Getting in the van and hitting the road to make money from music because records don’t sell? That’s nothing new for James McMurtry.
“It’s been that way for us for a long time,” said McMurtry, who is playing the Troubadour in West Hollywood on June 11. “I never made money off records. I had to tour cheap back before Napster. It’s really been from the get-go. The Columbia records never did recoup. We had to learn to tour cheap right off the bat.”
The three records McMurtry cut for Columbia Records, beginning with 1989’s “Too Long in the Wasteland,” may not have been money makers, but they established McMurtry as one of the best songwriters of his generation and set him up for a life in vans that has become more wearying as he’s entered his 60s.
“It’s a little tougher, but the vans ride smoother than they used to,” he said. “I don’t like buses. I’ve only been on a few of them. I’d rather be in a van and have everybody get their own hotel room every night.”
Perhaps inevitably, the road contributes to songs that McMurtry writes, like “Canola Fields,” the lead track from 2021’s “The Horses and the Hounds,” his most recent album.
“That came through the windshield,” he said. “We spent a lot of back and forth in western Canada. They got this crop that has these beautiful chartreuse blossoms that go out all the way to the horizon. We didn’t know what it was. Then, one time, there was a sign ‘Canola Processing’. And in October or November, we saw it raked up into rows and a bunch of machines scooping it up. So we figured out it was a row crop.”
The songs, however, aren’t written on the road.
“I’ll get a phrase and turn it over in my head, but I’m not really writing a song,” he said. “I write when our tour draw starts falling off and I start working on an album. We’re still doing pretty good off this last one. So it may be a while.”
That means songs from “The Horses and the Hounds” will figure prominently in the set that McMurtry and his band will play this summer.
“We play pretty much the same set through a tour, maybe a couple of tours,” McMurtry said. “When it gets boring for us up there, we change it. It’s just about set flow, what song naturally follows another. It’s a really good idea to do ‘Choctaw Bingo,’ ‘Leveled Land,’ (which) they like, and ‘Canola.”
“This (latest) record is connecting with people a little more than a lot of them,” he added. “The nature of what makes a song popular is the listener. If the listener can connect with the character in the song and see themselves in it, they want to listen to it again and again.’
Of late, McMurtry has been wearing a dress during his encore to protest anti-drag laws enacted in Florida and Tennessee and introduced by legislatures in at least 13 other states.
The audience reaction, by all reports, has been enthusiastic. And the shows have been generating positive reviews from writers and fans, even if the band doesn’t share the sentiment.
“You can be having a horrible time up there and people think that it’s great,” he said. “You have to try to connect with the audience and the energy they have, which is easier in a band situation, where they’re moving sometimes. Solo shows, they’re all looking at you.”
When McMurtry’s not on tour, he has a twice-weekly residency at Austin’s venerable Continental Club, with his band on Tuesdays and solo on Wednesdays.
“It keeps the chops up. But the main thing is it builds the audience,” he said. “Austin has become such a tourist town. A lot of people come in and just go to the Continental Club. They don’t care who is playing. A lot of them have never heard of James McMurtry before. That’s what you want.
“You have to keep your audience growing,” McMurtry said. “Some of them are getting old and won’t be around or won’t come out.”
McMurtry has played hundreds of places over the years. Asked if there’s anywhere he hasn’t played that he still wants to visit, he said:
“I’ve played every place in the agency books and some that aren’t, I’d like to play in Hawaii, so I can say I’ve played all 50 states. I’ve played Alaska. But I’ve never been to Hawaii.”
McMurtry won’t be taking a van to the islands. But he’ll probably find one there to keep making a living from his music.
