Lone Star Crooner: Robert Earl Keen, 'The Rose Hotel'

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ROBERT EARL KEEN is more a legend than a celebrity. For more than 25 years, the Houston native has been writing smart, plucky songs about misfits and barflies and has recorded a string of well-received albums, including the landmark "A Bigger Piece of Sky" in 1993 and "Picnic" in 1997.

More crucially, however, Keen has earned a reputation as one of the Lone Star State's most exciting showmen, showcasing his crack backing band's technical prowess and his own raconteur charm. Touring heavily throughout the year, he plays to diverse crowds of frat boys, mainstream country fans, alt-country fans, NPR listeners, and people who just like really good music.

Even so, Keen remains something of a cult artist. He's never become a household name like his old friend and former housemate Lyle Lovett or fellow Texan George Strait; instead, he's a musician's musician. Perhaps his latest album, "The Rose Hotel," will change all that. Released on Lost Highway Records (home of Lovett, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams and Ryan Adams), it's a strikingly full-sounding album that shows his considerable range as a songwriter and storyteller.

As he prepares to rattle the walls at the Birchmere, Express asked him to talk about labels, cameos, hotels and "phantonyms."

» EXPRESS: Is the Rose Hotel a real place?
» KEEN: Only in my mind. To me, that song occurs somewhere in the middle of a big city. The way that happened is, I'm originally from Houston, and I've tried for years to write a real cityscape song, one that really felt like was in the heart of some city, whether it was a vibrant city or dilapidated, it doesn't really matter.

Believe it or not, it totally eluded me. I could never put it together. It always seemed to fall apart or seemed fake or fictitious or weird. But that one, I felt like I just nailed in that the thoughts of the characters. It didn't get wild and outlandish, but there's a lot of mystery. Is there a Rose Hotel? I'm sure there is, but I'm not writing a commercial for it here.

» EXPRESS: Did you have a general impression you wanted to convey on "The Rose Hotel"?
» KEEN: I wanted this record to be sonically fat --strong and robust. In that, when I talked to Lloyd Maines about producing the record, I told him I wanted a lot of percussion and a lot of voices. I want to fill up that — what do they call it? Annular space, the space between the pipe and the hole. I wanted fill up all that space. I really felt like the songs were good and strong. It's not [Bob Dylan's]" John Wesley Harding" or [Willie Nelson's] "The Red-Headed Stranger" or something. It's not some big concept record. It's just a record with a bunch of really good songs. There's no big message there. What I wanted was for them to be cohesive sonically.

» EXPRESS: At times it almost sounds like a rock record, especially on "10,000 Chinese Walk Into a Bar."
» KEEN: Here's the deal. This is my band, and we're been touring for the better part of 15 years together. They've been making all the records since 1997. We just get in there and feel the songs pit. That is an in-your-face song, and it's a fun song, so we wanted it to sound in-your-face and fun. There's never any talk about this has to be a country song or this has to be a rock song. It's more about what works with the song. That one, I wanted it to be jangly and noisy and fun. It's representative of all that bar chatter — all the jokes and stories and stuff. Pull up a chair and stay all night.

» EXPRESS: How did you end up back on Lost Highway for this album?
» KEEN: When I left, it was just a miscommunication. So I was on this other label for a while, and when I did this record, I thought, I always got along with Luke [Lewis], and I always liked Lost Highway, so what the heck. I'd just as soon go back to them. That was it.

» EXPRESS: You've changed labels often throughout your career. Has that been a concerted effort to keep things fresh?
» KEEN: For me it's been stumbling through the dark. Some were intentional; some were accidental. None of them have been terrible, and Lost Highway was one that I always remembered as being a good experience and I've always wondered what I was thinking when I left. So I went hat in my hand and they said, we'd be glad to have you. They do a great job. It's tough out there. In the past, I've never had much sympathy for record companies, but the guys who are still hanging in there and doing a good job, I have a lot of sympathy for them. They work really hard.

» EXPRESS: Has that changed how you do what you do?
» KEEN: Certainly. You don't know what's going to come around the next corner. There were these projections around 2004 about how much the Internet was affecting the CD sales and stuff like that. Well, nobody really predicted how incredibly popular iTunes and all the online sales have become. You can see the end of CD sales in retail stores, so that's what everybody's thinking. Everybody's trying to figure out at least how to make a business out of this. I don't know if there's any real answer as far as what I do. I sat around for four years really not making records thinking there would be an answer, and then I realized there's not! I just have to go ahead and do what I do, which is write songs, make records.

» EXPRESS: You've kept that line-up of backing musicians for a long time. What about them lets you do what you do?
» KEEN: If I didn't have these guys, I don't know if I could do this at all. They can do damn near anything I want them to do. If I wanted to make a Celtic record, I could make a Celtic record. If I wanted to make a solid full-blown Buck Owens country record, I could make a country record. If I wanted to make an R.E.M. record, I could make an R.E.M. record. I can make whatever I want. So then, right there, open to whatever I want to write, which allows me to keep form painting myself into a corner.

» EXPRESS: It's rare to see bands like that who are as good on stage as they are in the studio.
» KEEN: Everybody in this band likes to be out on stage as much as anything else they do. Otherwise, we wouldn't be doing it. However, sometimes that security and that peace that comes with staying at home and doing records and being a studio musician, they're all qualified to do that, but they just like being up on stage as much as I do.

» EXPRESS: How did you end up working with Greg Brown and Billy Bob Thornton on this album?

» KEEN: I'm a huge fan of Greg's. He knows who I am, but I don't bother him. We were fixing to record his song "Laughing River," and Rich [Brotherton] said Greg was going to be in town the next night. He was playing the Cactus Cafe. I called him up and told him we were doing his song and asked if he wanted to come sing on it. He said, Well, I don't really have a car. So I said, Well, I'll come pick you up, take you out here, bring you back, you don't even have to think about it except the part where you're singing. And then you don't even have to think about that because you're singing your own song. Pretty much no thought process going on here. I'm making it as easy as possible on you. So that was really cool. And it turned out he really hadn't been in Texas for 15 years.

I read a thing in the New York Times the other day about something called a "phantonym," which is a word that you think means a certain thing but it doesn't mean that at all. They mentioned the word fortuitous, and the general consensus is that people think it means "good luck." But it doesn't. It means "just by chance." So the fact was, this was fortuitous because just by chance, Greg was in town the day we were going to record the song.

The other one was my road manager, Toby Scott, was in a bar and ran into Billy Bob, and Billy Bob said he was a big fan of mine and gave Toby his phone number. Most of the time when stars tell me to call them, I never do because I don't know what to say. But this one, just for the heck of it I thought OK I'll call him. So I called him. We talked for a long time, and a couple of days later, I thought, You know what? This song "10,000 Chinese Walk Into a Bar" would be perfect for him to sing on. So I called him back, and he said, Well, I'm not going to be in town but you can send it and I'll do the parts and send it back to you. I said that sounded great.

The verse that he does, which is one about the man with the duct tape, is a tribute to the great Blaze Foley, who lived in Austin. He was a folk singer, slept in alleys, dug through dumpsters, and ended up getting murdered. They really did cover his coffin in duct tape. And he really did have this big love for duct tape. He was a real character and a really good musician. As a matter of fact, Merle Haggard covered one of his songs, called "If I Could Only Fly." Most of my stuff is just totally fictitious, but that one was inspired by Blaze. So I gave that to Billy Bob and he sang the shit out of it.

» EXPRESS: Another musician you sing about on "The Rose Hotel" is Levon Helm of The Band.
» KEEN: We went to the Ramble up there in Woodstock. They have this regular Saturday night jam, and they always have a special guest. And we were the special guest one night. Otherwise, I'd have never gotten that far up north to see something like that. Everybody in the band is a huge fan of The Band. There was a huge amount of anticipation about the whole gig anyway. Everybody was pretty excited. What we experienced was far and away better than anything we could have imagined. We were on this rockin-down-the rollin-highway high, and enjoying life and being glad we were all musicians. And Bill [Whitbeck] said we ought to write a song about it, so we just sat in the back of the bus and wrote that song.

» EXPRESS: You seem to have a very wide-ranging audience, with fans across the spectrum. Why do you think you can attract so many different kinds of people to your shows?
» KEEN: Well, I've been around a long time (laughs.) I've been around for the better part of 25 years, so you run through different kinds of audiences. It's like you're on the ocean — in "Finding Nemo" or something. Here's a bunch of turtles, here's a bunch of jellyfish, here's a bunch of silver fish. And you just keep running through these different schools of people. At this point, what's happened is I think I've touched on the fringes of some mass appeal where people just say you gotta go see this guy, and nobody cares too much about categorizing what I do anymore. I get all kinds and all ages. I used to have this joke where I was the Milton Bradley of music, where I appealed to everybody from 8 to 80. That joke has turned out to be true. Not necessarily fortuitous.

» EXPRESS: A lot of Texas musicians who seem to have that kind of broad audience and are similar uncategorizable.
» KEEN: I think you're right. Texas has always been an incredibly fertile ground for all kinds of music and really fantastic artists. You can't turn the corner here without hearing a different kind of take on something. If you say country music in Texas, are you talking about Bob Wills? Are you talking about George Strait? There's a pretty big difference. It's hard to say you're one thing or another. I'm too confused to tell you what I'm doing. I'm just really writing songs. That's what I do. I write songs and I put some music to them. Sometimes it sounds like country music, and sometimes it doesn't. That's why the band and I really work well together and why it really helps me to have those guys because we're not sitting there thinking about how we can take a song about this tea shop where old ladies go and make that into a country song? Well, we can't. So we don't.

» Birchmere, 3701 Mt. Vernon Ave., Alexandria, Va.; with Todd Snider and Bruce Robison; Wed., Oct. 21, 7:30 p.m.; $49.50; 703-549-7500.

» RELATED: "No Daytime Guy: Five songs to know before you go to see raucous Texas singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen." [Express, Nov. 2008]

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy Peter Figen