Review Summary: Keen tries his hand at a myriad of Country styles with the artless confidence of a drifting storyteller.
Robert Earl Keen has never really had the moment in the limelight he deserves. Throughout his long, prolific recording career he’s made a respected name for himself delivering some of the most consistently enjoyable country music to blow in out of Texas. Never reaching the commercial heights of even his more unconventional contemporaries in the 80s and 90s, Keen has seemingly been content to keep plugging away at his decades long career, trying his hand at almost every permutation of Country with a confidence that speaks volumes about his love of the genre. “A Bigger Piece of Sky” finds Keen at his most assured, as well as his most expansive, touching upon a dizzying array of Country styles with a boldness that speaks to his many strengths as a songwriter.
Keen would continue to expand and shift his musical horizons throughout his career, but it is here perhaps that his vision is best able to keep up with his ambition. The expansive, evocative feeling conveyed by the album art is borne out with heartfelt warmth in the music, a sense of grandeur that is nonetheless intimate in its detail. Keen’s sense of dustblown storytelling and grinning fatalism reminisce of the same wistful homeliness of musical ancestors Billie Joe Shaver and Guy Clark but there is an impression of something more epic in Keen’s intentions, as though in his lyrical portraits he’s reaching for something a little more explicitly universal than those luminaries. It hearkens back to the working-man-as-a-symbol small town mythologizing of Springsteen in a far more Western permutation, perhaps the central Texas rebuttal to the Boss’ pretensions at being the patron saint of the working man. Framing Keen’s music in this manner isn’t meant as a disservice, he’s more than capable of standing on his own as an artist and his lyrical examination of outlaws, dive bars and interstate reminisces is endlessly versatile and consistently strong.
There were, however, points in the album where I couldn’t shake the feeling that Keen was perhaps trying too hard to make something iconic out of A Bigger Piece of Sky, The power of simple stories of simple people is undeniable, and Keen at times seems to be all too consciously reaching for that power. It’s perhaps the main flaw in “A Bigger Piece of Sky”, although it’s niggling to the point of insignificance. Where Keen seems to be explicitly aiming for the duality of the small town narrative as a microcosm of humanity, the likes of Billie, Guy and Townes were able to achieve that aim almost without seeming like they were trying to. By trying to achieve that universal sensibility through juxtaposition of his intimate storytelling with (relatively, for the genre) a grandiose sense of instrumentations and scale, Keen throws into sharp relief just how much the older songwriters were able to simply capture that sensibility effortlessly, as if by accident. It’s such a minor point that it almost doesn’t seem worth relating, but in an album where the songwriting is in general so strong, the nagging sense that Keen is maybe trying just a little too hard pushes to the surface just enough to be noticeable.
It’s a good thing then, that for the most part the arranging and songwriting are more than capable of sustaining the sense of scale Keen is shooting for. Throughout the album Keen jumps from style to style with a sense of startling effortlessness that is missing from his lyrical intent, from the barroom bawler of opening track “So I Can Take My Rest” to the rollicking good-ol’-boy freeway howler “Amarillo Highway” to the abrupt shift from the stormy, stadium ready “Here In Arkansas” into the jaunty Texas Swing on “Daddy Had a Buick”. The choicest cut on the album though, is also the most straightforward Country rocker, the booze and babes and regret reminiscence of "Corpus Christi Bay" probably best capturing both Keen’s characteristically solid Country songwriting and his Springsteen-esque sense of American mythology found in the commonplace. It’s a moment that shows just how much Keen’s capable of, powerfully nostalgic and ultimately greater than the sum of its parts. If the rest of the album had been this successful, “A Bigger Piece of Sky” might have been one of the all-time great Country Albums. As it stands, it can still hold its head high among the pantheon of lesser Country-Western classics, an eminently relistenable, moving release just begging to be put on during those long, quiet highway drives where a bigger piece of sky feels like all you could ever want in life.
