If Alex McMurray's songwriting seems a bit dour at times - okay, most of the time - well then that's totally intentional. "Like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar," he says, "I find sorrow to be quite a beautiful emotion. Loneliness can be nice." And he'd know. A New Orleans fixture since the '80s, the guitar slinger is now widely recognized as the embodiment of the downtown New Orleans lifestyle: sketchy bars, cracked sidewalks, fallen-down houses, tattered hearts, broken spirits, discarded chicken bones. He's often compared to Tom Waits; they both have whiskey-throated voices and share a curious ability to find inspiration in the degenerate, not to mention an obsession with the Ninth Ward. Except McMurray actually lives there.