The Musical Box

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.