Too Long in the Wasteland is the debut album by the American musician James McMurtry, released in 1989.[2][3] Its first single was "Painted by Numbers".[4] The album's title was inspired in part by his father's Texas ranch, which is named the Wasteland.[5]
The Chicago Reader wrote that "McMurtry mainly acts as a dispassionate observer, content to sketch the outlines of a situation and leave its meaning, or his opinion of it, largely up to the listener to infer."[18]Robert Christgau thought that, "like so many singer-songwriters and so many local-colorists, he tends to a soft fatalism, especially when he tries a big statement."[16]Texas Monthly likened McMurtry's "droll" singing to Mark Knopfler's.[19] The Edmonton Journal described the album as "Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska in technicolor."[20]
The New York Times called the album "a collection of 11 dour songs that portray the spiritually desolate lives of people living in America's heartland."[21]Trouser Press concluded that "McMurtry’s lyrics read as riveting poetry, but they’re that much more powerful when heard in the company of a modest hook and a heartland backbeat."[12]The Globe and Mail stated that McMurtry "writes with mordant humor about tiny places in a vast land where suspicion, prejudice and vague threats linger behind the Main Street facades, where choices made in haste are mulled over years later."[22]The Washington Post considered that, "while his singing often takes on the dry, colorless, detached tone of the narrator, his songs are full of sharply drawn tales and three-dimensional characters."[23]
AllMusic noted that McMurtry "has a smooth, low voice that carries a Western twang from his life in Texas."[15]Salon deemed the album full of "catchy and harsh country-folk songs filled with tortured Southern souls failing at love, failing at life or just talking about it in front of the gas station on a country road."[24]The Rolling Stone Album Guide labeled "Terry" "a great, unsentimental lament for a mixed-up rehab bad boy."[17]
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