EXCLUSIVE: James McMurtry Shares 'Sailing Away' Ahead of Forthcoming Album The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy

“Several times I’ve made a wrong turn over by the Pentagon, trying to get to a club in Alexandria, Virginia in time for load-in," McMurtry shares about 'Sailing Away,' the latest song to be lifted from his forthcoming album, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy. "Satellite navigation seems to always get confused in that neighborhood. So I had that line about being lost over by the Pentagon kicking around for years while I waited for a song to put it in. Finally, the rest of the details filtered in from years of touring.”

"D.C. beltway in this five-thirty gloom / Opening for Isbell in some cavernous room," he sings on the roughly plucked americana shuffle as he recalls all the realities and regularities of life on the road, filled with all bit part characters that drift through and the often mundane moments that fill a touring musician's day.

"I won’t forget your birthday ‘cause you don’t forget the score," he sings, trying to keep long distant relationships going while he's away. "I won’t forget that chorus like I did the night before when I was trying to remember did I lock the front door."

"Have I any business being in this business anymore," he asks himself forlornly as he pushes on.

Mixing the meticulous storytelling and off-kilter Americana of Craig Finn with the bloodshot eyed straight-talking songwriting of Guy Clark, 'Sailing Away' is one of those songs that you have to have lived a life to be able to write. Filled with a deep aching and a resigned melancholy, it feels like listening in on James McMurtry having a dark night of the soul conversation with himself as he drives alone late at night, looking back with longing and wondering where it all went wrong and right and how he ended up where he did.

Listen to 'Sailing Away' exclusively on Holler below

Produced by McMurtry with Don Dixon, the song is taken from his forthcoming The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy album due out on 6th June via New West, a 10-song collection which follows his 2021 acclaimed New West debut, The Horses and the Hounds, and features contributions from Sarah Jarosz, Charlie Sexton, Bonnie Whitmore, Bukka Allen, accordionist and vocalist BettySoo, bassist Cornbread, guitarist Tim Holt, and drummer Darren Hess.

McMurtry’s new story-songs find inspiration in scraps from his family’s past: a rough pencil sketch by Ken Kesey that serves as the album cover, the hallucinations experienced by his father, the legendary writer Larry McMurtry, an old poem by a family friend. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, McMurtry teases vivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that have the elements of Americana but sound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence as young songwriters like Sarah Jarosz and Jason Isbell (who is namechecked on 'Sailing Away') cite him as a formative influence.

The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy is released on New West on 6 June