| Too Long in the Wasteland | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | James McMurtry |
| Border: | yes |
| Released: | 1989 |
| Genre: | Rock, country, folk |
| Label: | Columbia[1] |
| Producer: | John Mellencamp |
| Next Title: | Candyland |
| Next Year: | 1992 |
Too Long in the Wasteland is the debut album by the American musician James McMurtry, released in 1989.[2] [3] Its first single was "Painted by Numbers".[4] The album's title was inspired in part by his father's Texas ranch, which is named the Wasteland.[5]
The album peaked at No. 125 on the Billboard 200.[6] McMurtry supported the album by playing some concert dates with Kinky Friedman, and touring with Nanci Griffith.[4] [7]
The album was produced by John Mellencamp (with Michael Wanchic and Larry Crane), who reconnected with McMurtry during the development of Falling from Grace; the film was written by McMurtry's father, Larry McMurtry, who passed along his son's demo tape.[8] [9] The songs were written in Archer City, Texas, and at Mellencamp's studio in Indiana.[10] McMurtry was backed by members of Mellencamp's band, as well as by David Grissom.[11]
The songs are not autobiographical. Many were written to rebut the tendency of popular country music to sentimentalize rural and small-town life.[12]
The Chicago Reader wrote that "McMurtry mainly acts as a dispassionate observer, content to sketch the outlines of a situation and leave its meaning, or his opinion of it, largely up to the listener to infer."[13] Robert Christgau thought that, "like so many singer-songwriters and so many local-colorists, he tends to a soft fatalism, especially when he tries a big statement." Texas Monthly likened McMurtry's "droll" singing to Mark Knopfler's.[14] The Edmonton Journal described the album as "Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska in technicolor."[15]
The New York Times called the album "a collection of 11 dour songs that portray the spiritually desolate lives of people living in America's heartland."[16] Trouser Press concluded that "McMurtry’s lyrics read as riveting poetry, but they’re that much more powerful when heard in the company of a modest hook and a heartland backbeat."[11] The Globe and Mail stated that McMurtry "writes with mordant humor about tiny places in a vast land where suspicion, prejudice and vague threats linger behind the Main Street facades, where choices made in haste are mulled over years later."[17] The Washington Post considered that, "while his singing often takes on the dry, colorless, detached tone of the narrator, his songs are full of sharply drawn tales and three-dimensional characters."[18]
AllMusic noted that McMurtry "has a smooth, low voice that carries a Western twang from his life in Texas." Salon deemed the album full of "catchy and harsh country-folk songs filled with tortured Southern souls failing at love, failing at life or just talking about it in front of the gas station on a country road."[19] The Rolling Stone Album Guide labeled "Terry" "a great, unsentimental lament for a mixed-up rehab bad boy."