created the Troubadour Award – since given to John Prine and John Hiatt – to honor Robert Earl Keen. 1: Official Revival Bootleg and “Feelin’ Good Again” opens the critically-acclaimed The Watkins Family Hour debut from Nickle Creek sibs Sara and Sean Watkins. Just as impressively, Record of the Year Grammy winner Shawn Colvin chose “Not A Drop of Rain” to set alongside songs from Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Stevie Wonder, John Fogerty and Paul Simon on her Uncovered his “Go On Downtown” is the only cover on Gillian Welch’s Boots No. Do good work you can stand behind, push what you’ve done before and honor the things that cross your songs – whether that’s the dysfunctional holiday hilarity of “Merry Christmas from the Family,” the cross-cultural wonderings of an American pondering the immigrant who works for him of “Mariano” or the deep sweetness of “No Kinda Dancer.” Yet the man who’s released 19 albums, toured millions of miles, provided hits for icons George Strait, The Chicks and the Highwaymen’s Mount Rushmore of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson and inspiration for waves of Red Dirt musicos from Pat Green, Wade Bowen, Cory Morrow and Jack Ingram to Cross Canadian Ragweed, the Randy Rogers Band and Eli Young Band is pretty straightforward. As timely now as ever, it’s master story painting that is as compelling as it is entertaining – and why his work endures. It could be a cousin of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” The yearning for more, the sacrifices to make a better life for those back home. I never have to flinch if someone wants to hear it.” “It said everything I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it. “I wrote ‘Mariano’ about someone I knew,” Keen says. There’s nothing simple to Keen’s work, but it is ultimately, utterly true. With strong hints of Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Tom McGuane, even John Steinbeck or Tennessee Williams, Keen could build songs that had vistas, small tactile details, wild nights of specificity and emotions riddled with conflict. But the first song he wrote when he moved back was ‘Mariano.’ When he looked out the window, exhaled and went, ‘I’m home,’ that’s what came out.” He’s with BMI, and he is a part of the music business. “When Robert went to Nashville,” remembers Lyle Lovett, a friend from before either was dreaming singer/songwriter dreams, “he committed to doing things the Nashville way. Heading home, Music Row factory town in the rearview mirror, the always heroic – even when the hero was an antihero – writer was freed from the conveyor-belt writing cycles and song structures built around hit formulas. Without that break-in, Keen might not be one of the most singular Texas voices ever. I looked at Kathleen, said, ‘You wanna move back?’ She said, ‘I’m already packed.’ I came back to close up a few weeks later, deal with the lease, but that was that.” When I woke up, it was 2 degrees, and I’d never really seen that kind of cold before. Someone had broken into our house (in Nashville) and we didn’t have a lot: a bed, a couch, a couple pieces of furniture, a stereo … I grew up on a corner in Houston, where the house was broken into 16 times, but this was different. “The car broke down on the way home, a timing chain issue. “I’d played a show in Lawrence, Kansas, and made $670,” he remembers of the beginning of the end. But on that April Fool’s Day, Keen finished packing up the loose ends of that chapter and drove straight into the beginning of a career that defies schools, categories or musical moments. But on April 1, 1987, even with some possibilities percolating, the Houston-born and -raised songwriter put himself on the highway home and out of Nashville – and he never looked back.Īt the urging of Steve Earle, who was on the verge of his debut Guitar Town and a Waylon Jennings hit in “The Devil’s Right Hand,” Keen had moved to Music City in 1985, expatriating himself to Nashville to stake his claim. Not that the English major from Texas A&M wasn’t always the literary blade who could stack images, weave details or conjure a masculinity you can smell from the second chord. That was the watershed, the day Robert Earl Keen truly became Robert Earl Keen.
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