Robert Earl Keen - Live from Austin, TX
Few Texas singer-songwriters are more beloved in their native state than Robert Earl Keen, as this 2001 taping forAustin City Limitsattests. For Keen, playing the series (this was his fifth appearance) is like a sports team with home-field advantage, as the partisan crowd plainly knows all its singalong parts and whoops it up. Yet the performance benefits from a level of attentiveness not typical at one of Keen's Texas concerts, with his reflective rendition ofTownes Van Zandt's "Snowin' on Raton" and the brooding melancholy ofJohhny Cash's "I Still Miss Someone" highlighting the 84-minute performance. An eight-minute rendition of Keen's signature anthem, "The Road Goes On Forever," shifts that epic into overdrive; the furious interplay of guitarist Rich Brotherton and steel guitarist Marty Muse finds the band firing on all cylinders. Only Keen could get away with the sardonic holiday centerpiece of "Merry Christmas from the Family" during the heat of August (when the program was taped), while the opening "Dreadful Selfish Crime" has a deadpan irony worthy ofRandy Newman. Throughout the 17-song performance, Keen comes across as the smiling, clean-cut boy next door, with a twisted intensity raging inside him.--Don McLeese