ROBERT EARL KEEN
There’s an irony in the title to Robert Earl Keen’s 11th album, What I Really Mean.
In his intriguingly elusive manner, Keen managed to compile 11 songs with varying degrees of mystery—songs that lead the listener to specific storylines and specific emotions without revealing too much. They’re picturesque and poignant, yet complex enough to unveil new layers of understanding with repeated listening. Yet with many of the songs in What I Really Mean, you can never know for certain what Keen means because even he is uncertain.
“Things come out the way they come out a lot of times,” he shrugs. “You don’t have a lot of control over ‘em, as far as I’m concerned.”
Rather appropriately, mystery pervades the career of Robert Earl Keen, the most successful artist that many Americans have never heard. He’s had his songs recorded by George Strait, Lyle Lovett, Shawn Colvin, the Dixie Chicks and the Highwaymen (Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash & Kris Kristofferson); appeared in such prestigious publications as Playboy and Men’s Journal; performed on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and “The Today Show”; and played concert venues steadily for more than 20 years. By his own admission, he’s never had a song hit the Top 10 of a major chart, and yet he consistently plays sold-out shows for audiences that number sometimes as many as 25,000.
As much as What I Really Mean is about the unknowable, Keen’s own career—hugely successful while dodging the music industry’s most obvious channel of exposure, mainstream radio—remains a bit of a mystery even to him.
“As time goes by, it becomes a greater and greater curiosity,” he confesses. “I literally can play a 90-minute show and literally almost everybody in the room will be singing every song. To me, that’s what it’s all about. If people are recording your songs and singing your songs, then you’re successful. If you play these songs and nobody cares, then you’re not successful. My thing is like I’m extremely successful because so many people know so many of my songs. They don’t know one song—they know them all!”
Perhaps the disconnect with mainstream radio is about to end. Key figures in the broadcast industry have warmed to the album’s tracks in advance listening, and one prominent station, WIVK in Knoxville, gave a number of the songs their world premiere.
What I Really Mean is bursting at the seams with material that Keen fans—both the established and the soon-to-be-won-over—will certainly want to know in exacting detail. In true Texas fashion, it works cohesively from start to finish while exploring a variety of musical influences—Celtic drama in “The Traveling Storm,” barroom country in “The Dark Side Of The World,” folk-meets-Dave Matthews in the title track, a touch of gospel soul in “Long Chain” and ranchero and cowboy traditions in “A Border Tragedy,” a piece so drunkenly absurd that even Keen refers to it as “that crack-pot song.”
The melodies are consistently memorable, and so are the characters, ranging from the subversive “Animal Farm” criminals in “Mr. Wolf And Mama Bear” to the images of Hank Williams in drag during “The Great Hank.”
Holding all of it together is the unvarnished vocal presence of Keen, whose gritty resonance adds a sense of realism to the songs’ literary qualities.
“Sometimes I say this jokingly, but I think this is pretty much the key,” Keen observes. “I don’t think I intimidate anybody with my voice. My vocal range is so limited that anybody that’s even had a tracheotomy can follow what’s going on. Everybody can sing a Robert Earl Keen song. You’re not gonna be thrown a big curveball by some huge falsetto piece in the middle of it. They work, and they sound good, the words fit together well, and they’re easy to sing. I think people like that.”
That’s certainly the kind of artist that attracted Keen in his formative years. Born in Houston to a Texas oilman and an attorney who turned him on to authors and poets, he began writing his own poems around the age of five. He didn’t begin to consider his rhymes as song lyrics until he started playing guitar at age 18, while majoring in English at Texas A&M.
In the meantime, he became enamored of roots music performers—the Western tales of Marty Robbins, the mournful laments of Hank Williams, the passionate rhythms of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys.
“I love originators,” Keen says. “I even love originators that are snakes and crooks, you know. As long as they’re the originator, I can give ‘em all that credit, and I’m happy for ‘em. When it gets away from the originator, it becomes watered down and half-hearted, and I’m no longer very interested in it.”
As a teenager, Keen scoured the discount bins for authentic music, and it’s likely there that he and fiddler Fred Duckworth found an eight-track of Jimmie Rodgers, widely regarded as the Father of Country Music. Rodgers’ hard-edged performances are not too far removed stylistically from the blues of Robert Johnson, who recorded during the same era, and Keen was immediately taken by the honesty in the Singing Brakeman’s music.
“It made all the sense in the world to me,” Keen recalls. “I don’t know if I liked it before, but since then, I’ve always liked that one-guy-with-guitar-with-the-story-kinda-song thing, whether it’s folk or country or whatever.”
Though Keen completed his college work, he found his true passion in the clubs, bringing his oddball characters to sonic life and gaining a sense of community with the audience through music he necessarily writes in painful solitude. National Public Radio and the occasional alternative-country program provided exposure for such Keen classics as the anthemic “The Road Goes On Forever” and the twisted “Merry Christmas From The Family,” attracting new fans to his energetic shows, which grew in larger numbers through word of mouth.
Keen’s efforts had a distinct effect on Texas’ music. Lone Star club-goers were notorious for their insistence that bands play two-step music—if an artist couldn’t make them dance, they usually were not invited back. Keen broke that barrier, establishing a new interest in thoughtful and unusual singer-songwriters. As a result, he paved the way for such artistic Texans as Jack Ingram, Pat Green, and Charlie Robison.
Keen’s set lists are ever-changing, the songs often undergo metamorphoses with continued playing, and his band—whose “newest” member has been with Keen for five years—revels in versatility. As a result, the concerts are often as unpredictable as the people he sings about.
The results sometimes surprise even Keen. When he began creating new material for What I Really Mean in his personal writing cabin, the Scriptorium, he fully expected a raucous, electric project. But the band—guitarist-producer Rich Brotherton, drummer Tom van Schaik, bass player Bill Whitbeck and steel guitarist Marty Muse—found more subtle waves of expression.
“As a group of people,” he contends, “they’re extremely creative, and they always bring their own ideas to the table. Their versatility is a huge element as to why we’ve been together so long.”
Danny Barnes, a progressive banjo player from Texas, sat in on the recordings, adding a breezy quality to much of the material, which includes guest appearances by a gospel group, a Mariachi band and Lone Star icon Ray Price, a relaxed vocalist who’s enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Recorded in Austin, What I Really Mean was mixed in Burbank by Ed Cherney, who also worked on Keen’s preceding album, Farm Fresh Onions. Noted for his work with Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison, the Grammy-winning engineer brought a fresh perspective to the tracks and whipped them into a logical final sound.
“I’m a real big fan of that,” Keen says. “Other than Rich, he doesn’t know the rest of the guys. He had no idea at all what the record’s about, and he listened to it primarily on an objective, sonic basis. He was concerned about what sounded the best, not whose guitar licks were the best.”
In the end, What I Really Mean represents the cast quite well, blending various musical cultures, quirky perspectives, singable melodies and superb musicianship. It’s literate, suspenseful, engaging and mysterious, much like its originator, Robert Earl Keen.
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