Ireland to Memphis: Acclaimed, troubled musician John Murry returns for Indie Memphis

“I love this city,” says musician John Murry, chain-smoking French cigarettes on the back porch of a rented house in Midtown, bare feet pressed against a table leg, a battered Virginia Woolf paperback at his elbow.

“I’m sick of America,” he adds, a few moments later.

Love and hate and beauty and ugliness and sickness and health and other irreconcilable yet inextricable attractions vie for attention in the songs of the widely acclaimed yet generally undervalued Murry, who returns this week to his former hometown — the city where he began his music career in earnest — for the local premiere of a new documentary, “The Graceless Age: The Ballad of John Murry," which screens at 5 p.m. Wednesday at the Circuit Playhouse, on day 2 of the six-day Indie Memphis Film Festival.

“This is the story of American singer-songwriter John Murry, who was on the cusp of greatness… when his world fell apart,” state the press notes for the film.

“Addicted to heroin, creatively exhausted, he washed up on the shores of Ireland a broken man,” the notes continue. “Now, he is ready to retrace his steps back to Mississippi, into the dark heart of American life, and face his demons." The journey takes him “from near death to redemption and a new zest for life and art.”

If the tone is almost mythic, Murry, 44, is ideally suited to its contours.

By adoption, he is a member of the extended family of William Faulkner.

Like a certain musician whose face and name are recognized around the world, he was raised in Tupelo and began making serious music in Memphis (home of his biological mother).

In a new folk-horror film by director Paul Duane, he appears in a loincloth, eating a baby.

He now lives in Ireland, and in conversation he mentions two of that country's greatest writers, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce; his ex-wife, however, once cursed him with a different comparison: “You’re nothing more than the American Shane MacGowan!” she said, in reference to the legendarily dysfunctional ex-leader of the the Celtic punk band, the Pogues.

In the new documentary, Murry ponders the fits and starts of his career, even as he and director Sarah Share — who has accompanied the singer to Memphis for the festival premiere — retrace his steps from Mississippi to Ireland, from Memphis to California, from the Rowan Oak mansion of William Faulkner to the Tupelo McMansion of his childhood.

“How did this happen?” Murray asks. “You make an album that people call genius, and you end up broke, exiled from your country, and without those that you love.”

How did this happen? In the film, Murry describes a career strategy that might sound familiar from the biographies of other promising young artists: “Let go of the wheel and let the car run itself into the ditch.”

After a traumatic forced stint in an area Christian-based drug rehabilitation center when he was a teenager, Murry abandoned a conventional college-and-career course and established himself fairly quickly as a musician in the Memphis punk/underground scene of the late 1990s and 2000s.

"The scene was so interconnected," he said. "We cared a lot about each other's music, and it was revolutionary."

Because he was in combos that never cut records, "I was in bands that sort of never existed," Murry said. Nevertheless, The Commercial Appeal chronicled his work in the such outfits as the Dillingers, and, later, with partners who did make records.

Murry was a sometime member of Lucero, and also a collaborator on a 2007 album of murder ballads with revered Memphis singer-songwriter Bob Frank, who was three decades Murry's senior. The album, "World Without End," was produced by the late Jim Dickinson, whom Murry calls "the last of the rock-and-roll ethicists."

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Murry's 2013 solo debut, "The Graceless Age," was listed in the Top 5 records of the year by American Songwriter magazine, and was described by Britain's The Guardian, as "a work of genius." His similarly lauded followup, 2017's "A Short History of Decay," was recorded in Toronto and produced by Michael Timmins of Cowboy Junkies.

Murry's painfully honest songs examined his own history as a literal junkie, in post-Memphis San Francisco, where he nearly died of a heroin overdose, and other personal and social illnesses. But the new documentary reveals further terrors, the worst being Murry's experiences in the Memphis drug rehab residency program, where he says he was repeatedly gang-raped by a trio of teens.

Music was his only "lifeline," he says. It largely remains so, along with the pleasures of art in general; his life in Ireland, where he has supported himself as a musician since 2015 ("there's something about Ireland that feels a lot like the South"); and his friends and family, including his daughter Evie, from an early marriage, who grew up in Memphis. Evie, 18, is a budding singer-songwriter; her full name is "Evangeline," after the Acadian folk heroine of the epic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem that was a top hit, so to speak, of 1847.

Share, 65, a veteran Dublin-based filmmaker, said the documentary was years in the making, with much of the funding provided by Screen Ireland, the Irish film board.

She said she was attracted in part to "the mystery" of Murry's career. "So many newspapers said 'The Graceless Age' was one of the top records of the year, and then he just seemed to sort of disappear." When she first saw him perform in an Irish club, "I was just blown away by the passion and commitment," she said.

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Murry said those passionate songs are his "attempts to make sense of life" and "to create a world that I find more palatable."

As he says in the film, in a question that might be a song lyric: "Why are the things that I'm running from always faster than me?"

Or, as he said on the back porch: "I'm not a genius. Yes, I am! I said that to my dad, and he said, 'What's your retirement plan?'"

John Murry: Back in Memphis

"The Graceless Age: The Ballad of John Murry" — Indie Memphis Film Festival screening at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, at Circuit Playhouse, 51 Cooper. Followed by a question-and-answer session with Murry and director Sarah Share, moderated by Memphis author/filmmaker Robert Gordon. Tickets: $12.

John Murry & Band in concert — 9 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, Bar DKDC, 964 Cooper. Free admission.

For movie tickets and more information, visit indiememphis.org.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: John Murry documentary to screen at Indie Memphis Film Festival