Alex McMurray

 If Alex McMurray’s songwriting seems a bit dour at times—okay, most of the time—well then that’s totally intentional. “Like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar,” he says, "I find sorrow to be quite a beautiful emotion. Loneliness can be nice.” And he’d know. A New Orleans fixture since the ‘80s, the guitar slinger is now widely recognized as the embodiment of the downtown New Orleans lifestyle: sketchy bars, cracked sidewalks, fallen-down houses, tattered hearts, broken spirits, discarded chicken bones. He’s often compared to Tom Waits; they both have whiskey-throated voices and share a curious ability to find inspiration in the degenerate, not to mention an obsession with the Ninth Ward. Except McMurray actually lives there.His latest album, How to Be a Canonball, explores all of the weird and wonderful ways one could catch the doldrums in such a place. “That Train,” a kind of gospel song for the other team, immortalizes the sounds of the railroad running past his St. Claude Avenue home. On “My Man Take Me Back to the War,” he compares horror scenes from Iraq and Hurricane Katrina over a slacker-jazz backdrop. Then there’s “Outrageous Love,” which he calls, “my version of a love song, where the singer wishes for death in the last verse.” Perhaps the song that sums up most accurately how McMurray feels about New Orleans—and himself, maybe—is the fan favorite “You’ve Got to Be Crazy to Live in This Town.”It’s hard to believe that, once upon a time, McMurray was a Jersey boy. He grew up in Red Bank and landed in New Orleans accidentally, as a student at Tulane. After falling in with the wrong crowd, he forewent any chance he may have had at a respectable life and got down in the trenches of the Big Easy music scene, where he remains to this day. Along the way he has washed dishes, dug ditches, signed and lost a record deal, joined and quit bands, substitute taught grade school, nearly died from a mysterious lung ailment and even moved away twice—once to Japan, once to New York City—yet none of these events affected his will to describe the peculiar beauty of the path he, first unwittingly, and later begrudgingly, chose. “I make a living doing music in the only music town of its kind,” he says, “suffering the slings and arrows but endeavoring to come up smiling on Monday.”Lord knows that is not always possible, but hoards of fans have left McMurray’s gigs happy. First as a sideman at legendary clubs like Maple Leaf Bar, Café Brasil and Tipitina’s, and later as leader of the beloved ‘90s jazz-rock band Royal Fingerbowl, McMurray honed his skills in front of some of the toughest crowds imaginable, winning audiences over with witty, hard-boiled banter and soul-baring performances. In 2001, he even did a six-month stint singing sea shanties at Tokyo Disney, a period he calls “the loneliest in my life.” Upon his return, he formed the Valparaiso Men’s Chorus as a vehicle to revisit old sailor songs, and began playing with the vintage Jamaican pop band 007 (a super group with members of G. Love and Special Sauce, the Iguanas and the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars). He released his first solo album, Banjaxed, in 2004. He is also a member and mastermind of the brilliantly loose sousaphone-washboard-guitar trio, Tin Men, who have released two uncommon albums, Super Great Music for Modern Lovers (2003) and Freaks for Industry (2005), blessing New Orleanians with McMurray-style theme songs like “Cocaine Habit Blues,” “Drunk and In Love” and “Still Drunk.” All of McMurray’s bands are yearly favorites at New Orleans’ Big Easy Awards and Best of the Beat Awards, where Cannonball won Album of the Year in 2010.In one incarnation or another, McMurray has played Jazz Fest every year since 1996, survived no less than two dozen Mardi Gras seasons, and lived to tell the tale in heartbreaking song. (See: “The Day After Mardi Gras Day,” which is slated for the closing credits of an upcoming episode of the hit HBO series Treme. McMurray appeared in two episodes as himself.) He is an organizer of the Jazz Fest season fringe music festival Chaz Fest, and currently plays in countless other New Orleans bands, including the Happy Talk Band, Ingrid Lucia, Paul Sanchez and the Rolling Road Show, the Schatzy Band, the Jackals and the Geraniums.

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