James McMurtry

The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy

McMurtry's 2025 album, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy, was released June 20 via New West Records. Co-produced with Don Dixon — who helmed McMurtry's 1995 album Where'd You Hide the Body? — the 10-song collection is his first in four years, following the acclaimed The Horses and the Hounds, which Pitchfork awarded an 8.0 and Uncut Magazine said "lifts storytelling-in-song to meticulous new levels."

The album features Sarah Jarosz, Charlie Sexton, Bonnie Whitmore, and Bukka Allen, alongside his trusted backing band: Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt on guitar, Daren Hess on drums, and BettySoo on backing vocals.

The songs find their inspiration in scraps of family history — a rough pencil sketch by Ken Kesey that became the album cover, the hallucinations experienced by his father, the legendary writer Larry McMurtry, and an old poem by a family friend. McMurtry teases vivid worlds out of small details, funny and sad often in the same breath.

The album's title came from his stepmother, Faye. After Larry McMurtry passed, she told James that his father's favorite hallucinations were the black dog and the wandering boy. McMurtry took them and applied them to a fictional character — and a song was born.

On Making the Record

"A couple of years ago I quit producing myself. I felt like I was repeating myself methodologically and stylistically. I needed to go back to producer school." McMurtry and his band worked to create something spontaneous — open to odd experiments, weird whims, and happy accidents.

The album opens with "Laredo (Small Dark Something)," an opioid blues by Jon Dee Graham, and closes with Kris Kristofferson's "Broken Freedom Song." McMurtry says, "Kris was one of my major influences as a child. He was the first person that I recognized as a songwriter. Kris had just passed not too long before we recorded it."

The Cover

Once the album was finished, McMurtry recalled a pencil sketch he had found in his father's effects — a portrait of himself as a child. His stepmother Faye identified it as the work of Ken Kesey, drawn during one of the Merry Pranksters' visits to the McMurtry household in the 1960s. "It's a miracle I found it again," McMurtry says. "It's a fitting image for an album that scavenges personal history for inspiration."

On Writing

"You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character, maybe you can get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you can get a song. A song can come from anywhere, but the main inspiration is fear. Specifically fear of irrelevance. If you don't have songs, you don't have a record. If you don't have a record, you don't have a tour. You gotta keep putting out work."