Sad in Central Texas: Martin Seay on “Tell Mary” by Michael Fracasso (et al.)
In the summer of 1995, about a year after I moved to Austin, I was working at the Bookstop on Burnet Road and got into a cordial aesthetic disagreement with my colleague Dan.
Dan was great. Short, broad, dapper, with a thick goatee that was about fifteen years ahead of its time, he had the pure North Texas accent—clenched yet purring—that decades of televisual entertainment had conditioned me to associate with gunfights among tumbleweeds. He was taciturn, world-weary, very funny, a bit of a drinker: a deeply cool dude. I was not then, nor have I subsequently become, cool.
“You been listening to anything good lately?” Dan asked in a manner that I was not yet socially adroit enough to recognize as him just wanting to be asked whether he’d been listening to anything good lately. Yeah, I said: the new Michael Fracasso.
Dan had never heard of Fracasso. At the time I barely knew anything about him myself, so my endorsement was a bit flailing: light on detail, not especially analytical. “There is a song on this album,” I think I might have said, “that is the saddest fucking song I’ve ever heard.”
Dan said he’d check it out. Then he started to tell me about something he’d just picked up, an album by a distant cousin whom he’d met at a reunion. He’d bought it mostly just to be supportive, but the more he listened to it…
Then we had to go help somebody find a book. Discussions among retail employees are chiefly defined by frequent interruption.
*
I’d gotten the Fracasso album after hearing a couple of songs on KGSR, Austin’s revered Triple-A radio station, my default option for behind-the-wheel listening, mostly due to its emphasis on local acts.
The local focus appealed to me because at the time I was trying to figure out what, if anything, it meant to be a Texan. My family’s roots in the state were deep, at least by Anglo standards. Unlike a lot of my friends from high school and college, I’d never lived anywhere else, and had no particular plans to do so. I understood that much of the required Texas history curriculum I’d been subjected to in seventh grade consisted of outright bullshit; I also understood that bullshit itself played an important role in the state’s culture, and not simply as something one shouted while dancing the “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” I knew that the bellicose pride that was then ascendant in the sprawling suburbs—emerging in the context of the late-’80s tech boom, the 1990 oil shock, and NAFTA in ’92; summed up by the ubiquitously misappropriated anti-littering slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas”—didn’t tell the whole story. It erased more than it expressed.
I had recently read Federico García Lorca’s lecture “On Lullabies,” in which he suggests seeking out the character of a place not in its “cathedrals, dead stones, and soulful landscapes” but rather through its “songs and sweets.” That seemed pretty smart. People make up all sorts of stuff about what they believe and what they’re proud of, but it’s generally easy to tell what they take pleasure in.
I did, however, think García Lorca might have gone broader than sweets to include other kinds of comfort food. As it happened, it was a song that had given me this notion. Cowritten by Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen, taking as its ostensible subject the porch of the house that Keen lived in when they were both students at Texas A&M, it initially appeared in 1984, on Keen’s first album, No Kinda Dancer, as “The Front Porch Song.” But the version I knew was Lovett’s, from his own 1986 self-titled debut: slightly abridged, more measured, and called “This Old Porch.”
I had only recently overcome my contrarian antipathy toward country music enough to start listening to Lovett, who hailed from Klein, a town north of Houston near where my dad worked and my mom’s folks lived. Lovett was a credible country artist—he rode horses; he’d worked cattle—but unlike his “neotraditionalist” hat-act peers he emphasized his music’s adjacency to other genres: folk, jazz, blues, gospel, even boogie-woogie and ranchera, forms that were marginal in Nashville but had long histories in the Lone Star State. His songs were catchy, quirky, often funny, sometimes devastating, but even when they seemed deeply felt they had an erudite, footnoted vibe that I, being me, liked a lot. (A representative credit in the liner notes of his 1994 album I Love Everybody reads “Guitar solo in ‘I’ve Got the Blues’ based on a Lightnin’ Hopkins guitar lick as played by Townes Van Zandt, as shown to Lyle Lovett by Eric Taylor in the back room of Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant, Houston, Texas, October 1979.”)
“This Old Porch” is a goddamn Calder mobile of tropes and devices, a litany song that branches metaphors anaphoristically off the title phrase, unfurling each into a little vignette. The song variously compares the old porch to a Hereford bull, the Palace walk-in movie theater, and, in the verse that made me want to amend García Lorca,
… a steaming, greasy plate of enchiladas
with lots of cheese and onions, and a guacamole salad,
and you can get ’em down at the LaSalle Hotel in old downtown,
with iced tea and a waitress, and she will smile every time.
The porch, of course, isn’t just a porch: it’s a metonym for the struggling ranch it sits on, which in turn stands in for a fading culture of smallholder farms. Located, we can infer, on the outskirts of the twin cities of Bryan and College Station, the ranch is also a metonym for the whole Brazos River watershed, which is itself a metonym: the site of the empresarial land grant to Moses and Stephen F. Austin that brought in the American settlers who ultimately rebelled against Mexico to establish the Republic—and, within a decade, the U.S. State—of Texas.
And here the undertow of history begins to tug against the song’s goofy melancholy, because the principal purpose of those Anglo-American settlements on the Brazos was the expansion of chattel slavery. And the principal purpose of the settlers’ rebellion was to maintain chattel slavery, which Mexico had outlawed. My junior-high-school Texas history textbook worked hard to obfuscate these facts, but they are facts. Celebrated as a triumph of liberty, the much-mythologized Texas Revolution is approximately the opposite. (Or, at best, it prompts the eternal question of liberty for whom.)
Bringing all this up in the context of “This Old Porch” probably sounds like overinterpretation. It ain’t. The song points to it, obliquely but unmistakably. “The Brazos still runs muddy, just like she’s run all along,” says the old rancher who’s its real main subject. “There ain’t never been no cane to grind, the cotton’s all but gone.” That’s a reference to “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos,” a harrowing work song, well-known to folk-music aficionados worldwide, that originated among inmates of the region’s prison farms. (Lovett would revisit it—twice—with his Large Band in 2007.) A successor to the antebellum plantation system, prison farming arose after the collapse of Reconstruction, exploiting a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment—which prohibits involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime”—to supply forced labor to sugarcane and cotton growers on the Brazos floodplain. My great-grandfather on my dad’s side was a manager at one of these farms.
The old rancher in “This Old Porch” insists that they’ve never grown cane around his place, and thus implies that his community has never relied on the labor of leased convicts or their enslaved ancestors… well, except maybe to pick that cotton, which they don’t really grow much anymore. This rhetorical device—raising a topic by dismissing it—is called apophasis.
On casual early listens I took the old rancher to be kin to the narrator, which he’s not. He’s the narrator’s landlord, who “always takes the rent late, so long as I run the cattle”—which is to say the narrator provides him with unpaid labor, albeit on a voluntary if slightly coerced basis. Such mild but tricky ironies abound throughout the song, starting with that Hereford bull, “just a-sweatin’ and a-pantin’ ’cause his work is never done”; given that that a bull’s work consists of impregnating cows, we’re meant to consider how much basis for complaint the critter really has. (We may ask the same about the old rancher; Keen’s version makes the link between the two more explicit.) The depiction of a Texas ranch beset by a changing economy is a scaled-down parallel to Giant, the epic 1956 blockbuster that (the song tells us) was the last film to be shown at the Palace walk-in, long before the adoption of the “G and R and Xs” of the MPAA rating system. (For years I thought the line was “G N’ R, INXS,” but no, not in 1984.) This apparent nostalgia for an era of hegemonic common culture when entertainment was aimed at everyone (whether they liked it or not) is complicated by the fact that Giant is largely about societal divisions: of race, class, wealth, generations, geography. The interplay of history and culture—the latter recuperating and propagating the former while (and by) smoothing out its rough edges—underlies just about everything in “This Old Porch”; take, for instance, the fraught exchanges across centuries between Nahua farmers, Spanish vaqueros, Prussian Mennonites, Canarian isleños, and the hospitality industry of a Central Texas college town that combine to produce that steaming, greasy plate of Tex-Mex enchiladas.
The song doesn’t lecture us about any of this stuff, maybe because it’s not sure itself just how all these images and tropes fit together, only that they do. This lots-of-clues-but-no-detective quality is what kept drawing me back to it, along with a compelling ambiguity in its tone, which seemed elegiac and sarcastic and sentimental by turns, with a startling shift at the end. The perplexing final verse—perplexing in part because it’s not clear whether the narrator is still quoting the old rancher—mentions onlookers who regard the struggling ranch with detached amusement; the word Lovett uses for these people is the formal, euphonious, almost courtly “passersby.” (In a college town these passersby might well be students, a group that would have included Lovett and Keen.)
Then the band mostly lays out, Lovett’s guitar plays on, and he sings the verse again. Only this time the word isn’t “passersby” but “sonsabitches.”
It’s rare to hear profanity—even PG-rated profanity—on a Lovett album, so this comes as a surprise. It’s also unexpected because the bitterness it expresses isn’t present, or is maybe just suppressed, in the rest of the song. “Sonsabitches” stopped me, sent me back to the beginning, trying to figure out what I’d missed.
What I noticed about the anger threaded through “This Old Porch” was that it didn’t really make the song seem angrier.
It made it seem sadder.
*
If you wanted to hear Lyle Lovett on the radio in Austin in the summer of 1995—or hear Robert Earl Keen for that matter, or other artists based in or hailing from Texas who were doing comparable stuff—then your best bet was KGSR, 107.1 on your FM dial.
To be clear, emphasizing local acts has never been a difficult mandate in Austin, and several other stations had similar commitments. But KGSR’s programming struck me as especially thoughtful. Without being fussy or didactic, their DJs would play songs in unpredictable combinations that occasionally revealed resemblances and commonalities that weren’t obvious on the surface. Though much of their programming was folk- and country- and blues-inflected music that would have fit in on an “Americana” station, KGSR wasn’t that, exactly; their selections were too arty, jazzy, quirky, international, and urbane to fit the mold. This affected how you listened, what you heard. It’s rewarding to encounter a Central Texas demigod like Willie Nelson in the company of Chet Atkins, Johnny Cash, and Son Volt, but putting him alongside Elvis Costello, Tori Amos, and Radiohead illuminates other aspects of his artistry.
The distinction seemed—and in retrospect was—important. While the Americana umbrella extends over a bunch of great music, what ties that music together is timbre more than technique: drawled or raspy vocals, acoustic string instruments, analog methods of amplification and recording (or the semblance thereof). What this yields is an impression of unmediated expressive authenticity—which always seems a little weird, since some degree of inauthenticity is always present by definition in any recording or replicable performance.
(We hear these same timbres in mainstream country music, of course, but in that context they signify something else, having more to do with affiliation than authenticity.)
Music that’s organized according to what it sounds like rather than how it works tends to encourage listening that’s casual rather than close—and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when that music is signifying a set of values in a context that’s not conducive to critical engagement, audiences and artists and the cultural apparatus that link them are incentivized to act in bad faith, songs become copies of copies of copies, and everything slides in the direction of kitsch. I will be more precise. The heart-on-sleeve Americana of the 1990s paved the way for the recently-much-derided “stomp-clap-hey” music that soundtracked the hirsute microbrewed natural-fiber experiential retail landscape of the 2010s, music that fails in a very specific way: its catchiness invites overplaying that it is not interesting enough to sustain, and that makes its insistent aw-shucks-iness seem—or be revealed as, or actually become—increasingly phony.
KGSR certainly played plenty of stuff that did not stand the test of time, but that weaker material was quickly exposed as such when played in a context that broadly prioritized seriousness of purpose. You got the sense that the artists you heard on the station—even when distantly separate in time, place, genre, etc.—would care what the other artists played on the station thought of their work. I strongly suspect that the listening habits of songwriters are vastly more catholic than those of their fans.
Anyway, KGSR was where I first heard Michael Fracasso.
*
As I’d soon learn, Fracasso was typical of the singer-songwriter cohort then on the rise in Austin in at least one respect: he was from someplace else, in his case Mingo Junction, Ohio. Raised by Italian immigrant parents, he bounced around the country a bit before landing in New York City in the late ’70s, where he joined the Greenwich Village folk scene—peers included Suzanne Vega, Lucy Kaplansky, Steve Forbert, and Shawn Colvin—and participated in the storied Songwriters Exchange at the Cornelia Street Café. After a decade in the city with no record deal to show for it, he guessed that Austin might be more receptive to what he was doing, and headed that way. He was right: local label Dejadisc released his first album, Love & Trust, in 1993. He's made eight more since then.
The Fracasso songs on KGSR that summer were from When I Lived in the Wild, his sophomore release. The one that caught my attention was “Coffeeville,” mostly because it rocks: big hooks, good bassline, nice management of tension and release, lyrics that sit well on the melody, and of course Fracasso’s voice, a high, sawtooth Phil Everly tenor that teeters between sweet and deranged.
After I bought the album and listened more attentively, the song that really got me was the opening track, “Tell Mary.” I must have been focused on driving when I first heard it on the radio because I—more mindful of timbre than technique—had taken it as a wistful, bittersweet lost-love song, which is probably what Fracasso wanted me to think. At first.
Two things derailed this casual assessment, as they were meant to. The first was the song’s elaborate epistolary point of view, set up right there in its title: its contents are meant for Mary, the narrator’s ex, yet the verses are addressed not to her but to a mutual acquaintance who’s supposed to pass the message along. (I should maybe clarify that by “epistolary” I mean not just a fiction written in the form of a letter but any fiction that’s narrated by a fictional character to a fictional character in specific fictional circumstances.)
This is a device I’d heard before. In fact, that same summer KGSR was also playing “Tell Her This,” a song by the teeth-grindingly chipper Scottish band Del Amitri that did the same thing with different narrative particulars: its protagonist is straightforwardly asking the addressee to convey an apology to a lover who’s not speaking to him. Something more complicated is going on in “Tell Mary.”
What interested me was how these songs put the listener, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style, into the position of the message-delivering intermediary. That’s not easy to do. While epistolary narratives are pretty common in songwriting, they’re intrinsically kind of weird, incorporating aspects of first- and second-person storytelling while differing significantly from both, mostly due to their depiction of specific fictional circumstances. They tend to feel more distant than straight second-person narration, more akin to the low-stakes illicit thrill of eavesdropping or reading someone else’s mail: the more detailed the scenario, the clearer it is that the audience isn’t the intended recipient.
But “Tell Mary” and “Tell Her This” close that typical distance, first by adding the character of the absent lover, and second by framing the narration as a request, delivered in the imperative mood, which grammatically implies a “you” while eliding it from the text: [You] Tell Mary. The classic paradox of point of view is that the less information the audience gets, the closer the audience feels to the story; in “Tell Mary” we learn a lot about the narrator, a bit about the lover, and little or nothing about the addressee, which makes it harder to be certain we’re not being spoken to. (For a helpful contrast, see the undisputed big dog of epistolary three-handers, Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat”: brilliant, obviously, but without an imperative-mood request it doesn’t entangle the listener in the same way, given that we’re obviously not the Jane-seducing raincoat-wearing Scientologist to whom Cohen is writing.)
I liked how these deliver-a-message songs leaned into their constructedness, foregrounding their rhetoric as such. Instead of trying to prove their unmediated authenticity like the stuff on the Americana station, they were robustly fictional. Further, they doubled down on the inevitable gap between artist and audience by being about mediation, about the difficulty inherent in delivering a sincere message through channels, whether the medium is a friend or a song or a recording. This difficulty is built into their structures; their narrative premises depend on it. I thought that was cool.
I tried to think of other songs that do this, and came up with a few. “Castles in the Air” by Don McLean—though McLean’s narrator just can’t be bothered to personally deliver an adios to his citified girlfriend; he asks the addressee to do the dirty work while he fucks off to the mountains. Bob Dylan has a couple of great ones: “Girl from the North Country” from 1963 and “If You See Her, Say Hello” from 1975, the former about a rambling narrator and the latter about a rambling ex, both melancholy as hell, both compellingly cagey or just uncertain about how exactly things went wrong. These are closer to what Fracasso’s doing, particularly “If You See Her,” with its jarring tonal swings—“Whatever makes her happy / I won't stand in the way / though the bitter taste still lingers on / from the night I tried to make her stay”—that suggest a narrator whose attempt to explain himself has made him freshly aware of his still-disarrayed feelings.
“Tell Mary” takes this narratorial unreliability further in that its speaker is just flat-out lying, though the nature of his deceit is only gradually revealed. The first verse outlines the reassuring and absolving message that the addressee is supposed to give Mary, but already something’s a little off. “These things happen in life all the time,” the narrator says: a truism that skirts cliché. If he's already reaching for stock phrases, where can he go from here?
Well, he can go the opposite direction, clichés falling away as his message disintegrates. “I’m sure it’s nothing, how could it be something,” the narrator asserts and keeps asserting, and with each repetition the “it” gets bigger as the dismissal gets less persuasive.
Now we understand what’s going on. Unlike the Del Amitri narrator, who can’t deliver his message in person because the lover won’t return his calls, and unlike McLean’s narrator, who won’t because he’s a self-important coward (McLean might disagree with me on that), Fracasso’s narrator is unable to face the woman who has broken things off to reassure her that he’s okay because he’s not okay. As in Dylan’s “If You See Her,” the emotional status report that he’s asking his intermediary to deliver is still a work in progress—he’ll convince the ex that he’s fine by convincing the addressee that he's fine by convincing himself that he’s fine, and if he can pull that off he might actually be fine—and the song works by showing the cascading failure of his forced optimism.
Rain starts falling in the second verse—the material world intruding on the narrator’s flimsy rhetorical construct—and he assures Mary (via the addressee) that he likes the rain, actually, because it’s a chance to “let the water wash away my feelings.” Uh oh.
In the third verse he attempts equanimous nonattachment—“sometimes life is dreaming / till you wake up and find you’re not there,” lines that might draw a respectful nod from an Edo-period haiku poet—then makes way for the guitar solo. Maybe our guy is going to keep it together!
Nope. With the last verse comes the second thing that derailed my inattentive assessment of “Tell Mary” as wistfully bittersweet, revealing it instead to be a stealth delivery device for weapons-grade pathos:
Tell Mary I’m tired, but I’m happy.
I’ve been down, but not this time,
and all my dreams are easily forgotten.
I’m sure they’re nothing, how could they be something,
when I can’t even see her when I open my eyes.
The give-the-game-away gut-punch-line is, of course, “all my dreams are easily forgotten.” The relationship that’s ending was at the center of the narrator’s plans: what he wanted to do, who he wanted to be. That’s all gone now. Maybe worst of all, the breakup isn’t happening because the lover wasn’t who the narrator thought she was—she’s still perfect; he still loves her—but because he’s not who he thought he was: not a person she’d choose to spend her life with. So it’s not fair to blame her for this, and he knows it. He wants to be strong enough to explain this to her sincerely, but he's not. He knows that if she sees him she’ll see how utterly wrecked he is, and because she’s a decent caring person she might reassess her decision to leave, or at least regret it, and he doesn’t want her to do either of those things, or at least he understands that she shouldn’t. So he needs somebody to go to her on his behalf and lie like a bandit.
“All my dreams are easily forgotten” might have amounted to no more than a single-use-only melodramatic reveal—à la “Cat’s in the Cradle” or some shit—if the song didn’t set it up so effectively. The “sometimes life is dreaming” line in the preceding verse and the suggestion of reverie in “I can’t even see her when I open my eyes” establish dreaming as a motif, in conceptual play with the “feelings” that are washed away in the second verse and the “thoughts” that offer no protection in the third. The forgotten-dreams line is also enriched by the intricate structure of the verses, which employ anaphora akin to that of “This Old Porch”—each starts with “Tell Mary”—as well as the refrain I mentioned above: “I’m sure it’s nothing, how could it be something / when I can’t even…” Formal restrictions have special resonance in narratives about confronting the limits of what’s possible, particularly when those limits are innate and unconscious, as may well be the case here. Like pulled thread raising the masts of a ship in a bottle, “all my dreams are easily forgotten” snaps everything in “Tell Mary” into place.
And it’s not even the saddest line in the song. The one that kills me is “Tell Mary I’m tired, but I’m happy,” both because it’s the most utterly false thing the narrator says—unless we interpret “happy” to mean “certain I am doing the right thing,” which maybe we should—and because it’s the line that sounds most like something someone would really say in these circumstances: what’s wrong can’t be fixed, talking about it will just make it worse, so maybe if I say I’m tired, not sad, I’ll be able to end this conversation and go lick my wounds.
Just brutal, y’all.
*
Fracasso can wreck a room by playing “Tell Mary” solo on acoustic guitar, but the song is well-served by the full-band arrangement on When I Lived in the Wild. The album sounds pretty great overall, tight and consistent, maybe partly because the arrangements are built around a core group of players: Fracasso, his co-producer Mike Hardwick on a whole bunch of guitars, and the great rhythm section of bassist George Reiff and drummer Rafael Gayol.
I recognized Gayol’s name: he played on the really good debut album by David Rice, a guy I went to high school with. (Gayol would go on to do session work for half the songwriters in Austin and to become Leonard Cohen’s touring drummer.) Because I had grown up with, y’know, standard suburbanite assumptions about the relations of cultural production under capitalism, this experience of encountering music made by people who were just a few degrees of separation from me was eye-opening. Over the years I got more accustomed to it, as a bookseller in Austin inevitably will. It became clear that this was not weird; what was weird was my received assumption that music is made by distantly sequestered professionals rather than normal-ish goofballs with side hustles and annoying roommates. (For some reason it took me slightly longer to have the same realization about writers.)
Some of my Bookstop colleagues were long-tenured enough to have worked with Kevin Russell of the beloved post-bluegrass country-rock band the Gourds. My coworker Bridgette was a manager for singer-songwriter Jeff Klein, another recent transplant from the Empire State. A few years later, at a different Bookstop, I’d work with the drummer of Okkervil River. And, of course, Dan went to that family reunion.
A couple of weeks after our interrupted conversation, I asked Dan if he’d had a chance to check out the Fracasso. He had, but reported that it wasn’t for him. Well, what he actually did was give me wincing grimace like he’d just bitten onto a slightly mealy apple, shake his head, and raspily say “Nah.” You had to be there, but this was in fact an eloquent response.
What Dan didn’t like about Fracasso’s music is what I liked about it: its overtly technical qualities, its nerdy craftedness. Even Fracasso’s most affecting songs felt like they might have originated as exercises, attempts to solve specific songwriting problems. Also, while he’s not too showy about it, Fracasso’s points of reference are literary; an air of book-learnin’ suffuses the proceedings. The fact that the narrator of “Tell Mary” seems devastated both by losing Mary and by the knowledge that he’ll eventually get over it reminded me of the Quentin Compson section of The Sound and the Fury, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that had been in Fracasso’s head too. In fact a Southern-gothic vibe prevails in several of his songs, particularly a warped Catholic mysticism that recalls Flannery O’Connor. (The latter is definitely not a coincidence; there’s a song on his first album called “Wise Blood.”) While I totally get that this type of stuff is not for everybody, I’m good with it. Dan, not so much.
“But,” Dan said, “you really gotta check out my cousin’s album.”
*
I have kept y’all waiting long enough. Dan’s cousin is James McMurtry, whose third album, Where’d You Hide the Body, had just been released by Columbia Records.
As you may know, or may have guessed, Dan is not McMurtry’s most famous relative. James is the son of Larry McMurtry, author of The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, and a bunch of other novels and essays and screenplays: one of the only writers to attain an iconic status in Texas typically only granted to political figures, titans of industry, professional athletes, college football coaches, and the ostensibly martyred heroes of the Alamo. McMurtry—James, that is—has borne the blessings and burdens of his lineage with grace, though not always, one imagines, with ease.
I was surprised to learn that he mostly didn’t grow up in Texas. His parents divorced when he was a kid—around the same time his dad bought him his first guitar, perhaps not a random coincidence—and he relocated to Virginia with his mom Jo, a Shakespeare scholar and English professor. Not unlike Fracasso, McMurtry drifted around after high school before returning to Texas, settling for a while in San Antonio. He won an award at the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival in 1987, and he also connected, via his dad, with John Mellencamp, who produced his first album. It’s pretty good, as is the follow-up, but Where’d You Hide the Body is a big leap forward.
I bought a copy, and swiftly concluded that Dan’s lack of enthusiasm for Fracasso’s album—which I still think is really good—was at least somewhat attributable to his hearing to it back-to-back with McMurtry’s, which is one of the best things I’ve ever heard by anybody. It has some weak spots—arrangements that don’t quite land, a couple of tracks that are just okay—but most of it is legitimately great, and two or three songs feel like music that people will still be listening to in a hundred years, if anybody’s still alive and identifiably human.
McMurtry is a rather dour character. In one of the few profiles of him that I could find that summer, I read a quote in which he downplayed his songwriting, basically saying that he only did it to create opportunities to play guitar. I don’t totally buy that, but he is a pretty fantastic flatpicker, particularly if you believe—as I do—that a guitar should sound as much as possible like a swarm of angry bees. One of the great things about Where’d You Hide is that it highlights McMurtry’s own playing, often in densely droning open tunings. On the album’s strongest tracks, Don Dixon’s production conjures a crackly storm-a-brewin’ ambiance that recalls Malcolm Burn’s work with Chris Whitley.
The best example of this—maybe the best thing on the album—is the fourth track, “Rachel’s Song,” which features fluttery hand percussion by Jim Brock alongside a daunting lineup of six-string hotshots: McMurtry’s acoustic, plus Dixon, David Grissom from Mellencamp’s band, and folk-blues legend Steve James, respectively credited in the liner notes as playing “Marlboro,” “scary,” and resonator guitar. Far from a “Hotel California” shredfest, the atmosphere is tense and haunted; props to everyone involved for recognizing that when a song is this good it’s best to stay out of its way.
It’s another epistolary song—see, I told you they were common—in this case a desperate single parent’s imagined conversation with an absent partner. Interpretations of the title diverge; Jason Isbell (among many others) thinks the song is addressed to Rachel, whereas I’ve always assumed that McMurtry is writing across gender and Rachel is the narrator. The difference matters, but the song works either way: somebody jumped ship, and the parent who’s been left behind is barely hanging on.
After a few listens it occurred to me that “Rachel’s Song” and “Tell Mary” have something else in common: a concern with meteorology. The rain in Fracasso’s second verse begins to dissolve the narrator’s fake cheer and show what he’s really feeling; in McMurtry’s song the problem precipitation is snow, and it too is a minor annoyance that reveals a major crisis.
From there they diverge. As a songwriter, Fracasso seems mostly interested in melody, structure, and concept; McMurtry’s focus is on rhythm, character, and detail. With respect to those last two, he’s especially attentive to people and phrases that don’t often make it into songs—even more so if their exclusion is related to class. In “Levelland,” probably the closest thing to a hit on Where’d You Hide the Body, the narrator speculates about why the eponymous town’s founders stopped in such a godforsaken place: “Wagon must’ve lost a wheel, or they lacked ambition, one.” When I was growing up I heard plenty of people shorten the phrase “one or the other” down to “one,” but I’d never heard that in a song before, and until I did I hadn’t noticed what a striking idiom it is. McMurtry’s gifts as a songwriter are manifold, but his ability to notice and use the music latent in everyday speech may be the biggest of them; see also “must’ve lost a” in the same line.
One way McMurtry hits on these striking phrases is by allowing his characters to talk how they want to talk about the things they want to talk about. Elsewhere in “Levelland” we hear about dryland wheat farming, rolling sprinklers irrigating cotton, and a home’s augmentation by central air and a satellite dish. On It Had to Happen, McMurtry’s next album, we find “Sixty Acres,” a handclap-driven earworm that’s substantially about municipal zoning districts and utility infrastructure. I could go on.
But back to “Rachel’s Song.” Unlike Fracasso’s rain, McMurtry’s snow isn’t just a general bummer: it’s the lit fuse of a causal chain that poses specific peril, and a cinematic sense of dread heralds its approach. The narrator’s terse, concrete assessment of the situation—snow on the eastbound train means bad winter weather on the way, which means no school, which means the narrator’s kid will be stuck at home—could be taken straight from a Hemingway novel, though to the best of my knowledge the difficulty of finding childcare isn’t a subject that Papa ever got around to.
The prospect of the kid being home is a problem because the narrator has no vehicle and, relatedly, is an alcoholic:
I wrecked the El Camino, would’ve been DWI
so I just walked off and left it laying on its side.
The troopers found it in the morning, said it’s purely luck I wasn't killed.
I probably ought to quit my drinking but I don't believe I will.
Leave it to McMurtry to identify the Chevy El Camino—a car/pickup chimera that had been out of production for eight years by 1995—as an objective correlative for the narrator’s attitude and circumstances, and for that matter to notice how well “dee-dubya-aye” sings.
There’s one more obvious commonality with “Tell Mary” here: the chorus of “Rachel’s Song”—with its insistence that “If anyone can claim they’re all right, so can I”—is like a compressed summary of Fracasso’s narrator’s deception, with the critical difference being that McMurtry’s narrator isn’t trying to fool anyone, doesn’t expect or even want to be believed. It’s a barely passive-aggressive assertion, and the emotion being concealed isn’t loneliness or sorrow or fear but a blinding, self-destructive anger. The narrator’s declaration that “I don’t believe I will” stop drinking frames an addictive behavior as a value-expressive choice, a fuck-you gesture to the fugitive ex.
What I noticed about the waves of rage emanating from “Rachel’s Song” is that they didn’t just make the song seem angrier.
They made it seem sadder.
*
As is unfortunately often the case—see “relations of cultural production under capitalism” above—the artistic triumph of Where’d You Hide the Body coincided with a career slump: Columbia made no apparent effort to promote the album, and they and McMurtry soon parted ways. His subsequent work has been on indies, or self-released; the good news is that that seems to have served him just fine, as he’s built a following through word of mouth, lots of gigging, and quality control. In 2005 he achieved an old-fashioned pre-Facebook viral moment with “We Can’t Make It Here,” a seven-minute, three-chord, nine-verse-no-chorus firehose blast of fuming sulfuric acid aimed at corporate greed and rising inequality; a lot of the new listeners it brought in seem to have stuck around to check out his other stuff, including the earlier stuff. At this point his status as a songwriter’s songwriter seems secure, particularly so in his home base of Central Texas. As we’ve seen, for a lot of artists, that’s what it’s really about.
Despite the record label’s neglect, KGSR eventually started playing songs from Where’d You Hide the Body.
At some point it struck me that what made these songs by Fracasso and Lovett and McMurtry and their various peers so affecting was the fact that instead of billboarding the emotions they depict—as more marketplace-oriented, consumer-driven popular music might—they started the listener outside those emotions and provided them with routes in. Although, and also because, the premises of these songs are constructed and broadly fictional, our emotional responses to them are genuine, because they’re evoked the way emotions are evoked in real life: by empathetically observing people and circumstances. For these songs to work, we have to do some dot-connecting, some imaginative exploration, and as a result the emotions we encounter there are honest, earned, and ours.
It also struck me how starkly the affective landscapes that I found in these songs differed from the sociopolitical vibe-shift then underway in Texas, where George W. Bush was six or so months into his first term as governor. It seemed to me that this kind of art could serve as an antidote or corrective to—or at least an offramp or refuge from—the self-congratulatory triumphalism that increasingly dominated public discourse there and would gradually come to do so nationwide. I didn’t yet appreciate that much of the population just genuinely loves the spectacle of fake emotion, and this doesn’t necessarily make them dupes. Acting like something is real and true when you know good and damn well it’s not is yet another way to demonstrate one’s power and privilege.
I didn’t figure this out until long after I left Texas. Now, of course, Texas has come to me.
Martin Seay is the author of the novel The Mirror Thief. Originally from Katy, Texas, he lives in Chicago with his spouse, the writer Kathleen Rooney.