Robert Earl Keen – The Rose Hotel

When I call Robert Earl Keen a songwriter’s songwriter, I mean it as a compliment – for the most part. It’s a fact that even Keen himself will attest to; in the press materials accompanying his new record, The Rose Hotel, the artist admits that he would love to spend even an hour in the shoes of a great singer — Vince Gill is the one he mentions by name — but affirms that yes, ultimately, his gift is for storytelling, not necessarily performance.

And indeed, The Rose Hotel is an album made by and for folks who love a good yarn. Keen doesn’t even care if it’s his story, necessarily – there’s a Townes Van Zandt cover here, and a song penned by Greg Brown – or whether he’s the one delivering all the punchlines, as he invites not only Brown but also Billy Bob Thornton to sing alongside him.

And if you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps, Keen’s guest list here is most revealing. He’s a good old-fashioned country singer who loves a good old-fashioned country song, and he prefers to keep things simple, unadorned, and stripped fairly close to the bone. He’s also a proud Texan, something he wears as a badge of honor not just in covering a Van Zandt song (it’s all the rage for Texan singer/songwriters this year, be it Steve Earle or Lyle Lovett) but also in choosing as his producer Lloyd Maines, another down-to-Earth country guy who hails from the Lone Star State.

“Simple” and “unadorned” are relative terms, of course, and Keen’s music, while being far from flashy, is also far from the lean cowboy poetry of, say, Kris Kristofferson. These aren’t campfire songs or late-night saloon tunes, but songs you might hear at a honky tonk, easy-going anthems that are wrapped up in sawing fiddles, pedal steel, and more than a trace of rock and roll muscle.

But the songs aren’t muscular enough to qualify as rock, or even country-rock, the twang of the instruments isn’t enough to make them work as pure country, and Keen isn’t a singer of great range or expression; the songs labor under similar tempos, plodding with too little grace instead of really rocking or strutting in the way that the best such country songs do. The performances are without distinction, and the songs without hooks: Essentially, it’s an empty-sounding exercise in bland, faceless “roots rock.”

That might actually be a blessing in some ways, because it keeps the focus on the stories being told, and Keen really is a fine lyricist, a man of humor and good taste. He pokes fun at barfly humor in “10,000 Chinese Walk Into a Bar,” pays stirring homage to the great Levon Helm in “The Man Behind the Drums,” and offers a winsomely (and totally country) take on doomed romance in the title cut.

But where Keen’s friend and label mate Lovett has made the most of his shortcomings as a performer, Keen’s approach simply draws greater attention to them. The result is an album that’s very easy to admire but difficult to really love, especially when all that is remembered once it finished playing are the stories — not, necessarily, the songs.

Tagged as: Country, Texas

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