James McMurtry, who has released 12 albums over a 28-year career, has a reputation in some quarters as a political songwriter, in part because one of his most popular songs is an angry-lefty anthem. That song, “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore,” laments that minimum wage “won’t pay for a roof, won’t pay for a drink,” and that the children of the poor are the ones who end up fighting in rich men’s wars. Released shortly before the 2004 election, the song swept through an America hollowed out by departed manufacturing jobs and the middle-class stability that went with them. A few years after its release, the critic Robert Christgau named it the best song of the decade.
But McMurtry more often writes about how seemingly distant political concerns nudge his characters’ choices and prod at their psyches: the stretched budget of the Veterans Affairs Department, or the birth of a new national park’s consuming the neighbors’ land through eminent domain. In “Sixty Acres,” the narrator laments that when his grandmother died, he inherited a plot of unpromising farmland while his cousin got “the good land,” zoned commercial: “Looks like a Walmart waiting to happen/I mean to tell you it’s a pot of gold.”
McMurtry’s father is the great Texas novelist Larry McMurtry, and his mother, Jo Scott McMurtry, is a former English professor specializing in Shakespeare. McMurtry calls his parents “first-generation-off-the-farm academics.”
