Home comforts and home truths from Gurf Morlix

American songwriter and producer Gurf Morlix plays Kelly’s Bar, Bridge Street on Wednesday, November 27. He has produced albums for venerated songwriters like Mary Gauthier and Lucinda Williams, and toured and recorded with artists such as David Byrne, Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle. Now Gurf has released his ninth solo album, Gurf Morlix Finds the Present Tense, which he recorded at his home in Austin, Texas.

 “I have drums set up in the living room, and bedrooms used for control rooms and singing rooms and amplifiers,” he says. “But it works and it’s very comfortable. And it happens to have a very good sound – I can hear the sound of the house on my records.”

Does the title of his latest album reflect his current state of mind?

“As a person, I would say for sure,” Gurf says. “There’s the obvious pun there – but I do find the present tense, I find it very tense. I think we’re edgy at having a whole lot of problems that are going to be difficult to deal with.”

One of the problems on Gurf’s doorstep is the water shortage in Texas.

“We live in the desert, and maybe we shouldn’t be in the desert – and we’re running out of water,” he says. “I live on a lake, and right now it’s 40 feet low. It’s a flood control system, a series of lakes and dams designed to keep Austin from flooding. And the water is just missing; two-thirds of the lake is just gone, it’s been gone for years. And they keep building golf-courses!”

While the water situation is alarming, the American crisis that made most headlines here recently was the government shutdown. What was Gurf’s take on the dispute between the Obama administration and Republicans?

“Well, I think there’s way more rancour in America than there ever has been,” he says. “Basically, I think America is way too big. We’ve become sort of a sprawling cancer, we’re pretty much ungovernable. I hate to say that, but it seems out of control to me.”