The Musical Box

robert earl keen.

“Hey, it’s just like the Oak Ridge Boys,” remarked Robert Earl Keen as the pace behind a merry country melody picked up last night at the Opera House.

Well, maybe not - especially since the tune in question was Copenhagen, a love song where the only thing that comes between the guy and the girl is a mouthful of chaw. Truth to tell, Keen’s acoustic performance with Todd Snider and Bruce Robison was a lesson in magnificent imperfection. All three writers performed separately and together without bands. The often diverse temperaments of their songs served as the performance’s only real artistic glue.

Keen pulled a fast one on the crowd, especially the numerous late-comers, by opening the program with a half-dozen world class Texas-fueled yarns. There was little denying that a touch of the brilliant Lone Star color inherent in Keen’s music was lost without the aid of his expert touring band. But in its place was a heightened sense of storytelling that he has scaled back on in recent years. Sure, gems like Gringo Honeymoon and the wistful homecoming portrait Feelin’ Good Again needed little introduction. But Keen prefaced one his best known songs by recalling a correspondence between his mother and uncle.

“Joe, Robert has written the most awful song.”

“Well, Juanita, is the song true?”

“Hell yes, it’s true.”

With that he sailed into Merry Christmas from the Family, his irreverently poetic snapshot of a dysfunctional holiday celebration.

bruce robison.

Robison, a fellow Texan whose songs have become hits for country kingpins like George Strait and Tim McGraw, offered a set of more streamlined tunes where the lyrical creases Keen so openly underscored were ironed out. That didn’t make songs with such generous melodic charm as Lifeline or Wrapped any less enjoyable. In fact, Robison poked fun at his own fortunes when introducing Travelin’ Soldier. The tune was a major hit for the Dixie Chicks the week Natalie Maines made public her infamous evaluation of then-President Bush. Robison last night dubbed the single as “the fastest descending No. 1 hit in country music history.”

todd snider.

Snider couldn’t resist a jab to corporate Nashville after Robison’s set. He admitted ahead of Money, Compliments, Publicity (Song Number Ten) that the tune was inspired less by the demons of artistic gluttony that inhabit its lyrics and more by a need to quickly think of a toss-off song to complete his new The Excitement Plan album. “Then I thought, ‘Hey, that’s how they make country music now.’”

A second set brought the three artists together to swap songs for just over an hour. But their stylistic differences were on display just as much when they weren’t singing as when they were given the spotlight. Keen played congenial host, Robison seemed eager to play some kind of accompaniment for his pals and Snider, his face buried in shadow from a loose fitting hat, generally looked like a caged animal.

But there was simpatico. Robison matched the barbed family sagas that pop up in Keen’s music during My Brother and Me, a tune influenced not by his sibling but by a black sheep grandfather. Similarly, Snider’s popularly giddy Beer Run made direct reference to Keen’s signature renegade tune The Road Goes On Forever, a tune Keen himself was more than happy to follow with.

But Keen was rightfully awarded the evening’s last song, I’m Comin’ Home - a travelogue tune that drew inspiration from heart and hearth. Performed with a sense of Texas country longing, the stune was a reminder that even though the road still goes on forever, it eventually leads one back home.

robert earl keen.

Sitting among the tunes on Robert Earl Keen’s new album The Rose Hotel is a slackers’ yarn titled Something I Do. It’s far from the deepest dish on the disc with its lazy boy chorus, pseudo-tropical groove and everyman’s lyrical demeanor.

“I kind of like just doin’ nothing,” sings Keen in a sleepy Texas drawl. “It’s something that I do.”

If you have followed Keen’s masterful Lone Star songwriting over the years, you know he is capable of drilling pretty far into misfit psyches for a song. Sometimes the results are positively harrowing (as on Dreadful Selfish Crime). In other instances they turn violently comedic (The Road Goes on Forever) or brutally family friendly (Merry Christmas from the Family). And then there are songs like Something I Do that suggest the recording sessions for his newest album was merry affairs indeed.

“Just like tacos,” Keen said about the songs constructed for The Rose Hotel. “They’re fun to make and fun to eat.”

Keen’s music is deceptively learned too. His songs sport sturdy Texas country roots that, in some cases, extend to honky tonk turf with a giddy Lone Star fiddle leading the charge. For The Rose Hotel’s Village Inn, though, echoes of pedal steel guitar are so vivid that you can easily picture the purple twilight skies that hang over the road stop. Granted, the song is actually set in Idaho. But when you hear Keen croon over the amenities… “free wi-fi, HBO, oh,” you know you’re dealing with the cosmopolitan campfire soul of a Texan.

“I really try to find a different level of thinking when I write,” Keen said. “If I can get to that level, I seem to be able to come up with some really cool ideas. And I can stay on that level for a long time as long as I’m not interrupted.

“I mean, you do a lot of writing in your job, don’t you? Doesn’t it take a certain amount of concentration and focus? But it’s so easy to find yourself sharpening pencils. Or maybe you go out and get yourself a hot dog. But then you’ve lost your focus. With songwriting, ideas don’t just run up to you while you’re driving to the store or something. To have something really significant to write about, you really need to spend time just cogitating a bit.”

The seeds of such cogitation for Keen were planted in the mid ‘70s when he befriended an unknown songwriting neighbor while attending Texas A&M. His name was Lyle Lovett. Their years of playing and writing songs together on Keen’s porch were chronicled on the mutually composed This Old Porch (The Front Porch Song). It has remained a vital part of Keen’s concert repertoire (and, frequently, Lovett’s) ever since.

“It’s a completely different perspective when I wrote with Robert because we were friends first,” Lovett said. “I just remember hanging out with him, playing songs and guitar together. It’s great to watch the world get that same feeling I used to get from sitting in that chair next to him and listening to him play.

“He is such an engaging and personable performer. It’s just nice to see that finally translate to the rest of the world.”

All of which begs the question, how did the world outside of Texas hear about Keen? His songs have hardly been radio staples, although The Road Goes on Forever gained a new life in the early ‘90s when fellow Texan Joe Ely recorded it. And Merry Christmas from the Family has been covered by numerous country acts (including Central Kentucky’s Montgomery Gentry), although Keen’s blueprint version is the one that tends to pop up most around holiday time.

The answer isn’t complicated. Keen simply fortified a reputation sparked by the popularity of a few renegade songs with relentless touring. Eventually, audiences discovered a larger artistic profile.

“By and large these days I have tons of fans that have either just found out about me recently or have known about me for years but never got to see a show until now. This is where the function of consistently being on the road comes in.

“When I first got out of college and moved to Austin for awhile, the word on the street was, ‘Man, you’ve got to hear (the veteran pop, soul and jazz inclined rock band) NRBQ.’ And the reason you had to see them was because they played all the time. And if you went to see them again, you weren’t seeing the same show you saw last time. You saw something different by guys who were fabulous musicians and sang really cool songs. But you found out about them because they toured all the time.”

The formula, at least in Lexington has paid off. Having established his performance reputation locally with late ‘90s shows at the long defunct Lynagh’s Music Club, Keen has gone on to bigger performance pastures. On Thursday, he will headline his third Opera House concert in as many years.”

“Sure, I think a lot of the stuff that’s going on for me now is filtered around certain songs like the Christmas song or The Road Goes On Forever. They’ve really found their way out to the counter culture. We see a lot of people like that at the shows. They go, ‘I heard you were playing here and that you wrote those songs.

“Luckily, I still have a burning desire to write more, and to write really good songs. It’s a task I haven’t completed at all.”

Robert Earl Keen, Todd Snider and Bruce Robison perform at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Lexington Opera House. Tickets are $22.50, $27.50, $32.50. Call (859) 233-3535, (800) 745-3000.

genesis 1973-2007 live

Out to break the world record for most boxed set anthologies by an internationally established rock band is Genesis, ‘70s prog rockers-turned-‘80s pop stars. The ensemble turned out two separate boxes beginning in 1998 devoted to archival material. Starting two years ago, though, all of its studio recordings (save the 1969 debut) were remastered to 5.1 specifications and repackaged with loads of DVD treats and unreleased goodies. That series came to a conclusion last Thanksgiving with the release of 1970-1975, the collection that rightly restored the glory of the band’s early adventures with a very young and very wild Peter Gabriel.

So what is left? Well, the band’s concert recordings, for one. Thus we now have a big black box titled 1973-2007 Live. The title is something of a lie though. The box actually stops at 1992 after Phil Collins’ final tour with Genesis (chronicled on the lopsided two-disc The Way We Walk). Live Over Europe, which documented a 2007 reunion tour, isn’t included although there is a space conveniently reserved for it in the box along with a card stating the album is “available from all good retailers.”

But 1973-2007 Live isn’t the inessential indulgence suggested by such a marketing ploy. Three of its five albums wonderfully recall the band’s most fruitfully creative era.

Genesis Live and the previously unreleased Live at the Rainbow capture the primitive glory years. The liner notes claim both albums were pulled from concerts in February 1973, which doesn’t seem possible. Genesis Live relies mostly on darker material from the early ‘70s albums Trespass, Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot while Rainbow, save for the epic Supper’s Ready, is exclusively devoted to the breakthrough Selling England by the Pound.

The Gabriel era discs are wondrous stuff indeed for the die-hards. But in all honesty, the disc with the richest musical voice is actually 1977’s Seconds Out, which comes from the initial tours with Collins at the helm.

1981’s Three Sides Live is more troubling for veteran fans, as it delves more into Genesis’ MTV period (but nowhere near so as The Way We Walk). Still, autumnal relics like Me and Sarah Jane and Duchess satisfy, as do recreations of such earlier wintry delights as One for the Vine and The Fountain of Salmacis.

Again, Seconds Out is the standout here. Its mix of Gabriel-era greats (Firth of Fifth, The Cinema Show) and early Collins gems (Afterglow, Dance on a Volcano) along with some of guitarist Steve Hackett’s most sublime recorded playing and an already brilliant sound design that the 5.1 mix heightens even more, qualifies it as the greatest stage document in this mighty black box.

miley cyrus onstage last night at rupp arena. photo by herald-leader staff photographer mark cornelison.

Strolling down on a walkway last night at Rupp Arena to sing a fairly unadorned ballad called These Four Walls, Miley Cyrus appeared considerably older than her 16 years. Decked out in a short black dress and scratching a head full of thick brown locks, the still reigning teen pop queen looked as if she had already had a hard night.

In a way she had. With 18,000 fans screaming her on - at least, initially - Cyrus had, in the first half hour of a 90 minute performance, bounced between massive scaffolds that a team of 10 dancers dragged around the stage (during the show-opening Breakout), fell backward into a centerstage pit (only to return aquatically on a video screen during Bottom of the Ocean) and soared on wires near the arena roof (for Fly on the Wall).

Shoot, a night like that would wear anyone out. But such theatrics didn’t really spell out the stylistic shift Cyrus seems to be in the midst of. This was not the bright eyed Hannah Montana of just a year or two ago in many ways. Much of the evening revolved around guitar saturated tunes that Cyrus simply didn’t have the vocal pipes for. Her singing, noticeably lower and coarser than we’ve come to expect, sounded like a young but still smoky Stevie Nicks.

But here’s the thing. Imperfect as her voice was, at least she was indeed singing. This wasn’t some push button show with body mics and lip synchs substituting for an actual voice or even a production where vocals were little more than window dressing for dance moves. Sure, the show was heavily choreographed, from the grand piano that rose out of the pit to the mid-air motorcycle Cyrus took for a spin during a cover of the Joan Jett anthem I Love Rock and Roll. But the singing, warts and all, was very real.

The impression Cyrus’ production left, though, was curious. Its amped up, rock savvy and overall assertive tone certainly befits her age. But in looking around the arena last night, her audience, if anything has decreased in age. The number of 10-and-under year old girls was plentiful. So was a noticeable level of disconnect that appeared as the show progressed. When I Love Rock and Roll rolled around, Cyrus might as well have been singing in Portuguese. The kids sitting around me appeared taken briefly by the sight of flying motor bike, but found little connection with the song itself. After Cyrus rode by, they turned their attention to playing with a pair of blue glow sticks. Now that’s entertainment. 

It’s not like the audience was bored by any of this. The youthful crowd of 18,000 (minus the 30% or so that were parents) still made a mighty shriek when the lights fell. They also came alive when the radio hit Party in the U.S.A. was uncorked late into the show.

But one - namely me, an elder by any standard in last night’s crowd - was left with the notion that this very youngish crowd wasn’t always on the same page as Cyrus. Maybe they expected more of a cheery dance party. Maybe they planned on more of a safe pop exercise. They were bits of both on display last night. But mostly what was promoted was the growing pains and celebration of a teen idol clearing on the path to moving on.

The singer’s older, more liberally tattooed and Ashland-raised sibling, Trace Cyrus, opened the evening with his Los Angeles band Metro Station. Its half hour set went heavy on more expected dance pop fare like Seventeen Forever and Shake. If anything, Brother Cyrus overplayed the role of rock star to the point of sounding almost desperate when attempting to engage the crowd.

“I want everyone to bounce on this one,” he said. “C’mon. I’m serious.”

lyle lovett performing last night at the norton center for the arts' newlin hall in danville. photo by kirk schlea.

DANVILLE - “I remember some of you folks,” uttered Lyle Lovett after one of his signature tunes, Here I Am, served as a reintroduction last night at the Norton Center for the Arts.

And well he should. The famed Texas song stylist played the Danville venue a mere eight months ago. But that was when he was alone onstage with fellow musical scribe John Hiatt. Last night, the sound was considerably saucier with the swing, country and soul preferences of the singer’s Large Band igniting tunes from nine different Lovett albums. Sure, the joyous genre-jumping Lovett and his Large Band are known for in concert prevailed. But so did a plentiful number of surprises.

To begin with, this was a slightly slimmer Large Band - a mere 14 players, including the singer. The lineup featured neither a brass section nor veteran Large Band vocalist Francine Reed. But in their place were such engaging new recruits as bluegrass/new grass fiddler Luke Bulla and session guitarist Dean Parks (now on his first tour with Lovett after recording with him for 18 years). Longtime pal John Hagen on cello. and the devastatingly soulful vocal trio of Sweet Pea Atkinson, Sir Harry Bowens and Willie Green, Jr. were among the returnees.

Watching this configuration of artists in action was a continual thrill as it dug into the ebbs and flows of Lovett’s material. The Atkinson/Bowens/Green gang, for example, clucked madly like chickens - well, more like kids imitating chickens - on the new Lovett barnyard romp Farmer Brown. A few tunes later they were hammering down the vocal foundation within the darkly resolute affirmation I Will Rise Up.

The rest of the Large Band proved to be even more adaptable. At one point, Lovett trimmed it to a mere quartet singing around a single microphone. That splinter group was assigned a bluegrass-flavored saga of culinary adultery titled Pantry, one of five tunes offered from the singer’s new Natural Forces album. A moderately larger grouping took on Loretta, the extraordinary Townes Van Zandt tale of restless and reckless love which benefited highly from subtle harmonies by mandolinist Keith Sewell.

And what of Lovett himself? Well, the Long Tall Texan still ruled this merry roost by letting his clear Lone Star tenor spark the insular country inspiration of Natural Forces‘ title tune as well as the more traditional honky tonk inclinations of If I Was the Man You Wanted, a song that dated back to his 1986 debut album.

For the title track off of 2003’s My Baby Don’t Tolerate, Lovett became the resolute bluesman, singing the song’s title like a hardened mantra against a band groove that sounded less like Texas and whole lot like late ‘50s electric blues out of Chicago.

And, yes, Lovett can still spin a good yarn onstage. When introducing It’s Rock and Roll, a 30 year old tune that made its recorded debut on Natural Forces, Lovett recalled how he and the song’s co-writer, Robert Earl Keen, were trying to design music for a theatre group while the two were students at Texas A&M.

“If you went to Texas A&M, you would realize what a strange combination of words that is - ‘Texas A&M’ and ‘theatre group.’”

There were crowd favorites too - like the murderously wonderful L.A. County and the rootsy sermonette Church, which served as the 2 ¾ hour performance’s lone encore. But they were far fewer in number this time out, which was fine. By allowing music from Natural Forces, 2007’s It’s Not Big It’s Large and My Baby Don’t Tolerate to dominate the program amd with a fetchingly realigned Large Band engineering the ride, Lovett fashioned this return trip to Danville into a suitably robust, Texas-sized treat.

the man, quite literally, behind the guitar: leo kottke.

How many artists do you know that apologize to an audience for its applause?

Well, put Leo Kottke at the top of the list as of last night. After taking the stage at the Kentucky Theatre for a typically stunning performance of 6-and-12 string guitar music, the lights stayed low for a beat or two, causing the crowd to extend their vocal greeting. Hey, nobody had a gun to their heads. The patrons in the house seemed happy to whoop it up for their acoustic guitar hero.

“Sorry,” Kottke replied in the same sleepy baritone voice that colored roughly one-third of his performance repertoire. “I didn’t mean to make you clap so long.”

Right there you had a key to Kottke’s performance persona. Oh sure, his guitars sang as wildly as ever with compositions that moved along with the grace and pace of a country blues while displaying an almost symphonic denseness. But the remarks - the opening as well as all kinds of wonderfully off-centre stories peppered throughout the evening - again proved as indicative of Kottke’s crafty invention as his playing.

Last night there were stories of playing a gig near an aspirin factory, a brief comparison study of Chester Gould (the creator of Dick Tracy) and William Faulkner, Emmylou Harris’ explanation for how she was able to harmonize in the past with Kottke (”When you go flat, I go with you - just not as far”), a reflection on the first complete sentence uttered by his daughter (”Daddy, don’t sing”) and the virtues of performing at a funeral (”No one will ask you to play Pachelbel’s Canon there”). And, of course, there were the sublime non sequiturs (”That sounds like something Alphonse D’Amato might say, not me”).

These spoken interludes, as have always been the case with Kottke concerts, were not some purposeful and pre-planned stabs for aloof laughs . These fragments of color commentary - some self-effacing, some unavoidably fragmented - weren’t the tools of a character. His humor and stories were entirely his own spontaneous creations that humanized his music all the more.

And the playing? Well it was remarkable. A new, unrecorded composition titled Ants was something of a tour-de-force with extraordinary dynamics. There were shades of neo-classicism that guitar giants like Ralph Towner often bring their music along with bold displays of harmony.

Ditto for the Carla Bley meditation Jesus Maria, a tune the guitarist said he learned after watching vibraphone great Gary Burton play it in opening sets for Kottke concerts decades ago. Kottle has been performing it for years, although last night’s version managed to nicely rough up the harmonic edges a bit while keeping the tune’s contemplative beauty intact.

There were so many other delights, as well, including the wonderfully animated Snorkel, a bell-like reading of Duane Allman’s always exquisite Little Martha and the playful spree of the longtime concert favorite William Powell. And those were just the instrumentals. That same crumpled voice that welcomed the crowd brought to life the wistful Julie’s House as well as a cover of Lefty Frizzell’s Saginaw, Michigan - tunes that Harris recorded with Kottke in the early ‘80s, prompting the aforementioned remarks.

The killer though, was Everybody Lies - a tune of such placid but profound resignation that Kottke has recorded it twice on two of his finest albums (1978’s  Burnt Lips and 1989’s My Father’s Face). But last night’s version came with a sort of Halloween bonus. In another of his quietly riotous stories, Kottke confided that he modeled one of the tune’s characters on a sound tech he despised and ultimately fired from a tour.

“But in the song, I made him an attendant in an insane asylum.”

In pure Kottke fashion, though, the remark sounded affirmative and endearing. Come to think of it, the entire performance came across that way.

lyle lovett. photo by michael wilson.

It is record release day for Lyle Lovett - a Tuesday where his 14^th album, Natural Forces, is being unleashed unto the world.

Typically, such an occasion becomes the apex of a promotional push, a day loaded with TV appearances, performances and any number of exercises to capitalize on what is, in essence, “opening day” for a recording.

For Lovett, multiple Grammy Award winning songsmith, stylistically innovative bandleader and all around Texan, the day is something of breather. A fall duo tour with fellow songwriting pal John Hiatt concluded two days earlier. In less than a week, he will be back on the road for a month’s worth of shows with his Large Band, the brassy Americana army that has been his most visible performance vehicle of the past two decades.

That means while Natural Forces introduces the next edition of Lyle Lovett music, Lovett himself is back, briefly, in the only place he has ever called home - Texas.

“It’s exactly where I’ve lived all my life, on the same piece of ground I grew up on outside of Houston.”

To many, Lovett is modern embodiment of Texas music - its celebratory swing, its vigorous country soul and, most of all, its extraordinarily literate sense of storytelling. His songs are outlined with thieving hearts, family yarns and an unfailing pride in anything that hails from Lone Star territory.

In short, Lovett isn’t merely a Texas artist. He is the state’s unofficial cultural ambassador to the universe.

“All of that is high praise,” Lovett said by phone. “But I just feel that my music is a reflection of the music I’m drawn to. My intention with the songs I write is to say, ‘Hey, this is where I’m from.’”

On Natural Forces, the Texas inspirations are considerable. There are four new compositions (one of which, Pantry, is reprised with a bluegrass arrangement), six tunes penned by fellow Texas songwriters that have long been friends and mentoring influences and a song (It’s Rock and Roll) he co-wrote nearly three decades ago with fellow Lone Star scribe Robert Earl Keen.

“My father once told me that if I went through life with at least two best friends, I was set,” Keen said. “I went, ‘What are you talking about? I’ve got lots of friends.’ But sure enough, he was right. And to say I have had Lyle as a best friend all these years has been wonderful.”

For Lovett, the initial songwriting pull came from the masters - Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Vince Bell and the like. But not even Texas could contain Lovett’s expanding celebrity status as the ‘90s progressed. He toured internationally and took regular turns as an actor in television and film, including roles in five Robert Altman movies. But as the chorus of Natural Forces‘ title tune states, “home is where my horse is.” As such, Lovett devoted his sublime 1998 double-disc album Step Inside This House entirely to the music of his Texas inspirations. He does the same on the better half of Natural Forces.

“With Natural Forces, I knew going in that I didn’t have 10 new songs of my own that I was thrilled about recording,” Lovett said. “But those I did have I didn’t want to get any older. I was very excited about recording them. The other songs were first considered for Step Inside This House. They have long been part of my musical life. I didn’t learn anything new for this record. These were songs I’ve played and known for years.”

Listen to Natural Forces as a whole and it is good bet that, unless you already know the outside material, you won’t be able to distinguish Lovett the songwriter from Lovett the Texas interpreter. The songs share similar tones, temperaments and human detail. At its best, as on Lovett’s Empty Blue Shoes, the mood is stark to the point of being impressionistic.

“I met Lyle in Dallas at a club that’s now gone,” said guitarist Leo Kottke who shared numerous concert bills with Lovett following the release of the Texan’s self-titled debut album in 1986.

“I was in the dressing room and I could hear Lyle walk onstage. He hadn’t sung a note yet. He just walked onstage and the room instantly became quiet. Some people can just immediately fill a stage. Lyle is one of them.”

Of course, the ensemble Lovett has favored in filling performance rooms over the years has been his Large Band. It has accompanied Lovett at various Lexington venues over the past 22 years, from his local debut at the long-defunct Rhinestone’s on Athens-Boonesboro Rd. in 1988 to a headlining performance at Rupp Arena in 2001.

“That’s the beauty of that band - so many of us have played together for so many years. But that’s also the part that doesn’t seem real because I remember that first Lexington gig in 1988. It does not seem like it was over 20 years ago.

“You know, I was asked early on in interviews about my goals. People would ask, ‘What would success mean for you?’ The answer I always used to give was, ‘Success would be the ability to continue doing something I love to do.’ All these years later, that’s still my definition. To do something I love without feeling guilty because I have to also devote time to another job. To be able to legitimately engage in this music all the time…I mean, there is just not a better feeling. That’s the blessing of it all.”

Lyle Lovett and his Large Band performs at 8:30 p.m. Friday at the Norton Center for the Arts at Centre College in Danville. Tickets are $60-125. Call (877) 448-7469.

leo kottke.

In a recording and performance career that spans four full decades, Leo Kottke remains an original.

Onstage, he seemingly brings little with him outside of a pair of acoustic guitars - usually 6 and 12 string models. But within his playing is an assimilation of harmonic, stylistic and improvisational capabilities that merge into music that is as unparalleled as it is indefinable.

But he matches such virtuosity with devilishly constructed but wonderfully askew between-song stories. So one moment you’re taken in by the earthy folkish warmth he lends to longtime concert favorites like Tom T. Hall’s Pamela Brown or his own masterful instrumental suite Bigger Situation. The next you’re doubling over laughing as Kottke reminisces about smuggling baggettes onto submarines while serving in the Navy so they could be used as filters for torpedo fuel.

“They still let me play,” Kottke said last week by phone from Seattle. “That’s the amazing thing. I had no idea I would still be doing this. I thought my career would be all over, at the most, in about 10 years.

When it was suggested that the key to career longevity might be his distinctive blend of instrumental daring and wildly off-center storytelling, Kottke hesitantly agrees.

“That may be part of it. There aren’t many brands like me available to the consumer.”

“Even with all his virtuosity, the first thing I noticed about Leo was how intent he was in pushing ahead with his playing,” said Lyle Lovett, who regularly opened concerts for Kottke in the mid ‘80s. “Guitarists everywhere were going out and buying 12 strings to try and play like him. But Leo was always looking for the next thing.”

To say that chance played a role in bringing Kottke to the guitar and, more important, to the stylistic innovators that helped him forge a commanding voice on the instrument, is not an understatement. He took up violin at age five and then moved on to trombone. He settled on guitar, primarily because “it made me happy.”

“It really hit me hard,” Kottke said. “By the time I was 11, everything took a back seat to the guitar. There was never a real effort to turn all of it into a job. I knew that playing music was something I needed. And when I found the guitar, I finally discovered the instrument I needed. That was enough. It was more than enough. But to make a living playing it? Well, that’s something I still can’t quite get around.”

This year marks the 40^th anniversary of 6 and 12 String Guitar, the recording that largely introduced the world to Kottke. Two independent recordings preceded it, but 6 and 12 String Guitar was released on the Tacoma label, an enterprise run by the guitarist who served as a mentoring force for Kottke - John Fahey.

“I had heard a lot of the great Delta players like (Mississippi) John  Hurt and people like (Appalachian banjoists) Frank Proffitt and Obray Ramsey, and even some jazzers like (guitarist) Kenny Burrell. But they were all kind of discreet to me. John put them all together. And he did it at a pancreatic level. It was so organic that there was no self-consciousness whatsoever.

“But the other thing about John was that his whole effect was metaphysical. It was as if music was a metaphor. Usually music is just itself. It kind of overrides and subsumes metaphor. Not with John. He discovered this whole attitude, this whole realm that was out there. He was like Marco Polo.”

Such stylistic innovation fuels Kottke’s music, as well. There have been all kinds of exemplary recordings since 6 and 12 String guitar, including the orchestral shadings of 1976’s Leo Kottke, the compositional calm of 1986’s A Shout Toward Noon, the playful pop experimentation of 1994’s Rickie Lee Jones-produced Peculiaroso and the collaborative fire struck with Phish bassist Mike Gordon on 2005’s Sixty Six Steps. When asked if he has a favorite recording, Kottke politely balked.

“The minute I think I have one, it turns out I actually hate it. Or the opposite happens. I used to be deeply ashamed of a record called Burnt Lips (an extraordinary 1978 album of unaccompanied vocal and instrumental tunes). The last time I heard it, I thought, ‘You know, this isn’t so bad.’”

The constant for Kottke, though, remains concert performance. He considers stage work, after 40 years, a privilege. That assertion was instilled long ago when the guitarist received a glimpse of an artist that had lost such a privilege.

“This was a long time ago. I played this old theatre in Miami, a really nice, kind of miniature concert hall. From the time of the soundcheck until I was leaving the building that night there was this one guy sitting in a folding chair. As far as I could tell, he was in his 80s. He never said anything. He never stood up. But he was there for the whole night. So I asked, ‘What the hell is that guy doing there?’ I was told he was the first act to ever play that theatre. He was a tap dancer, but now he comes to every show and just sits there for the whole thing.

“So, yes, it is a privilege to still play. There is something very humbling in that for me.”

Leo Kottke perform at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Kentucky Theatre, 214 E. Main. Tickets are $24.50. Call (859) 231-7924.

r.e.m.: live at the olympia

“This is not a show,” announces bassist Mike Mills through a bullhorn at the onset of the second R.E.M. concert album in two years. Such a qualifying intro winds up better serving the veteran Georgia band than the audiences crammed into the 19^th century Dublin theatre known as the Olympia. That’s because the five night Irish run during the summer of 2007 that now gives us the 39 songs on Live at the Olympia was intended as a string of working rehearsals before the band recorded its redemptive Accelerate album. Yet, outside of a false start here and a vocal hiccup there, nothing reflects a practicum-like environment. That’s pretty remarkable considering what winds up on Live at the Olympia.

For R.E.M., the Olympia concerts were a chance to give legs to nearly a dozen tunes being readied for Accelerate. Two of them - the fuzzy psychedelic romp Staring Down the Barrel of the Middle Distance and the jagged ballad On the Fly - were left off the record and appear here for the first time. But Live at the Olympia’s ultimate charm is its ability to reconnect R.E.M. with its past as it prepared for what was then its future. Along with the wealth of Accelerate-related music is a stunning assemblage of vintage material that favors obscurities over hits.

How old are we talking here? How about four of the five songs from the 1982 debut EP disc Chronic Town? How about five tunes from the mystic, muddy 1985 ceremony that was Fables of the Reconstruction? And then there are the obscurities, like Monster’s rampaging Circus Envy, New Adventures in Hi-Fi’s gloom-meets-glam confessional New Test Leper or the lost soundtrack gem Romance that wound up on 1988’s Eponymous.

Mills, guitarist Peter Buck and singer Michael Stipe don’t attack these relics with the cracked whip immediacy they employed in the ‘80s when they were roughly half their current age. But there is clearly a vital electric vigor that connects the old and new

The album opening crunch of Accelerate’s Living Well is the Best Revenge bleeds directly into 1984’s chiming, churning Second Guessing. The piano/backbeat melody of the 1996 pop charmer Electrolite (which is as close as Live at the Olympia comes to hit territory) neatly prefaces the jacked up, hook-heavy Man Sized Wreath. And in Live at the Olympia’s greatest mash up of the then and now, the propulsive Fables neo-hit Driver 8 crashes into the proto-punk gusto of Accelerate’s Horse to Water.

“We’re R.E.M. and this is what we do when you’re not looking,” jokes Stipe before the 1987 nugget Disturbance at the Heron House comes into focus. Given the breadth of the drive and spirit tied into the time traveling on Live at the Olympia, maybe we should glance away more often.

kenny barron. photo by carol friedman.

If you had only the initial moments of his splendid solo piano concert last night at the University of Louisville’s Comstock Hall to go by, you might have pegged jazz pianist Kenny Barron as something of a standards man. His touch was light and approachable, his tone was clean and melodic and his repertoire was full of the familiar - namely, ample inclusions from the Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn songbook along with such often-covered covers as How Deep is the Ocean, Love Walked In and Body and Soul. And truth be told, if the performance delved no deeper than that, the evening would have still wound up in the win column.

There was such a subtle punctuation to Barron’s playing, as in the rumble of left hand blues in Strayhorn’s Isfahon and the even gentler right hand sweeps during Melancholia (part of a four song Ellington/Strayhorn medley) that the soulfulness inherent in the tunes was effortlessly enhanced.

But Barron proved a wily player, as well. You don’t clock time with greats like Freddie Hubbard and Stanley Turrentine on top of a famed five year stint in the mid ‘60s with Dizzy Gillespie and not pick up a few tricks. On the original New York Attitude, Barron let loose with runs that, in the tune’s madder moments, possessed the danger level of a cab ride through Midtown Manhattan. But Calypso, another Barron composition, favored dynamics over tension for a bright, lyrical, tropically inspired bounce.

As Barron is deeply versed in the music of Thelonious Monk (he is a co-founder of the great Monk tribute ensemble Sphere), there was also room in the performance for the modal mischief and overt playfulness of Well You Needn’t. But the gems of the night were two other Barron works - the decades old Lullaby and a tribute to South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim titled Song for Abdullah. Within their sparsely designed frameworks, Barron created passages of unhurried lyrical warmth balanced by the solemnity of a hymn.

Neither could be classified a standard. Yet. But the unforced elegance, soulful charm and emotive beauty that defined the performance suggested another learned pianist a few decades down the pike may be exploring Barron’s music with the same reverence he afforded the Ellington generation last night.