Review

This, friends, is not quite the sound of hands reaching across the aisle.
The literary Texan revisits the illiterate one with this preview from his forthcoming album, picking up where 2005's We Can't Make It Here left off. On that slow burner, such zippy topics as the VA budget, outsourcing and single motherhood made for surprisingly effective lyrical fodder. Here, McMurtry musters up his most contemptuous drawl to soften up the Commander in Chief — "Show 'em what you're made of/ You're no longer daddy's boy/ You're the man that they're all afraid of" — before delivering the uppercut: "But you're only Cheney's toy." This, friends, is not quite the sound of hands reaching across the aisle. The president and his right-hand man will be out of office by January, which will render this little how-do-you-do obsolete; anybody humming John Denver's "Ballad of Spiro Agnew" today? Still, if it's inside, you gotta let it out.