Robert Earl Keen knew the question was coming, so he answered it without a prompt.
“My primary purpose in life is not only writing some songs and playing guitar,” Keen says, “but the magical part is actually putting that music out there in the world, and getting to perform.”
Keen publicly retired from touring in 2022, crossing the country on his “I’m Comin’ Home” tour — which involved more than 40 shows, a fire on his tour bus, and a back injury so severe he spent more time seated onstage than standing. By the time he wrapped up the tour, with three shows in four nights at John T. Floore Country Store in Helotes, Texas, Keen was exhausted. He assured friends and fellow musicians backstage that there would be no comeback.
Two years later, the 68-year-old Keen has, for all practical purposes, made a comeback. To be clear, he’s not going coast-to-coast in a tour bus, but he has kept a steady run of shows booked in 2024, loosely centered around his 2023 concept box set, Western Chill.
In September, before an AmericanaFest panel showcasing the music of Yellowstone — which includes Keen’s work — the songwriter ducked into a side room at Nashville’s City Winery and talked about the latest chapter in his life. In a blazer and cowboy hat, Keen was spotlight-ready. He also sported a smile and the sort of confident eye contact that made you feel both at ease and as though you were being sized up. This was the Keen who won over Texas from his days in the 1970s after getting his start as a student at Texas A&M University in College Station, and this was the Keen whose “The Road Goes on Forever” became a Texas music anthem long before both Joe Ely and the Highwaymen covered it in the 1990s. The physical pain he showed at his final shows in 2022 was no longer there on his sleeve. On this day in Nashville, Robert Earl Keen was happy.
That is why, without being asked, he got straight to the point: He wants to keep playing shows, for the simple joy and fun of it all.
“I’m not worn-out anymore,” he says. “There was a lot of tension between me and the band during the retirement, because once I set my mind on something, I don’t let go. But there were several times during that whole exit strategy that someone would come up to me and just suggest, ‘Let’s just take a couple of weeks off,’ and I’d go, ‘No!’”
To Keen, taking a break wasn’t an option. He was determined to play until he could no longer.
“At one point in Asheville, North Carolina, I had a meeting with everybody… and I said, ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. Unless you see my body out there on that sidewalk, and I’m not breathing, and I’m dead and you can’t find a pulse, then we’re going to keep playing until we get to the end,’” he recalls. “And, I have to say, today, that was a mistake.”
His attitude toward touring slowly started to change at a 2023 one-off show — a year after his “retirement” — at Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas. Keen began playing solo, and telling stories about his music, before bringing his band members onstage one by one. It awakened something inside of him.
“By the time we got everybody on the stage, we were like this full-blown band and sounded like a million bucks,” Keen says. “It went over so well that it was intoxicating for me. It was just the reminder that, ‘Oh, this is how we perform.’ Part of performing always includes being creative. It’s not just writing a setlist and singing. It’s thinking about the audience and the venue, and getting out there and working the room as best you can.”
Keen is sober now — an effect of not wanting to get hooked on the painkillers he needed for his back injury during the retirement tour. He prefers to keep this detail in the context of his post-retirement life rather than center his music and writing around it, but still, he says, the experience helped him connect with his creative side in ways he rarely considered.
“I went into a recovery place between October and March last year,” he recalls. “I only had to stay there a month, but I ended up staying there for six months, because I was getting so much out of it. It was a great place. I got to do all kinds of counseling with people. One of the things they taught us was about making lists of gratitudes. I’d get up every morning and start a list, and it turned into poems. I always felt like I write better in poem form anyway, so I’ve written about a hundred poems since then. It’s pure poetry, not songs, but it was a whole new outlet that I hadn’t touched since, like, fifth grade. Some of them are good, some are bad, but they’re all about my life since this recovery period.”
The bellwether of Keen’s resurgence has been Western Chill, the 2023 album he wrote, recorded, and produced as a team effort with much of his longtime touring band. Brian Beken, Bill Whitbeck, Tom Van Schaik, and Kym Warner all contributed songwriting and lead vocals to the album, which marries Keen’s penchant for vivid lyrical imagery of Texas and the American West with a laid-back vibe that is almost tropical in its leanings.
“The concept was to do a band-inclusive record, together,” Keen says. “These guys have been supporting me for years and years, so I thought it would be a good time for us to get together, with some of their songs and some of my songs, and make a record. It turned out to be the right thing to do on many levels, but the main thing was, it was a great bonding experience. We all became part of this one thing, and that became Western Chill.”
Keen had written the title track before the record took shape. The groove of “Western Chill” makes it hard to look past its timing: When he sings, “Western Chill, it’s what I’ve been needing,” it’s clear that it’s about the 2022 version of himself. His bandmates took the cue and brought their own shade-tree vibes to the table; Keen realized they had an album on their hands.
“Everything that they brought were things that were just amazing,” Keen says. “Not only that, but they expanded the whole notion of Western Chill. They wrote heartbreaking narratives. Some of them were just like these cool, journalistic explanations of somebody going around trying to sing their songs.”
Keen and the band released the album as a box set, complete with an illustrated songbook and accompanying DVD in 2023, but a delayed digital release gave them a chance to keep Western Chill front-and-center for the bulk of this year. It’s the precise sort of project Keen envisioned taking on before retirement. What he did not see coming — once he hit the road in support of the project — was his own reconnection with who he is as a songwriter and musician.
“I thought I was going to be sitting around, writing more songs, maybe produce more music or write a book,” he says. “It would be that serious retirement, sitting in a rocking chair and concentrating on the universe. But the fact is there was something missing. It was really a part of me — putting these shows together, getting out there to people, singing the songs, and getting a huge kick out of it.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.
