Robert Earl Keen – Can you patch together a feeling that’s going to stick with somebody ten years from now?
ND: Has that “Texas singer-songwriter” description outlived its usefulness for you?
REK: I’m just a performer. I’m proud of being a Texan. My stuff is salted and peppered with Texas images. But I could have come from Iceland. It doesn’t matter, I still would have become a songwriter.
ND: It seems like in the last couple of albums, there’s less geographic specificity. Is that conscious?
REK: I dunno. I keep looking for new ways to write stuff. I really try not to repeat myself too much. In the who-gives-a-shit category, I find I can write this kind of song or this kind of song…I’ve always had, I feel, a tremendous amount of knowledge and stretch about what I can write about and how I can write it, and how I can put it across. To me it’s like, I can do it.
At this point in my life, I am no longer testing the waters; “Can I do this or am I unsure about what I’m doing?” I know what I’m doing and I’m pushing the envelope every place I can without getting so far out there that I leave people behind. I am a real whore in terms of wanting people to enjoy the music. I know where that line is, and it’s fun to cross the line, but my balls aren’t that big.
ND: When will they be?
REK: When I don’t give a shit. [Laughs]…I turn into that 75-year-old lady holding that gold cigarette pack in one hand and a cocktail in the other and going [slurring a southern belle accent], “Well, I don’t give a god-damn what you think!” When I turn into one of those ladies, that’s when I won’t care.
II. I WORK FROM THE BOTTOM UP, NOT THE TOP DOWN
ND: Had the songs on the new album been road-tested before audiences before you went in to record?
REK: I wrote them all last March, and then we went in in April and recorded them.
ND: That’s a dark, dark collection of songs you’ve got yourself there!
REK: [Chuckling] I like the darkness! Makes the light look better.
ND: Well, having had this great, bang-up year last year, by your description, and then having this somewhat grim collection of songs come out of the middle of that, I was wondering if something was going on on another level.
REK: I don’t know. The fact is, some of those things come out. You know, I like that gothic and that mystical thing. I like those colors. I’m very skeptical of music or speeches or writing that don’t have that really anchored, hard contrast. So I work from the bottom up, not the top down.
ND: So there must not be a great deal of interest to you in today’s mainstream country music, with its relentlessly sunny outlook.
REK: I mean, come on, man. I know some people who are writing really good songs [in Nashville] and there are some really good songs out there. But…what happened? What happened to the wink and the nod in those old, great country songs? What happened to the humor? It’s all a laundry list right now. Anybody can patch together a song. But can you patch together a feeling that’s going to stick with somebody ten years from now? That’s a song.
ND: Funny you should say that, because I thought the first track on the album, “For Love”, from the get-go, was going to be one for the canon, one that would show up on the box set years from now…
REK: Yeah, and when you start playing that, it almost plays itself. Nobody’s going, “Oh we’ve gotta go to the two here,” and someone else going, “Oh we gotta figure this out…”
ND: I was really taken by the juxtaposition of “Broken End Of Love” and “The Dark Side Of The World”, almost looking at the same guy from two different perspectives.
REK: Well, it is — that’s exactly what’s going on. And one has an almost happy, poppy melody, and the other has that downright hard, gritty, shoulder-against-the-grindstone country thing. And that was really fun.
ND: Do you ever get a sense of when a song might work best in third person vs. first person? Or do you break it down that much?
REK: I tend to write in first person a lot, but that was a problem early on; I had a problem with pronouns when I first started writing. But it kind of went away.
ND: What was the nature of the problem?
REK: You wouldn’t know who was talking. And I feel like I moved around that. And it opened up a huge world. When I was doing Farm Fresh Onions [his 2003 album], I wrote this whole song, “These Years”, in first person, and then I got to this one part and it just wouldn’t click. And I was going, what am I doing? Why can’t I make this work? And then I went, oh, wow, let’s just move it! So it was first person all the way to the last verse and then it switched to third person. And it was just so great!
It was like all of a sudden you’re looking through the eyes of this completely crazed fucking guy and then all of a sudden you’re looking from up above at him. And I really enjoyed that. That’s really kind of the stuff that blows your dress up. “Wow! I can do this!”