Complicated Game
Blessed with a voice of limited but perfect range for his tales of everyday people, James McMurtry remains a songwriter’s songwriter, a man whose lyrics make other songwriters consider rewriting what they originally considered good enough. Working with C.C. Adcock and Mike Napolitano as producers, McMurtry achieves a balance between austere and small-band intimacy, centering the songs on his acoustic guitar’s simple cowboy chords and letting others work around it. His lyrics tell tales of people who remember the past too well (“Carlisle’s Haul”) and who feel like they’re sitting in the perfect seat for observation (“These Things I’ve Come to Know”).
The danger with the word masterpiece is its singularity: each artist gets just one.
James McMurtry was an outstanding songwriter right out of the box, but learning the art of record-making took a while for him, and he was close to 20 years into his recording career when he cut 2008's Just Us Kids, his best and most effective album.
McMurtry steps back from the opener’s heady storytelling style for the remainder of the album’s first half, adopting a more personal mode.