James McMurtry w/Anders Osborne at The Triple Door in Seattle

It’s hard to pick a favorite James McMurtry lyric, and not for lack of quality. One could opt for the produndity of “We Can’t Make It Here,” the solemnity of “Gulf Road,” the dizzyingly detailed landscape of “Choctaw Bingo,” or the entirety of “Lights of Cheyenne.” But to me, the mark of a phenomenal songwriter is the brilliant toss-off line, where the poetry subconsciously seeps in.

“With my vest unbuttoned and my necktie loose, impervious to all abuse.”

That’s probably my favorite James McMurtry line (and probably the only appearance of “impervious” in song), as I was reminded on a blustery Friday night at Seattle’s Triple Door, where McMurtry played a pair of shows with New Orleans’ great Anders Osborne, who looks like a scruffy Bryan Adams and sounds like an Creole amalgam of Joe Walsh, Warren Zevon and Bruce Hornsby.

Clean shaven and donning a black fedora and collared salmon shirt, McMurtry opened the late show, striding out alone a shade after ten. He opened with “St. Mary of the Woods,” quickly reminding attendees that while he can only play one guitar at a time, it somehow sounds as though there are three. He followed with a heater, “Red Dress,” and then three tunes off his latest LP, Complicated Game: “Copper Canteen,” “You Got to Me” and “I Ain’t Got a Place.”

“You Got to Me” contains my favorite McMurtry lyric; it’s the tale of one man’s attempt to recapture the rapscallion romance of his youth over the course of a Big Chill-ian weekend in his old east coast stomping grounds. Prior to a characteristically uproarious rendition of “Choctaw,” McMurtry quoted H.L. Mencken, saying, “The problem with communism is the Communists, much in the same sense that the problem with Christianity is the Christians.”

McMurtry mostly drew from Complicated Game during his economical set, but closed with “Peter Pan,” dedicating the track to a front-row patron who’d run up a healthy credit-card debt when a man of his age should have known better. “I guess I really did it this time, mom.” Yes, you did, son, but please keep on doing exactly what you’re doing. It makes mom proud.