Robert Earl Keen strikes an unusual balance between sensitive portraits and raucous barroom fun. These two song types in Keen’s output strongly influenced the early practitioners of what would become known as alternative country music. Keen made a splash with his debut album, No Kinda Dancer, self-financed in 1984. Texas landscapes and residents provided Keen with creative inspiration, as his second album, West Textures, made clear. That album yielded one of Keen’s signature numbers, “The Road Goes on Forever.” Keen waited several years to release a studio follow-up, 1993’s A Bigger Piece of Sky. After that album came Gringo Honeymoon, which merged Keen’s story songs with the emerging sounds of alt-country. The 1997 album Picnic again moved in the direction of alternative country, featuring Keen in a duet with the Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins, while 1998’s Walking Distance featured sparer textures. In the next decade, Keen continued to record and issue albums. Keen decided to experiment for his 2011 album, Ready for Confetti. He cut 11 new songs — among them nine originals ,including a re-recording of “Paint the Town Beige” and a couple of covers. More recently, he released the live album Live Dinner Reunion in 2016. Robert Earl Keen continues to criss cross the country with live dates.
