MADISON, Ind. -- Figuring that his well-traveled touring van was past due for an oil change, James McMurtry thought about looking for a Jiffy Lube when he pulled into town for the night's gig. But then he got a better idea. "First order of business, I'm gonna see if they have beer in the Mexican restaurant behind the hotel," he said.

So here is the Texas-born singer-songwriter-guitarist, slumped in a booth at Los Compadres, plucking the jalapenos from a plate of nachos in between sips of cheap Mexican beer while a couple nearby bickers about what to watch on television later. The restaurant is tucked behind the Best Western, hard by State Road 62 in an Ohio River Valley town that hasn't quite been the same since the steamboat boom went bust. There's a pickup with an enormous Dale Earnhardt window sticker parked outside. At the next table, a family is making plans to reconvene at the Wal-Mart down the road. Ranchera music blares over the speakers.

McMurtry, a famously caustic observer of Americana, murmurs, "It's pretty bleak."

This is precisely the sort of scene that might show up in a James McMurtry song. When he's not ranting about the screwy state of the union -- something he has been doing with increasing frequency -- McMurtry specializes in trenchant character sketches set in the vast nothingness of rural America.

It's an improbably colorful place as he packs his story-songs with novelistic detail and observations about fascinatingly ordinary people and fantastic fringe characters. It may or may not be a genetic gift: He's the son of the famous writer Larry McMurtry.

His lyrics focus on broken dreams and hard realities. "I tend to look at the dark cloud behind the silver lining," he says.

Whatever he is -- bard in a bar band; songwriter's songwriter; hell, writer's writer (Stephen King will talk your ear off about him) -- McMurtry, at 46, has crafted one of the year's best albums in "Just Us Kids," which artfully mixes provocative portraits with political screeds, including the Bush-bashing "Cheney's Toy."

This after 2005's "Childish Things" was named album of the year at the Americana Music Association Honors and Awards. McMurtry's protest anthem, "We Can't Make It Here," also was named song of the year.

Critical acclaim is nothing new for the roots-rock artist, whose first album, 1989's "Too Long in the Wasteland," was hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the year's best debuts. Now eight albums and 20 years into his career as a critical darling, his fan base is suddenly swelling.

"We're selling more seats and selling more records now," McMurtry says through clenched teeth, which is how he says pretty much everything (and how he sings, too). Almost indifferently, he adds, "It's energizing."

And then: "It's also an uncomfortable position. We're filling clubs that we used to not fill. But we're still in clubs."

Why is that uncomfortable?

"Because there's more people," McMurtry says, averting his eyes. "I'm not really a people person."

You're a misanthrope?

"I don't know that I'm a misanthrope; I just hate people -- some of the time."

Funny thing about James McMurtry: He has a masterly command of the English language, but you might not know it from engaging him in conversation -- if you can get him to engage at all.

In interviews, he'll talk about himself, his art, his influences, his politics, his father, his own son's songwriting. He'll be thoughtful and revealing. He just won't be loquacious. Don't take it personally. His friends don't.

Every Wednesday, when McMurtry is at home in Austin, he performs a late-night set at the Continental Club. He's almost always preceded onstage by singer-songwriter Jon Dee Graham, who once asked McMurtry's girlfriend, "Why doesn't James like me? He's said maybe nine words to me in three years and we play together every week!"

"And she goes: 'Nine? Wow, he really likes you.' "

Graham laughs. "Obviously, this is a man who uses words like a scalpel. ... As a songwriter, I respect and envy the hell out of him.

"He's able to create, whole cloth, out of thin air, things that never happened to people who don't exist, and to make them funny, witty, insightful and a general comment on the world. How do you do that?"

Might help that McMurtry's father is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist ("Lonesome Dove") and Oscar-winning screenwriter ("Brokeback Mountain"). His mother, Josephine, recently retired as an English literature professor at the University of Richmond. But, James says, "I don't know if it has to do with being around them, or what I listened to when I was growing up."

McMurtry was born in Fort Worth; his parents split when he was a toddler. They moved to Virginia -- Josephine to Richmond, Larry to Waterford, Va., near Washington. James lived with his father, who taught at George Mason University and American University before buying an antiquarian bookstore in Georgetown; he spent weekends with his mother.

McMurtry attended his first concert at 7: Johnny Cash at the Richmond Coliseum. He decided he wanted to do what Cash did. His father bought him a guitar; his mother taught him three chords. McMurtry says he really started to think about writing songs when he was given a copy of Kris Kristofferson's debut album, "Me & Bobby McGee." McMurtry enrolled at the University of Arizona in 1980: "I think I became a sophomore after four years. I was more interested in playing the guitar than learning. I kind of regret that now."

He bailed on college and landed back in Texas, working as a house painter and bartender. A few years later, Larry McMurtry was working on a film project with John Mellencamp and passed along a cassette containing some of his son's songs. Mellencamp helped McMurtry land a deal with Columbia and produced his 1989 debut.

"I didn't even know it was possible," McMurtry says of a career in music.

Then came the early acclaim, a series of business-side disappointments and, now, the recognition that seems to have been sparked by the scathing "We Can't Make It Here," posted online shortly before the 2004 presidential election. In his influential Entertainment Weekly column, Stephen King called McMurtry's first foray into political songwriting the best American protest song since Bob Dylan's epochal "Masters of War."

King, who owns a rock radio station in Maine, put "We Can't Make It Here" in heavy rotation, right alongside 2002's "Choctaw Bingo," a freewheeling, nine-minute vignette that McMurtry describes as "a song about the North Texas-Southern Oklahoma crystal methamphetamine industry."

"He excites me in a way that very few artists do, both on an emotional level, because I love music, and on an intellectual level, because I love poetry and story," King says from his office in Maine. "The clarity, the details, the feeling that these are real people -- or could be real people -- it's terrific."

King's support, McMurtry says, "couldn't have come at a better time for us; we were kind of slipping off the edge."

Larry McMurtry has listened with pride come to a surprising conclusion: "James' best songs are so good that I don't think that my best novels really come up to them."

How's that again?

"One element of music is poetry, and poetry is a lot harder than fiction," the father says from Arizona. "A lyric is the hardest form. You have to concentrate and squeeze those words. I respect James a lot for having found his own art and done it so well."

While McMurtry hasn't actually transformed himself into a full-time protest singer, he has earned more new fans than he's lost by flying his left-leaning flag.

"Our job is to be remembered, not loved," he says. "Your job is to make an impact. And if they hate you, they'll remember you, too."

He takes a swig of beer, then says: "You can like the art without liking the artist. You can."James McMurtry

Where: Three Rivers Arts Festival's Main Stage

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday.

Tickets: Free.