Robert Earl Keen
Released May 10, 2005, What I Really Mean features special guests Ray Price (vocals), Danny Barnes (banjo) and is sprinkled with a few unique touches (including Gospel singers and Mariachi players). The first single, the title track “What I Really Mean,” will ship to radio on March 23, 2005.
As was the case with REK’s critically acclaimed 2003 Koch Records debut, Farm Fresh Onions, the new project was recorded with his road band, enhancing the listening experience and capturing the excitement of a live performance. Rich Brotherton, who has been REK’s lead guitarist for several years, produced the record, marking his second production effort for REK. Brotherton has been listed among the 100 best guitar players in America by several publications and has worked with Shawn Colvin, Toni Price, Ronnie Lane and Eliza Gilkyson, to name a few.
Keen has inspired much praise from music critics over the years. Rolling Stone wrote of Farm Fresh Onions: “Keen takes a page from Lucinda Williams, backing up his unassuming, dusky tunes with punchy guitars and well-manicured country-rock grooves” Billboard added: “Keen has delivered one of the best records of his career.” Performing Songwriter called it “A compelling collection of songs stamped with Keen’s trademark mix of lyricism, breezy humor and intelligence.” And No Depression observed: “A very funny, clever and ambitious writer...Keen sounds here like an artist renewed.” Keen has also been a stalwart presence on late-night television and NPR.
Granted, most people know Keen best for a handful of what he calls “yee-haw party boy” non-stop fun songs like “Merry Christmas from the Family” and “Five Pound Bass” or for his anthemic, rousing “The Road Goes on Forever,” but even a quick glance back at his career reveals a man who is at home recalling the gifted black poet Langston Hughes and long gone politician William Jennings Bryan ("The Great Commoner” and “Silver-Tongued Orator") as he is evoking hardscrabble tales of rogues, drunks, drifters, grifters, cheaters, carpetbaggers, and louts that form a gallery of dead end America, or better, capture an amber-hued Polaroid of a disappearing America last seen in smoky barrooms with jukeboxes and election buttons on the floor, scratched noir and western films looped in Saturday matinees, and dog-eared novels by William Faulkner and Keen’s fave contemporary Larry Brown.
Every record, including the early superb efforts of West Textures, rollicking and humorous No. 2 Live, polished and FM friendly Picnic, and the conceptual and meditative Walking Distance, has pushed his own musical envelop. Each reveals wry lyrical finesse shot through down home twang and showcases Keen’s covert discipline and his trademark easy-going, intelligent venturing. Farm Fresh Onions, his latest, produced and co-engineered by longtime Keen collaborator Rich Brotherton (who also produced Caroline Herring’s newest effort) is no look backwards, but a nod and wink to all things Keensian, with an added dollop of Dylanesque roots rock.
Like Rodney Crowell and Kenny Rogers, Keen grew up amid the once manicured lawns that lined the bayous and railroad tracks of beltway Houston, where the din of AM radio filled his room with the sounds of “the Beatles, Cream, and Marvin Gaye” and his mom showed him the power and potential of books. Never a big audiophile or collector, Keen nevertheless had an ear for “rhyming poetry… From the time I was about five years old, or the time I could first write, I did, and I liked it…And when I started playing guitar, which was when I was 18, it just made sense.” So, although he earned a degree in English at Texas A&M, his real learning took place in grubby little clubs where rain plopped down in buckets at his feet. Like Bruce Springsteen and others before and after him, he shrugged off the peeling paint and roaches, plugged away, and turned porch songs into heartfelt nuggets that even Townes Van Zandt admired during Keen’s first nervous tour with the legend. Later, Keen thought maybe Nashville would understand too, but they found out that he was no puppet or trained monkey, so he came back to Texas, where he’s remained ever since, forging a sweltering fan base that most people associate with stadium rock bands (25,000 people at Keen’s Texas Uprising shows, no problemo).
Most songwriters talk about the West as if it were some hokey postcard mailed out with a Louis L’Amour inscription, but for Keen, “the West is more than a point of reference. It’s in my dreams. Even Lordsburg, New Mexico, which people think is a hellhole.” Keen is an ardent lover of place, warts and all. Meanwhile, his characters drift towards often unattainable goals, deluged by desire and trouble, as if born to fumble and fall down in a pre-digital world of trailer parks and cheap Greyhound stations, collapsed roadside fruit stands and muddy restrooms. He blends the fugitive spirit with a taqueria reality, wears his heart on his sleeve, ignores the false trap doors of hipness, and listens to the cicadas in the moist night air right outside the strip mall parking lot and knows that really good drama doesn’t need gun powder, disease, or spies, for its nucleus is the homecoming we experience every time we let down our guard and make the same mistakes again and again. It’s the unpaid bills and the poem we wrote on a wet napkin, looking at sycamore trees when we should be watching the road, the smell of marijuana in the backseat of our Chevy, the kiss we stole on a work break with that person who is a wreck, but we love anyway.
Keen will forever be known as the guy who can cover the likes of Dave Alvin, Peter Case, Townes Van Zandt, and Johnny Cash, evoke the world of tough immigrant workers and dead politicians, and simultaneously appeal to baseball-cap wearing college kids without losing his own poetic magnetism or sense of self. While others drift quickly towards anonymity, flash-in-the-pan cut-out bins at the local K-Mart, or hopelessly make banal copycat Keen songs and try to serve them up as fresh pie, Keen serves up literate, rich worlds by letting go of squabbles and egos and embodying an earthy resilience that is more and more uncommon in the dot.com millennium. There are no hillbilly hoedowns, white trash mockery, or ad-lib mock blues on this record, but instead what Keen does best: Lyrical and cinematic wordplay, raved-up rocking, and masterly country thumbing that makes the road feel like a bit of black tar heaven. Or as Keen offhandedly ruminates in the title track, “The truth is all I’m looking for.” Undoubtedly, he has found part of it.
Source: http://WWW.Lonestarmusic.com
