Vootie Presents ROBERT EARL KEEN W/INFAMOUS STRINGDUSTERS
Friday, August 27th, 8pm - 11pm
DOORS 7PM/8PM SHOWTIME
Location: EMERSON CENTER, BOZEMAN
BUY TICKETS
http://www.ticketriver.com/event/269-robert-earl-keen-w--infamous-stringdusters/
“I would love to have been one of the great singers in the world -- like Vince Gill or someone like that -- even if it was just for one hour,” says Robert Earl Keen. “But I really feel like my gift is writing songs. That’s just there and it’s always been there. I don’t know why, but I always have stories -- they don’t all have to be true, just good. If I could put a subtitle on my best songs, it would be ‘based on a good story.’”
With his latest Lost Highway album, The Rose Hotel, Keen re-confirms his place among the Lone Star State’s great storytellers, capable of painting rich, poignant landscapes worthy of Cormac McCarthy and spinning satirical yarns that’d do Kinky Friedman proud. The disc’s rough-hewn tone -- it’s one of the more immediate, organic efforts in Keen’s varied catalog -- emphasizes both ends of that emotional spectrum, with Band-styled organ washes dappling the evocative title track and a hoedown-worthy breakdown propelling the wry “Wireless in Heaven” to its conclusion.
"I've done rustic records, polished records and live records," says Keen. " And this time, I wanted to do one that sounded rich and robust. I wanted it to sound big. I wanted it to have a lot of voices. I think it sounds great. The feedback from everybody has been outstanding."
Keen and producer Lloyd Maines (known for his work with his daughter’s little combo, The Dixie Chicks, and many many others) got a lot of voices onto The Rose Hotel in both figurative and literal senses. The album is loaded with tunes designed to get toes to tap and hips to swivel, and peppered with guest appearances sure to pique interest -- from the unmistakable deadpan tones that Billy Bob Thornton adds to the shaggy-dog saga “10,000 Chinese Walk Into a Bar” to the rough-and-ready baritone of Greg Brown, who swaps verses with Keen on his own “Laughing River.”
“I’ve always been a huge fan of Greg’s and I knew that he was in town when we were recording, so I called up the club where he was playing and asked him if he’d be on the album,” recalls Keen. “I promised him I’d make it easy as possible. My whole family came down for the session.”
A familial vibe extends throughout The Rose Hotel, as is usually the case when Robert Earl Keen enters the studio with his band, a tight-knit group that’s navigated the globe together for the better part of a decade-and-a-half. Keen prides himself on the fact that the albums he and his compatriots turn out are almost completely self-contained and 100 percent free from artificial colors and flavors.
“These songs are real,” he says. “They’re hand-made. When people come to see us live, they’re seeing the people who created them play them and that’s not all that common these days. It’s the kind of magic that doesn’t happen all the time.”
Well, Keen and his band have been making that kind of magic happen for quite a spell, ever since the singer started putting his writing -- a pastime that had been part of his life since before he started elementary school -- to music while a student at Texas A & M University. Keen dipped deep into the waters of his native state’s musical tradition early on, digging out nuggets from such touchstones as Bob Wills and Lightnin' Hopkins.
By the time he recorded his first full-length studio album, 1989’s West Textures, Keen had already established himself as one of the most engaging live performers on the roadhouse circuit, capable of coaxing a two-step out of the most reticent audience member and planting a tear in the beer of the toughest customer. That persuasive style -- captured on four different live albums over the course of his two decades on the road -- also helped him win friends and influence contemporaries like Jack Ingram, Pat Green and Todd Snider, all of whom have sung his praises.
Keen has had no trouble translating that appeal in the studio over the years, from 1994’s highly acclaimed Gringo Honeymoon to the top 10 breakthrough disc Gravitational Forces -- the latter of which showcased the sheer breadth of his stylistic reach. He and his band always find a way to connect with the pleasure center of the listener, and -- as the genial, good-natured tone of the songs on The Rose Hotel prove -- they manage to have a mighty good time of their own in the process.
“I wrote most of the songs at the Scriptorium, this little shack about 10 miles from where I live,” says Keen. “I usually just end up hanging out there -- I’m a world-class hanger-outer -- but the songs really started coming to me. I had no intentions. But I ended up with these songs and found that I had enough for a record.”
Those songs address everything from, well, his ability to simply hang out (the gently rollicking “Something That I Do”) to his years of soaking up the atmosphere in clubs of all shapes and sizes (the woozy waltz “Goodnight Cleveland”). They flow from the grooves the way they flow from Keen’s own spirit -- naturally, affably and with a lack of fanfare that’s remarkably refreshing in this age of glitz.
“I was in flux before this project, I wasn’t sure there was a purpose in compiling these songs in this old-fashioned way. But then I realized, well, it doesn’t matter if there’s a point -- this is my life, this is what I do and I’m proud of it.
INFAMOUS STRINGDUSTERS :
”There are plenty of bands that begin with the momentum of shared musical goals, but lose steam, or faith, before they’re ever realized. Things That Fly is not an album by one of those bands. It is exactly the kind of album the Infamous Stringdusters got in the business of original music, together, to make: expansive, imaginatively textured and energized by collaboration through and though. Their career is young, yet they are where they want to be.
Five years ago, Andy Hall (dobro), Jeremy Garrett (fiddle), Jesse Cobb (mandolin), Chris Pandolfi (banjo) and Travis Book (upright bass) were skilled young sidemen who had already landed some pretty impressive gigs with the likes of Dolly Parton, Ronnie Bowman, Lee Ann Womack and Drew Emmitt of Leftover Salmon. Book had taken a slightly different route, anchoring a popular jamgrass band in Colorado. But that wasn’t the whole story. They each also had fresh songwriting ideas, wide-ranging musical interests, distinctive playing styles and the drive to do something with all of it. And launching their own progressive acoustic band was the perfect answer.
The ‘Dusters’ first two albums were impressive in their own rights. Fork In the Road proved the band’s chops right out of the gate, earning International Bluegrass Music Association awards for Album, Song, and Emerging Artist of the Year. Following that, The Infamous Stringdusters showcased a solidified lineup and exciting chemistry adding guitarist Andy Falco. But Things That Fly, recorded over ten days at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Haunted Hollow Studios and out April 20, 2010 on Sugar Hill, is a different animal entirely.
What strikes the ear first is the sheer scale of the ‘Dusters’ new sound. Thanks in no small part to their adventurousness and their wise studio partner, co-producer/engineer Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss, the Dixie Chicks, Nickel Creek), there are a good many lush, new layers. Explains Book, “I think string bands have a tendency to feel like when they go to record, doing anything that they can’t necessarily replicate 100 percent live is sort of off limits. Instead of saying ‘Well, this is how it sounds when the six of us play it standing around in a circle, so we’re just going to put mikes up and capture it and that’s going to be it,’ we really got a little deeper in the production aspect.”
Going deeper meant trying new things; Hall added lap steel and Garrett viola and—in the boldest departure from the stringed instrumentation the band is known for—Falco played organ, all of which enhanced the sonic landscape. A case in point: laced with organ, the brooding blue groove of the Falco/Book co-write “All the Same” fairly smolders.
That spirit of experimentation extended to vocals. The band has no shortage of high-quality lead singers in Garrett, Hall and Book, but, for the first time, they brought in a few fine-singing friends: country standout Dierks Bentley, Crooked Still frontwoman Aoife O’Donovan and Americana songwriter-chanteuse Sarah Siskind (who, as it happens, recently tied the knot with Book, and co-wrote two songs with him for the album). “We’ve taken a lot of pride in making up our own music and performing it ourselves—one thing we can never do is add that feminine element,” jokes Book. “I think the album is better for having that feminine vocal element. And the same thing with Dierks.” Indeed, Bentley’s playful “poor old me” act is spot-on when he trades lines with Garrett during a buoyant cover of Jody Stecher’s “17 Cents.” And though it might in theory seem a minor touch, the reverb splashed across voices and instruments alike—also new territory for the band—changes the listening experience in a big way; With the edges gently blurred, every note feels a little more spacious.
“In God’s Country” is the album’s only other cover; Not only did the ‘Dusters transform it into their own propulsive vehicle—they wrote transcendent anthems in a similar spirit: “Taking a Chance On the Truth” (a Falco co-write) and “Love One Another” (co-written by Hall). Muses Hall, “I think bands like U2 and Led Zeppelin influenced us, lyrically particularly. You listen to Zeppelin tunes or U2 tunes; it’s not all just given to you. You get a feeling; you get images; you get emotions.”
There was one more hardly unimportant factor in the ‘Dusters making an album that lends itself to absorbed listening from start to finish, like the great rock albums do. It came about well before they ever set foot in the studio and it went like this: They would rent a house in a scenic locale—Asheville or the Poconos, say—stock the fridge with brain food and beer and hole up for a few days of serious writing and arranging.
The ‘Dusters still tear it up live, displaying considerable dynamic prowess when they use a slow-burning number like “Masquerade” as a launching pad for an electrified exchange of solos all around. But, as a recording unit, they’ve hit their mark on their third album. “I’m proud of the fact that we gave it so much time on the front end that we never had to approach it from a philosophical place as much as pure, creative exploration,” says Pandolfi. “I hope that that can translate in some way and help people avoid having to figure out what this is, and just allow them to listen to it and enjoy it.”
With an album like Things That Fly, collective musical achievement that it is, that won’t be hard at all.
