((UPDATE: I went back to look, and, yes, Keen's last two studio albums — "What I Really Mean" and "Farm Fresh Onions" — were produced by Rich Brotherton. I listened to them both again yesterday and, yes, they are still my two least-favorite Keen albums. Sure am glad to see Lloyd Maines again.))
I had the perfect opening for this.
You know, after hearing the saxophone-tainted title track on Robert Earl Keen's last studio album "What I Really Mean," I had said way back in my previous blog that Robert Earl Keen had gone and gotten old on us, or grown up, or moved on, or something.
And I have experiences with that. Witnessed it first-hand with Jerry Jeff Walker, who, sometime about 1996 decided that he'd had about enough of being "Up Against The Wall, Redneck Mother," had about enough of those assholes sloshing their beer and shouting "Sangria WIne!" and decided to write and perform what and how he felt like. About 1999, he growled at us all in a San Angelo honky-tonk, something to the effect of "I played the shit you want to hear, now I'm gonna play what I want."
And I'm cool with that. I can't expect Jerry Jeff (or Robert Earl) to stay unchanged any more than I can stay the hellraiser that I was in the 1990s.
Anyway, so when I hear two songs from Keen's newest album, "The Rose Hotel" — the title track and the blissful "Village Inn" (yeah, basically the hotel/motel set) — and they have an "old Keen" feel to them, I'm really excited.
I'm thinking, I'm gonna write "Did Robert Earl Keen go back to his old sound, or did I grow up, too?"
Well, it's not that simple, of course. I opened up the CD after I bought it yesterday to see it was produced by Lloyd Maines (score!) and the musicians included Bryan Duckworth, which just made my heart glad. (I never knew why exactly Duckworth left the band, but I'd always imagined something bad.)
And true enough, "The Rose Hotel" on one end of the album, "Village Inn" on the other end and "The Man Behind the Drums" have an old-school feel with Keen's unapologetically Keen-esque (sorry, I just ran out of adjectives, good thing I didn't try for that music writer gig) voice front and center.
But then there's the odd cover of Townes Van Zandt's "Flying Shoes." Really, I don't mind re-imagining a song at all. In fact, I think a cover should re-imagine a song. (Can you imagine why George Strait would have covered Keen's "Maria," and, with all that Strait had at his disposal, have it sound just like Keen's version?) But the heavy drum track just doesn't fit. I mean, if you could separate the song from Van Zandt, and take it on its own, I guess it would be pretty good. But this is one of those songs that can't be separated from the despair and the ache that Townes infused it with. Besides, Lyle Lovett's cover of the song on "Step Inside this House" is pretty definitve.
And "Throwing Rocks" is a a rock song indeed, complete with background singers the Stones would have been proud of. It's not a bad song at all, I kinda dig it. Maybe an old Keenoid can move on, after all.
Since "Gravitational Forces," Keen can't resist the oddball song, and while "10,000 Chinese Walk Into a Bar" is not as weird as the title track to "Gravitational Forces" — beautifully described by Texas Music magazine as a "spoken-word stream-of-somethingness" — it's just not doing it for me. No, not even with supporting vocals by Billy Bob Thornton. Or maybe because of that.
"Something I Do" is the flip side of "Dreadful Selfish Crime." An ode to time wasted, without the regret or the soul of the earlier song, but with a smart-ass attitude and a faint reggae beat.
(You know, back in the day, my favorite San Angelo band, NDC, spontaneously performed a reggae version of a Robert Earl Keen song. They just made it up on the spot and it KICKED ASS. Or I thought it did. The fact that I can't remember what song it was, might be a clue to whether it was really good or not.)
I haven't given the back end of the album as much of a listen as I should have yet. I still haven't figured what "Goodbye Cleveland" or "On and On" are about.
But Keen leaves us laughing with "Wireless in Heaven," the countriest song of the bunch, descending into a bluegrassy number that Bill Monroe could not have predicted and would definitely not approve of.
So, is the album any good? Yeah, I think you'll like it. It's definitely Keen's best album since he released "Gravitational Forces" on Sept. 11, 2001.
(Note to reader: It is nearly impossible to write about music while listening to your 2-year-old play 3 musical toys at once. Elmo is a terrible background singer. Maybe later tonight I'll clean this blog up a bit.)
No clean up needed
Posted by: Robert Adams | November 20, 2009 at 12:13 PM