Matthew McConaughey will always call Texas home. Rolling Stone has an exclusive first listen of the actor joining Gordon Wright for “Texas My Home,” a track written for Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright’s audiobook Mr. Texas.
“It’s one of a kind/And a state of mind,” McConaughey and Gordon sing. “It’s not just my home/It’s me.”
McConaughey — who was born in Uvalde, Texas, just outside of San Antonio — was once Mr. Texas writer Lawrence Wright’s neighbor. Mid-pandemic, Wright says he reached out to the actor to see if “he would duet” with his son Gordon on the track.
“He really threw himself into it in the most McConaughey fashion!” Wright tells Rolling Stone.
Wright co-wrote the track with his son and Marcia Ball, a Texas-based pianist and blues singer. Writing music for the book, he says, “was one of the most creative periods of my life. We composed songs in many different genres to represent the diversity of the state.”
The track sung by McConaughey is set to be featured in the audiobook Mr. Texas, which follows a dark-horse political candidate running for the Texas House of Representatives as he navigates life in politics and weighs his own ethics and environmental concerns while facing politicians, his own party, and lobbyists.
“I’ve always thought audiobooks had an opportunity to incorporate music and Mr. Texas provided an ideal opportunity to prove it,” Wright says. “The songs and sounds are a pure essence of the culture of the state.”
Mr. Texas went on sale on Tuesday and is described by the New York Times as a “rollicking satire” with a “fiery sample of the chili of Texas politics.”
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Wright earned a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book on the rise of al-Qaeda, titled The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
Audio is courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio from MR. TEXAS by Lawrence Wright, sang by Matthew McConaughey and Gordon Wright.
