Great Album: James McMurtry – Complicated Game

JamesMcMurtryComplicatedGame

[What’s the complicated game?]
Well, it’s mostly about relationships, and that’s a complicated game. Actually, my label is called Complicated Game, and I had that line in a song, so I stole it for the album title and figured people would think I owned the record label.
~James McMurtry (to Bill Nevins – nodepression.com)

Having long earned his place on the short list of best American songwriters, McMurtry is remarkably turning better with age. Complicated Game is brilliant album, dense and thoughtful as McMurtry swirls around inside the heads of another set of fascinating characters.
~Eric Swedlund (pastemagazine.com)

“Forgotten Coast” (Official Music Video):

Wikipedia:

Complicated Game
Studio album by James McMurtry
Released 24 February 2015
Recorded 2015
Genre Folk Rock
Length 55:21
Label Complicated Game Records
Producer Mike Napolitano; C.C. Adcock

Complicated Game is the ninth studio album by American folk rock musician James McMurtry, released on 24 February 2015 by Complicated Game Records.

JamesMcMurtryComplicatedGame back

McMurtry brings all of the album’s disparate themes together on the beautiful “Long Island Sound.” Over traditional Irish instruments like Uilleann pipes and low whistles, McMurtry intones a chantey about a Tulsa native who finds himself, much to his bemusement and ambivalence, living with his kids in the New York City suburbs, a soccer Dad buying rounds for the “strangers, the Mets and the Rangers” while musing about a long-ago love singing hymns in an Oklahoma church. Life is indeed a Complicated Game on James McMurty’s latest. It’s an album that shows again and again that very few songwriters on this planet illuminate the oft-unfair rules of this game or the inner workings of the players quite like he can.
~ (americansongwriter.com)

“How’m I Gonna Find You Now” (Official Music Video):

eTown Exclusive – On-stage Interview:

Track listing

No. Title Length
1. “Copper Canteen” 4:37
2. “You Got to Me” 5:23
3. “Ain’t Got a Place” 2:41
4. “She Loves Me” 3:01
5. “How’m I Gonna Find You Now” 4:03
6. “These Things I’ve Come to Know” 3:18
7. “Deaver’s Crossing” 4:00
8. “Carlisle’s Haul” 7:13
9. “Forgotten Coast” 3:34
10. “South Dakota” 5:03
11. “Long Island Sound” 6:47
12. “Cutter”

-Egil