Texas roots-rocker James McMurtry is the son of an English-professor mother and a novelist father (Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry), so it’s no surprise that a literary streak runs through his songs, which often play like dispatches from a country at war with itself. John Mellencamp helped McMurtry get his foot in the door, producing the songwriter’s 1989 Columbia Records debut, Too Long in the Wasteland, but McMurtry’s subsequent albums have been much more political than that debut, particularly his most recent ones, 2005’s Childish Things and 2008’s Just Us Kids, both of which wallow in Bush-era despair.
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