James McMurtry + BettySoo at Union Chapel - London

Texas storytelling royalty comes to Union Chapel! James McMurtry brings The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy to London on Tuesday 13 October, joined by BettySoo.
A master of sharply drawn characters and wry, world-weary Americana, McMurtry returns with songs that are funny, haunting and deeply human — adding another chapter to a career that continues to influence a new generation.
Get Tickets
tinyurl.com/DMPmcmurtry
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youtu.be/L-D824LHti4

www.jamesmcmurtry.com/
Presented by The London Roots Festival.
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A Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. A mechanic lies among the spare 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 wandering boy and hums “Weird Al” songs in his head. These are some of the strange and richly drawn characters who inhabit Austin legend, James McMurtry’s eleventh album, The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy on New West Records. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, he teases vivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that have the elements of Americana—rolling guitars, 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 him 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,” he says, “but usually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer will do, McMurtry collects little ideas and hangs on to them for years, sometimes even decades.
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 then Ross Hogarth did The Horses & the Hounds. It seemed natural to revisit Mr. Dixon’s homeroom.