Inspiration is a strange concept for many artists to grasp, but singer-songwriter James McMurtry has a pretty firm grip on the elements that drive him to create. "Any group of songs I record are generally inspired by fear and commerce," says McMurtry via phone. "The last record plays out, you have to make a new record, so you have to finish a bunch of songs. The way we usually do it is we book the recording time and then I scramble and try to finish enough songs to make a record. What goes on the record is what gets finished."

The results of McMurtry's latest cram sessions can be found on his ninth album, Just Us Kids, a typically stellar collection of folk/rock story songs from the Texas native. While the waning days of the Bush administration are still grist for McMurtry's creative mill ("God Bless America" and "Cheney's Toy"), many of his songs are seeded from everyday life, then transformed into fictional tales that benefit from McMurtry's novelistic penchant for narrative detail. "The Governor" is a prime example of McMurtry making a societal observation by way of a tale of negligent homicide covered up at the highest levels.

"People think we have no class system in this country, but we really do," he says. "There are people that are not subject to the laws that the rest of us are subject to. That's what I was trying to explore in that one."

McMurtry's last album, 2005's Childish Things, was perhaps his most widely acclaimed album to date, spending six weeks at No. 1 on R&R's American Music Radio Chart and earning McMurtry both Album and Song of the Year awards at the 2006 Americana Music Awards. For all the positive buzz generated by Childish Things, McMurtry never felt any particular pressure to emulate its success when it came time to start Just Us Kids.

"The goal now is to exceed the last one and our first-week sales have doubled the numbers on Childish Things," he says. "Given that the retail record industry is off by 40 percent since a year ago and we managed to increase sales, it's looking pretty good for us. Relatively. Look at the world we're living in. You sell 5,000 records in a week and that puts you in the Top 200 in Billboard. That didn't used to happen."

The success of Childish Things kept McMurtry on the road longer than usual, which extended the time required to finish Just Us Kids.

"We started making this record in 2006," says McMurtry. "We'd do a session, we'd go out on the road for a little while, we'd come home and go back at it again."

Since McMurtry didn't feel any obligation to rush a new album on the hot heels of Childish Things, he took his time with the material. Following his standard pattern, he booked intermittent sessions between touring cycles and recorded whatever was at hand, not even considering an album structure until he was well into the process.

"It took several sessions before we had nine or 10 songs that we thought we could make a record out of," he says. "So it probably took a year before it started to look like a record. Then we spent another year refining it, mixing it and mastering and all that stuff."

A pair of subtitles on Just Us Kids might raise eyebrows among those unfamiliar with McMurtry's dryly understated sense of humor. "God Bless America" is tagged parenthetically with "(pat mAcdonald must die)," a reference to the former frontman for Timbuk 3 who provides harmonica and harmony vocals on a pair of tracks and "You'd a Thought" carries the similarly dark sentiment, "(Leonard Cohen must die)."

"That was an in-joke on the session," says McMurtry. "The Leonard Cohen song was one of the first ones we recorded, and I was writing it while the guys were sitting in the studio waiting for me to write it. It kind of reminded me of Cohen's work so I came in and said, 'If it wasn't for Leonard Cohen, you guys wouldn't be sitting here. Leonard Cohen must die.' Then 'God Bless America' was written and recorded in pat mAcdonald's drop C guitar tuning, so we named that 'pat mAcdonald must die' and got him to play harmonica on it. There were a couple other 'must dies' that didn't make it onto the record."

James McMurtry, The Dedringers: 9 p.m. Friday, May 9 at Beachland Ballroom, 15711 Waterloo Rd., 216.383.1124. Tickets: $18 advance, $20 day of show.