Robert Earl Keen said that the wanted to make his first album in four years to sound rich and robust. He succeeds in an album which feels like a night of Texas style story telling, set to music. If you have never been to a Texas style story telling session, or if you have never read Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, you know there is only one rule. The story has to be good, it doesn’t have to be true, but it has to be good. The songs on this album are big and face life with an unflinching dose of reality, but he never lets that reality get in the way of the story.
The album opens with the title track, a fatalistic tale of two people looking back at a fractured romance. This leads into an album filled with Robert Earl Keen’s trademark mix of gritty realism and dry wit, accompanied by twangy guitars. “I am the king of burning daylight” he offers on “Something That I Do” “I kind of like just doing nothing.” Billy Bob Thornton and The Box Masters show up to lend a hand on “10,000 Chinese Walk into a Bar,” a boisterous deconstruction of barroom jokes and stories. Greg Brown leads some haunting harmonies and lead vocals on “Laughing River”. Keen pays touching homage to both life on the road (Goodnight Cleveland) and Levon Helm (The Man behind the Drums). Keen turns to his most self-deprecating humor for the finale “Wireless in Heaven,” describing how he gets the cute Starbucks clerk to smile at him: “She knows who I am/her grandpa pays the guitar and he’s my biggest fan.”
Robert Earl Keen is one of the best storytellers making country music today. Lyrically, his songs stand as reminders of why rural farmers, mill workers and blue collar citizens used to find refuge in the genre, because it was the only genre of music that was about their lives and their stories. In the mainstream today, there is a movement back towards songs about small towns. However, this is not another album about The Common Man from Everytown USA. This is simply an album of stories about people you see at the local grocery store or bar. And the stories are very, very good.
Listen to this album below! Courtesy of lala.com and Lost Highway Records.
0 Comments