Murray certainly hasn’t been idle in recent years. His songs continue to appear in the collections of other artists. Notably, his “No Change in Me” was a featured song in the musical “Needfire”, as well as being recorded by John McDermott, and The Ennis Sisters. Murray’s co-write with Tom Wilson, “Burned Out Car”, became a duet on the Junkhouse album, featuring Sarah McLachlan and Tom, and won the best video JUNO. Murray co-wrote “You Should be Havin’ Fun” with Barney Bentall, and “Bad Girl” with Lorraine Segato of Parachute Club. Bentall, incidentally, produced McLauchlan’s 1996 album “Gulliver’s Taxi”, which featured The Odds from Vancouver, Billy Cowsill, Tom Wilson from Junkhouse and a whole lot of collaborations with some great songwriters. Murray’s song Honky Red is currently in heavy live rotation and newly recorded by American band Widespread Panic.
Now of course, Murray has also hooked up with the mega-songwriter band Lunch at Allen’s and has four successful CD’s to their credit on EMI and True North Records. They are selling out theatres across Canada.
In the fall of 2012, Murray released what many think is his best album “Human Writes”. It was extensively played in the UK and Europe as well as Australia and appeared in the top 10 of the Cashbox Roots charts in the US. Coming hard on the heels of the very successful “Songs From The Street” double CD on True North it was a great time for Murray’s fans.
Murray is also very active on the business side and was for a number of years a board member at SOCAN, the Canadian songwriters/publishers collective, championing the cause of author’s rights and copyright reform as well as Vice President of the SOCAN Foundation.
In addition to 36 concert appearances in 2018, Murray was pleased to be given the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award at a gala presentation spanning Rideau Hall, Canada’s parliament and the National Arts Center, where Murray appeared on stage with Blackie and the Rodeo Kings in a rousing version of Down By the Henry Moore. If that wasn’t enough, his much loved Child’s Song, sung by Tom Rush, was featured in the hit NBC TV show “This Is Us”.
In 2019, Murray was off to Vietnam for inspiration and getting ready for another Voices That Care concert on April 25th at the Glenn Gould
Theater in Toronto.
Then along came the global pandemic. Murray was fortunate enough to finish up a concert tour just before things locked down but 26 additional shows, including lunch at Allen’s concerts had to be cancelled. As of summer 2021, the theaters have still not opened up.
Not one to stand idle, Murray began work on a new project, writing a series of poems to deal with the many things in a troubled world that he felt he needed to address. These poems became songs and the eventual result was the newest release “Hourglass”. Hourglass has been getting a lot of attention throughout the world and provoking thoughtful conversation wherever it is heard. That, after all, was always the idea.
And of course, there will be more concerts.