James McMurtry Brings His Novelist's Eye to WAVE Tonight
If you only see one songwriter this summer, make it the one who writes like his father wrote novels. James McMurtry plays WAVE tonight, and for anyone who cares about lyrics as craft rather than decoration, this is the show — a true songwriter's-songwriter, in a room built for the kind of quiet that lets every line land.
McMurtry has spent four decades earning a reputation as one of America's great narrative writers, the guy other lyricists study. His songs are short stories with a pulse — "Choctaw Bingo," a road-trip epic of meth cooks and family reunions, and "We Can't Make It Here," a recession-era gut-punch that reads truer with each passing year. He comes by the storytelling honestly: his late father was the novelist Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove, who died in 2021. James inherited the eye for character and dialogue and pointed it at three-and-a-half minutes instead of six hundred pages.
The occasion for the tour is his 2025 album, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy, released June 20 on New West Records — his first record of new material in a while and, by wide agreement, one of the finest of his career. The ten-track set includes two covers, Jon Dee Graham's "Laredo (Small Dark Something)" and Kris Kristofferson's "Broken Freedom Song," with Don Dixon contributing bass and drums to the Kristofferson number.
The title track is where the McMurtry lineage folds back on itself in a way almost too literary to be true. It came from his father's final years: during Larry's dementia, per James's stepmother Faye, the elder McMurtry experienced recurring hallucinations involving two figures — a black dog and a wandering boy. James took those apparitions and did what his family does with raw material. "I just used those hallucinations and applied them to a fictional character," he explained. A son turning his father's dementia into a song is the kind of move that could curdle into exploitation in lesser hands; McMurtry, characteristically, turns it into empathy.
He's also refreshingly clear-eyed about why he still tours at 60-plus, and it's not romance. "Mostly what I do is geared toward a live performance because that's the revenue stream," he's said, describing records as promotional tools for the road rather than the other way around. He even copped to what drove the new album: fear, and the pressure to keep the touring engine fed. It's an honesty most artists reserve for their memoirs, and it makes the live show feel less like a product and more like the whole point.
Which is exactly why WAVE is the right room for it. McMurtry's songs live on detail — the specific brand of cigarette, the exact make of the truck, the throwaway line of dialogue that tells you everything about a marriage. Those details only detonate in a room where people are actually listening, and WAVE's setup rewards the kind of hush that a good McMurtry verse demands. This is not background music for a bar tab. It's an invitation to lean in.
So here's the pitch, Wichita: skip the doom-scroll tonight and go watch a master do the thing he does better than almost anyone alive — build a whole world out of a few lines and a road-worn guitar. Doors are early, the songs are long in the best way, and the guy on stage learned narrative at the family dinner table. Some shows you attend. This one you read.
Sources: WAVE Wichita concert history — Setlist.fm; James McMurtry on 'The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy' — American Songwriter