Published on Oct 28, 2002
James McMurtry is one of those artists I’ve always heard about,
but never heard. People would rave about him, I’d file the name in
the back of my mind, and it’d disappear under a pile of 1970s
Chicago Cubs lineups, role-playing game trivia, and 1980s music
geekery. However, it stuck enough that when his new CD,
Saint Mary Of The Woods, showed up in my mailbox, I opened
it up and took a listen.
Wow. What in the hell have I been waiting for?
Saint Mary Of The Woods is one of the greatest CDs I’ve
heard this year. McMurtry is a musical photographer; he takes
snapshots of moments and people and drags them out into the
unblinking light. His lyrics are bitter, biting, and brilliant
(“Grand Daddy’s good name//Fits like a shackle and a chain//And all
them others, long dead//Still a-hangin’ around my head//Hard
workin’ cattle men//There’s not a one left of them//There’s only
me, there’s only mine//I guess we’re all the other kind…”).
The musicianship on
Saint Mary is excellent, and McMurtry’s a pretty fair guitar
player as well.
But it’s the songs that really blow you away. Unrelenting
photographs of despair and hope (“Dry River”), past sins (“Valley
Road”), lost love (“Broken Bed”), and broken homes (“Gone To The
Y”) barrel into you like runaway freight trains, framed by the
precise dispassion of McMurtry’s vocals. This is brilliance, plain
and simple.
Special note has to be given to two songs: “Out Here In The
Middle”, McMurtry’s wickedly funny tribute to life for those of us
here in Middle America, and “Choctaw Bingo”, an eight-minute opus
about one of the world’s most dysfunctionally hilarious family
reunions. The gem of the entire set, though, is the title track,
“Saint Mary Of The Woods”; rarely, if ever, does a songwriter
entrap a single moment of despair and alienation in a net of words
like this.
Saint Mary Of The Woods is one of the best CDs of the year.
Don’t miss it.