Thirty years after beginning a career defined by songwriting that tells sprawling tales from the American West, Robert Earl Keen visited Missoula during the fifth annual River City Roots Festival. In a conversation before his show, Keen talked about a long career defined by his earlier failures. Times are changing for the country legend but he’s had time to reflect and he’s never written better songs.
Q: You’ve said in other interviews that you would love to have been one of the great singers, but your gift has always been telling stories. Your songs have characters, plots and drama in them. Where do the stories come from and how do they keep coming?
A: I usually try to come from a point of truth and nonfiction. If it’s something that happened to me, I’ll flesh it out in a story-driven way. The fun part of telling a story is the way you can manipulate the characters and the narrative. Then it gets to be entertaining your self. I don’t want to say it happens all the time, because I certainly sit around and fret over which way things are going and then things don’t seem right. I like stories to come out where they seem plausible anyway. It’s something that I could always do.
Q: Are there consistent themes you use in your storytelling? Is there something you always come back to from album to album, song to song or even throughout your whole career?
A: I have a couple of themes. One theme is that I like to do as little as possible. When I’m writing in first person, sometimes my theme for a song is like the song from my most recent record, “Something I Do.” That seems to be a recurring theme for me. Another theme that seems to be recurring, particularly if I’m writing in first person, is that I get the hell out of here. So I must have some inner desire to do as little as possible then if it gets hard I get the hell out of here. I like the male characters to be noble and the female characters to be strong.
Q: It seems you’re singing a lot about the way things used to be like in the title track of the Rose Hotel where you sing about drifters in alleyways. But, at the same time you have a song called Wireless in Heaven that is a commentary on where things are going. After thirty years of playing music, is this you starting to feel melancholy or is it just your job as a songwriter to encompass everything?
A: I like to write about the past and I enjoy that old west genre, but I’m also fascinated with what is implied in the future. So, I kind of sometimes feel like I’m a little bit stuck in the middle and hope that I’m not running out of time. I’m kind of a melancholy guy.
Q: You and your band have been playing together for fifteen years. How important to your song writing is it to be familiar with your band and the way you guys are?
A: I really believe in making music, and I believe in entertaining people and I believe that’s all part of being consistent and I believe in taking care of the people that take care of you and that’s to say that the musicians that I play with are fantastic musicians and they can probably, if they really wanted to, play with anybody and they play with me. They’re loyal to me, so in return I’m loyal to them. And I also think that works as far as people like seeing a group of guys are girls or whatever come through with the same group all the time and not change it up. I think it’s bullshit that these guys carry on these names and there’s maybe only one guy who’s an original member or sometimes there’s not even an original member and I think that’s total horse shit. I don’t believe in that. When this band dissolves you won’t see me either. The whole idea is that the music we present are my songs, but it’s these guys that play it.
Q: On the song “10,000 Chinese Walk Into a Bar,” Billy Bob Thornton sings. How did that come to be?
A: He ran into my road manager, Toby, in the bar and told him that he was a big fan and told Toby to have me call him, so I called him. We were making the record at the time and I asked if he wanted to sing on it and he said ‘yea’. So, he sang on it and he sang all the parts and whipped it out in no time. It’s really impressive how hard and fast he worked. He’s somewhat of a controversial character but the one thing I know about him is he’s a damn hard worker and he can do it in a hurry.
Q: Your story telling and writing style has been compared to people like Cormac McCarthy because of the detailed and sometimes dusty southern atmospheres you create. How much does the southern gothic style play into your work?
A: Well, I like Southern Gothic. Not just Cormac. I like Flannery O’Connor and Larry Brown was a real big friend with this band and I like Faulkner to some degree. I like that stuff and I have a degree in literature so, I’ve read quite a bit of literature and I enjoy that but to compare me to Cormac McCarthy would be like comparing a swing set to Disney Land so that would be a hard comparison to make. I am a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy. I have ten signed first editions of Cormac’s stuff.
Q: Ever met him?
A: No, I don’t really care to. I don’t care to meet people who I really admire. Their magic is in their art not in their person. He might be a fine person, he might be a great guy, but I find that I can derive all the pleasure that I want out of the art that they put out and I don’t give a shit about the person because I don’t think the person gives a shit about the world, so I just as soon stay away from him. If I met someone I really admired, I wouldn’t say I wouldn’t tell them I really admire their work but I wouldn’t be surprised if they told me to fuck off.
Q: In the mid-80s you were having trouble getting signed to a record label and you had become frustrated and disillusioned with the popular country at the time and its polished sound. But, this album has a bit of a polished sound to it as well.
A: I know a lot more about going into the studio. I spend a lot more money in the studio and I’m a lot more comfortable in the studio. But what happened back then was, when you have no means at all of making records, you only sort of have one choice and that’s to hook up with some kind of label and no one was really interested so I was kind of frustrated because I felt like I never had quite the talent some other people did but I always had the drive. I always knew that I’d be in it for the long run and consequently I’ve been in it for longer than almost any of the people from 1985.
Q: You recently made it to number one on the Americana country charts, though. So, do you think country sensibilities are drifting back toward accepting the rawness that you deliver?
A: I really don’t pay too much attention to that. I just keep thinking of what I want to do next as far as writing songs or how the music should sound.
Q: So what’s coming next?
A: Shorter songs.
Q: Can you still say the same amount of stuff in shorter songs?
A: Not at all. As a matter of fact, it would be a whole new idea. It’d be more like a bumper sticker than a short story.
Q: What’s the song Rose Hotel about?
A: It’s about two people who just can’t get together. They were together, and they’re going to get together. They’re racing to get together. She’s a little more blasé about it and he’s a little frantic about it and she disappears and he misses his chance.
Q: How much of that story telling is metaphor and how much of it is direct truth?
A: I think it’s a lot of truth. I’d have to think for a while what the metaphor is but I think a lot of times we miss things by just seconds, by a breath, and it may be a life-changing event. I can think of a handful of times where I swore I just stood there for a second and looked out the window and looked at the sun or the moon and went one way when I was thinking of going another way and I can remember exactly what I was thinking. I was exactly thinking ‘this is a moment that I’ll remember because it’s going to be different than it was going in.’
Q: So, after you got your literature degree, what caused you to pursue songwriting instead of short stories and other fiction?
A: I was a lousy prose writer.
Q: I think I disagree.
A: No. For instance, there’s an art critic named Dave Hickey. He has a book called “Air Guitar” and he writes the most fabulous short stories in the whole world. They’re fabulous. They’re just mind-blowingly good. And the reason he’s an art critic is because he thinks he’s a shitty short story writer. So, maybe my prose is OK, but it’s not as good as Cormac’s prose or Larry Brown’s prose or people that I loved. And not that you can’t pick up a total piece of shit in the bookstore these days and go ‘this is nauseating!’
Q: So, what made you give music a shot after you decided you weren’t going to be a writer? How did you bridge that gap in writing styles?
A: Well, I’ve always just been drawn to songwriting. I love music. I started playing really late. When I was 18, I picked up a guitar and from the minute I started playing – and I’ll tell you, I’m not a great guitar player either – but I just love the sound of the guitar. I like the electric guitar, the acoustic guitar, the classical guitar and I can sit there for hours and just strum on the guitar. I just love them. So, that combined with the fact that I had this propensity to write rhyming poetry, it just fit. And it’s more enjoyable than hacking out on old typewriters. That’s just so solitary. I like the camaraderie of music.
Q: How about playing shows? Does that go along with this idea of camaraderie?
A: I love playing shows. Not all of them. But, I like being on stage better than being in life.
Q: What are you listening to these days?
A: I listen to the same stuff I’ve always listened to. I listen to blues and bluegrass. I love Freddy King, Albert King, Lightning Hopkins and Muddy Waters. I like classical music quite a bit. I think the whole deal is I don’t have a sense of what it’s about and I don’t try to deconstruct it. I just enjoy it. I’d love to be a great blues player, but I couldn’t be. I just don’t have it in me. So, I’m glad I have a style of music that I just like to listen to. For instance, I can’t listen to country music because I just try to deconstruct it. I love other songwriters. There are some that I admire greatly, like Todd Snider, Richard Thompson, those people are geniuses. It’s still my tendency to deconstruct it. Sometimes you just lose the pleasure of the song.
Q: It seems like you’re kind of down on yourself. You’ve already said you’re not a good prose writer.
A: Well, I’m not.
Q: And you’re not a good blues player.
A: I’m not. I’m a really good entertainer and I really can write the shit out of a song. I think that’s pretty good to have two out of how ever many you got. I’m a great father, I’m a good friend and I’m a good bandleader. I’m not down on myself. I’m just trying to be honest. I’ve been working on the guitar for thirty years, and I’m still just OK.