” The Merry Prankster’s—Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators—stopped by often tovisit Larry Mc Murtry and his family. “I don’t remember their first visit\, the one d ocumented in Tom Wolfe’s 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 remembered it and thought it would be the perfect ar t\, but I had to go back through the storage locker. It’s a miracle that I found it again.” It's a fitting image for an album that scavenges per sonal history for inspiration. Even the songwriter himself doesn’t alway s know what will happen or where the songs will take him. “You follow th e words where they lead. If you can get a character\, maybe you can get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure\, maybe you can get a song. A song can come from anywhere\, but the main inspiration is fear. S pecifically\, 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. Yo u gotta keep putting out work.”\n\nBoletos: https://wegottickets.com/eve nt/689256 URL;VALUE=URI:https://360exp.net/events/973f5a68-a7d1-499d-80ee-d3e7ac394c 10 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR