{"id":11218,"date":"2016-08-03T05:45:12","date_gmt":"2016-08-03T09:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=11218"},"modified":"2016-07-25T11:03:49","modified_gmt":"2016-07-25T15:03:49","slug":"james-mcmurtry-put-good-lines-in-the-verses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2016\/08\/03\/james-mcmurtry-put-good-lines-in-the-verses\/","title":{"rendered":"James McMurtry: Put Good Lines in the Verses"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe room is the instrument,\u201d says Austin singer-songwriter James McMurtry<\/strong>. Considering that he began playing his original songs live onstage more than 30 years ago, he should know. The son of novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry<\/strong>, James has seen his share of honky-tonks, rock clubs, and concert halls. A frequent and longtime visitor to Asheville, McMurtry played the Grey Eagle on July 22.<\/p>\n

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Every room is different, McMurtry says, and a musician has to adapt. \u201cYou have to figure out how to play whichever ‘instrument’ you’re given on a given night,\u201d he says. \u201cIf it’s a big venue, you might have to slow it down to make things a little more deliberate, to fill all that space. A theater room is basically an acoustic amplifier, built to amplify the sound coming off the stage without any help from electronics. So you’ve got to keep your stage volume way low; otherwise it can just get out of hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd,\u201d he adds, \u201cyou don’t tell any real complicated jokes; stick to one-line sound bites.\u201d<\/p>\n

Venues like the Grey Eagle are different, McMurtry says. \u201cIn a bar with low ceilings, pack it full of people and you can turn it way up. Nobody cares; it’s not gonna slap back from anywhere. The people soak it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though \u2013 thanks in large part to the well-drawn characters that populate many of his songs \u2013 he’s sometimes pegged as a folk or Americana artist, McMurtry bristles at genre labels. If he fits anywhere, he says it’s into \u201cthe broad genre of rock ‘n’ roll, which you can put pretty much anything<\/i> into. That’s usually what I tell people in the elevator when they ask me what I play.\u201d<\/p>\n

2015’s Complicated Game<\/i> is McMurtry’s 12th album; \u201cPainting by Numbers,\u201d a single off of his 1989 debut Too Long in the Wasteland<\/i> reached #33 on the mainstream rock charts. His subsequent albums have sold in varying measures, but critical acclaim has been near-unanimous and constant.<\/p>\n