Getting in the van and hitting the road to make money from music because records don’t sell? That’s nothing new for James McMurtry . “It’s been that way for us for a long time,” said McMurtry, who is coming to the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz Thursday. “I never made money off records.
I had to tour cheap back before Napster. It’s really been from the get-go. The Columbia records never did recoup.
We had to learn to tour cheap right off the bat.” The three records McMurtry cut for Columbia Records, beginning with 1989’s “Too Long in the Wasteland,” may not have been money makers, but they established McMurtry as one of the best songwriters of his generation and set him up for a life in vans that has become more wearying as he’s entered his 60s. “It’s a little tougher, but the vans ride smoother than they used to,” he said.
“I don’t like buses. I’ve only been on a few of them. I’d rather be in a van and have everybody get their own hotel room every night.
” Perhaps inevitably, the road contributes to songs that McMurtry writes, like “Canola Fields,” the lead track from 2021’s “The Horses and the Hounds,” his most recent album. “That came through the windshield,” he said. “We spent a lot of back and forth in western Canada.
They got this crop that has these beautiful chartreuse blossoms that go out all the way to the horizon. We didn’t know what it was. Then, one time, there was a sign ‘Canola Processing.
’ And in October .
