, is being released this week, but it was written and mostly recorded before the pandemic hit, before his father, the novelist Larry McMurtry, died on March 25 at age 84. So there’s no elegy for his dad on the recording. But there are 10 superb examples of the family business: making up stories about Americans at the margins.
On this record, McMurtry sings in the first person as if he were an old man phoning from Canada to an old friend who had briefly been a lover; as if he were a mentally unbalanced man who shoots his best friend for no good reason; as if he were a homeless truck driver living in a series of motels; as if he were a husband with a flat tire, an angry wife and no internet. None of those characters are him, but he’s such a good actor as a singer that it’s easy to believe he is.
In Berry’s version, the murderer’s daughter is named is Meg. McMurtry changes her name to Lola and has her visit her father in jail. She still loves her dad, despite the awful thing he’s done, and that bothers the prisoner as much as the crime itself. He had supposed the world to be a place of unrelieved meanness, and her affection shatters that assumption. “I don’t know how she even stands,” McMurtry sings, “to look on her Daddy’s face.” And the kick of the .38 shivers through him once more.
The album ends with the song “Blackberry Winter,” a Southern term for an unexpected cold snap in May or June, when the blackberry bushes are in bloom. McMurtry assumes the persona of a new boyfriend of an older woman, whose children have all moved away and left her with none of the activities that have always warded off the depression. And when the blues come on strong like a cold snap, she’s tempted to fill her pockets with rocks and walk into the river, like Virginia Woolf.
A year before the sessions, McMurtry had had to move out of the house he’d been renting for 20 years in Austin. “There was no way I could afford to buy it,” he says, “but I could afford to buy down here in Lockhart. Prices in Austin have just gone through the roof; it’s not the same town it once was. I don’t know how any musicians can afford to stay there. It’s a tourist town now, and we’re the mechanical bears singing on the Splash Mountain at Disney World.
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