Following the release of ‘Oscar Wilde (Came Here To Make Fun Of You)’, which was described by Americana UK as “utterly absorbing” and by Record of the Day as a “gorgeously melancholic and twisted gem”, John Murry is continuing his journey towards the new album with ‘Ones + Zeros’.

Here we find the proto-country American songwriter enclosed in a world of dusty introspection and solitary amusement. True to his poet’s soul, there’s a sense of meditation as expressed by the forlorn melody, warm analogue crackles, simple percussion and soft harmonies thanks to backing vocals from Nadine Khouri throughout the single. As ever, Murray’s lyrics are inescapable, personal and persuasive; he doesn’t shy away from the harsher edges of life, as by bringing them to the light can he truly begin to expel the pain.

“Sometimes songs almost write themselves; Ones + Zeros being one of those that did just that, albeit in fits and false starts, and over two recording sessions,” comments Murry of the new single. “It was something I wrote very quickly one afternoon many moons ago and recorded the following day as a sketch, or demo, with Tim Mooney of American Music Club. It would prove to be the last thing we recorded together. Tim passed away suddenly only a few days after, and The Graceless Age was released a couple of weeks later. I ended the sketch I’d ‘drawn’ before we recorded it at the studio the next day with the line, ‘I stare at the ceiling while they fall asleep, I wish I was dead, you wish it weren’t me... lying still: learn to love or don’t.’

I didn’t know where to leave it as a song after Tim died, so I tried to shelve the thing permanently. One day, while filming our upcoming documentary film, director and friend Sarah Share filmed me at The Watergate Theatre in my then adopted hometown of Kilkenny, Ireland. She asked me to play a melody on the Steinway grand piano there, and for whatever reason, this song was the first thing to come to mind, and - without singing any of the lyrics - I played it while they filmed and recorded... maybe because it is simple, and intentionally so, even necessarily so. Immediately after filming it, Sarah asked me what that melody was. I told her, and she brought it up and couple more times in the following days while filming at other locations. That was the permission I needed to take it seriously, as a melodic and lyrical impulse.

I took it to the sessions at Rockfield with John Parish as it was. We began recording it and, because I wanted to see what would happen if I chose to write in this way. Sometimes ya just get lucky, gotta trust the creating and not the thing you think you intend to create, because that’s often when magic happens. This felt like that. I could tell immediately that Sarah Share and John Parish and Rick Vargas and Joe Jones dug it, too.... the song and I felt incredibly alive, meeting one another again there, seeing how things had changed over the years, and how things hadn't; realising nothing is within our control, that we are just kinda dancing with time itself, hoping to find the same groove but different needles.”

The video for ‘Ones + Zeros’ was directed by Sarah Share,who directed the documentary ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God: The Shane MacGowan Story’ and is shooting an upcoming documentary film about Murry.

“We shot the video in a Georgian house on Henrietta Street, then in an empty club called Leggs that had been closed for a year due to COVID,” comments Share. “Henrietta Street was once the best address in Georgian Dublin and has especially grand and some unmodernised houses that are frequently used in films. Now it is mostly artists who use the grand rooms as studios and other colourful characters who are dedicated to preserving the buildings.”

‘Ones + Zeros’ will feature on Murry’s forthcoming record, The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes, which was recorded at Rockfield Studio near Monmouth in Wales early in 2020 was total, and Murry found that bond with producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Eels, Aldous Harding, This Is the Kit).

“Trust matters a great deal,” Parish says. “All my mad ideas, John would facilitate those fully, and get the value of them. John works instinctively and openly in the studio, and his songs are uncomfortably honest and revealing at times,” Parish says. “I think he encourages co-conspirators. He’s quick to identify & enlist whatever skills are in the room at any one time. I hope that I gave him the freedom to pursue outlandish ideas, and the confidence to know that someone was keeping track of them and would know how to fit the puzzle pieces together.

John is a unique character, as you’ll know if you’ve spent five minutes with him. He is interested and distracted by everything, which makes him both a fascinating and frustrating person to work with. On many occasions the hardest part of my job was to identify the moment when all that was to be said about an idea had been said and it was now time to play the damn thing. John can keep a pretty riveting stream of consciousness going for as long as you’ve got.”

Together they brought out what was needed on The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes: the simple pleasures of playing guitar figures, of working with sympathetic people, of playing music that has the same ragged looseness of Murry’s inspirations and fellow Mississipians RL Burnside and Greg Cartwright (Reigning Sound, Oblivians). No one would mistake it for a blues or garage punk record, but there’s that same organic sense to its rumbling guitars and contained wildness, nurtured by Parish.

The next record in the pantheon on Murry’s work, The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes, promises to be a world unto itself, wrapped in the softest black velvet and studded with shining examples of the musician’s signature style.