John Murry
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John Murry

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As if resigned to his fate, Murry spent the succeeding years on a heavy diet of alcohol and hard drugs. After a car crash and a heroin overdose, before his wife left him, taking their young child with her. It took a while, but Murry cleaned himself up, reconciled with his wife, and used his colourful experiences as the inspiration for his critically acclaimed album, The Graceless Age.

“Overdosing wasn’t the lowest point I reached,” Murry says in his measured Southern drawl from his adopted home in Oakland in California’s Bay Area. “That wasn’t when I quit using. I think I’m more afraid of living than I am dying. I think the lowest point that any addict reaches isn’t something they do to themselves – it’s about they do to other people. Having your heartbroken hurts a lot more than overdosing.”

Murry spent a couple of years writing the songs that would appear on The Graceless Age, including the epic Little Coloured Balloons, the track that narrates Murry’s near-death experience and its repercussions. “Writing The Graceless Age was a cathartic experience, and it still is,” Murry muses. “I didn’t think about it creatively that way, or that it would be necessary. But for me it did exercise demons in a sense,” Murry says. “The record didn’t come out for a while because I was afraid I’d be judged for telling the truth – and I don’t think I have necessarily told the truth, but not that any of us really tells the truth.”

Performing the songs live initially was an emotional experience; the passage of time hasn’t diminished the intensity of re-living the events of Murry’s troubled narcotic history. “You’re trying to re-enter the emotional space when the song was first recorded,” Murry says. “I played the album for the first time in a coffee shop in Tupelo. A friend played with me, and it was raining. I was worried because playing the songs in the way I did – and I still do – I didn’t really know how to play them live. I think it was just glad that I got through it.”

Some years after kicking his heroin habit, and eschewing his various other chemical and alcoholic pastimes, Murry is still confronted with heavy emotional baggage each time he plays The Graceless Age live. “It has to be engaged, and it’s harder to do now because of the distance from the time the events happened,” Murry says. “It’s harder to do now just because it hurts more – or it’s easier to play the songs, but it’s harder to choose to do.”

Whether it’s because of his experiences and troubled upbringing, or despite it, Murry has a deep and idiosyncratic assessment of the human condition, and the dominant Western society within which he exists. Murry holds no affection for the Southern American culture in which he grew up; neither does he hold a candle for Oakland, which he regards as fundamentally flawed as the South. But to describe Murry’s observations as cynical is to ignore the depth of his analysis: Murry’s concern is with the spiritual superficiality of Western society, which Murry believes underpins the demand for escapism in pop culture.

The Graceless Age was released in 2012 to an amazing international reaction, garnering lavish reviews in the English music magazines Mojo and Uncut. Murry is, however, almost bemused at the response the album has generated. “I get why it frustrates my wife why I don’t get any validation from these end of year lists, but if I do find validation from that, I think someone should call the mental institution,” Murry deadpans. “It is humbling when a magazine like Mojo says that because I respect that publication. But this industry is screwed – the 99 per cent of people who’re in it because they think they can make money out of it, and the other one per cent does it because they have to do it – and I’m in that one per cent.”

BY PATRICK EMERY