Review: With The Horses and the Hounds, James McMurtry Embraces and Defies Aging

The album proves that McMurtry’s nearly peerless ability to tear our hearts out with a good yarn hasn’t waned a bit.

James McMurtry, The Horses and the Hounds
Photo: New West

James McMurtry’s most recent studio albums, 2008’s Just Us Kids and 2015’s Complicated Game, helped cement him as arguably the greatest narrative-style songwriter of his generation. Even in his 20s, McMurtry seemed to possess both the wisdom and dry, conversational drawl or a curmudgeon. And over the decades, his voice has grown craggier, making him sound even more of a natural as he delivers layered tales of average folks confronting the indignities and moral quandaries of American life.

The son of Pulitzer Prize-winning literary titan and screenwriter Larry McMurtry, who passed away earlier this year, the younger McMurtry has always been a superb, instinctive storyteller, using his characters as conduits to get at more profound truth than a more diaristic lyricist might. The singer-songwriter’s latest album, The Horses and the Hounds, features no shortage of great stories, but some of the details betray a self-aware preoccupation with aging that lend the album a more endearingly personal bent than his previous efforts.

McMurtry had already produced a pretty definitive treatise on the art of getting older in one of his most beloved songs, “Just Us Kids.” But that ambitious, decades-spanning character study doesn’t seem as directly culled from McMurtry’s own experience as Horses and the Hounds standouts like “Canola Fields” or “If It Don’t Bleed,” which approach the subject with affirming acceptance and characteristically wry humor. “Now it’s all I can do just to get out of bed/There’s more in the mirror than there is up ahead,” he opines on the latter.

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On the electrifying “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call,” McMurtry winkingly inhabits the role of cranky old man with relish, ranting about cable news, faulty Wi-Fi, and, above all, how he can’t stop losing his glasses. Of course, he also voices trepidation and regret across The Horses and the Hounds, as in the middle-aged marital grumbling depicted on “What’s the Matter. But it’s the sweet catharsis of rekindled romance on “Canola Fields” that makes the most lasting impression: “Cashing in on a 30-year crush/You can’t be young and do that.”

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If McMurtry has become lyrically preoccupied with aging, the crisp, spry playing on his latest defies that notion. Some of the album’s featured players, including percussionist Kenny Aronoff and guitarist David Grissom, first worked with McMurtry all the way back on his debut, 1989’s Too Long in the Wasteland, but they haven’t lost a bit of verve, as evidenced on the confident “If It Don’t Bleed” and the driving “What’s the Matter.”

Some of the gravitas of the expansive folk songs on Complicated Game is lost in the songs’ snappy snares and clomping guitars, but the band’s energy and tight musicianship deepens the subtext of McMurtry’s songs. The chunky riffs and bright melody of “Operation Never Mind” at first seem at odds with the song’s weighty subject matter—namely the degradation of post-Vietnam wartime journalism. But like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” those elements are the sugar that coats the pill: “We just go on about our business/Drop the kids off at the mall/Play the Black Ops on the laptop/And don’t make too big a fuss about it all.”

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Conversely, “Jackie” is a somber waltz, complete with a mournful fiddle line, that seems like an odd fit for a seemingly sweet story about a tough lady rancher and her Friday night dance date. Only when that tale comes to a sudden and tragic end in its final verse does the arrangement’s logic become clear. He may be getting old, but The Horses and the Hounds proves that McMurtry’s nearly peerless ability to tear our hearts out with a good yarn hasn’t waned a bit.

Score: 
 Label: New West  Release Date: August 20, 2021  Buy: Amazon

Jeremy Winograd

Jeremy Winograd studied music and writing at Bennington College, where he did his senior thesis on Drive-By Truckers. He has written for Rolling Stone and Time Out New York. He and his wife met on a White Stripes message board.

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