Robert Earl Keen, Lyle Lovett team up in Marin County
MICHAEL SHAPIRO
Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett on touring together, their vastly differrent musical styles and their longtime brother-like friendship.
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Santa Rosa Press Democrat
It has been almost 40 years since Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett whiled away their college days on the front porch of Keen's rented house in College Station, Texas, a stone's throw from Texas A&M where they were students.

They'd sit on the porch in all sorts of weather, “playin' guitars and mandolins and fiddles and singing old country music and bluegrass music and little tunes that we made up,” Keen said at a concert in Birmingham before singing “The Front Porch Song,” co-written with Lovett.

Looking back, Keen, who just turned 60, says that front porch on Church Street has become a sort of “Walden Pond,” a touchstone where he and Lovett dreamed big and where their careers as songwriters began.

Keen wrote the first three verses, then Lovett added several stanzas to the song, which Lovett calls “This Old Porch,” a variation on Keen's title. The two versions have slight lyrical differences as well.

“It's just one of those songs that I felt represented exactly how I felt at that time,” Lovett said. “I'm as proud of that last verse in ‘This Old Porch' as anything I've ever written.”

The verse reads: “This old porch is just a long time of waiting and forgetting / And remembering the coming back and not crying about the leaving / And remembering the falling down and the laughter of the curse of luck / From all those sons of bitches who said we'd never get back up.”

Lovett, a four-time Grammy winner, has become more famous (his brief marriage to Julia Roberts in the '90s helped catapult him into popular consciousness), but Keen's following is just as fiercely loyal.

They're both known for their literate, poetic and evocative lyrics, yet neither artist fits into a single category.

Keen's voice can trigger wellsprings of emotion. His “I'm Comin' Home” is one of the great road anthems about the joy of seeing his love after a long tour. And every one of his shows is a party that his fans wish would never end.

Keen and Lovett, along with the late Townes Van Zandt, were inducted into the Texas Heritage Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012.

Lovett, who studied journalism and wrote for Texas A&M's college newspaper, is a distinguished actor as well, with notable roles in two Robert Altmans films, “The Player” and “Short Cuts.”

Other than a few benefits and festivals, Keen and Lovett have rarely played together until recently. Thanks to local promoter Rick Bartalini, they're coming to the Marin Center on March 24 and to the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium on March 26 and 27.

As part of their three-week national tour, they'll also play U.C. Davis' Mondavi Center on March 25.

Keen spoke to The Press Democrat by phone from his home in Kerrville, Texas; Lovett was interviewed while on tour in Jacksonville, Fla.

Q. How did you decide to tour together?

Keen: We have played shows on different occasions, but we've never done this kind of show where you swap songs and sit on the stage and just have a good time. We tried a few shows – it was a lot of fun. This year Lyle called me and said he'd like to do a bunch more … and I jumped at the chance. So that's how it emerged.

Lovett: We book dates together as a way to spend time together because otherwise we're both going in different directions and don't get to see one another very often.

Q. Why haven't you played together more often?

Keen: We had talked about this for quite a while, but I play 120-130 dates a year and spend the rest of my time making records. Lyle does more dates than I do, and he makes records as well. It was just one of those things where we had to get on the same path.

Q. Do you have a script or setlist?

Keen: No, we don't play the same thing every night. We come out and I talk a little bit and then Lyle introduces the show. One of us starts to play a song – then the other one plays the song, and then we talk about some more stuff.

Lovett: These songwriter-in-the-round shows are unstructured. We don't ever discuss what we're going to do, and it really makes it fun. You go out there, you don't know what's going to happen. It's sort of a stream of consciousness because one song suggests another. You can play whatever you want. Q. What's the on-stage dynamic like?

Keen: With Lyle I don't really have to do any guesswork. He's going to challenge me on the one hand, and then he's going to just lob a few over the plate every now and then to make it really easy for me. So it's a really good dynamic.

It's not like the audience is a fly on the wall. The conversation is directed at the audience, but a lot of times it's pretty personal and sometimes there are inside jokes. So it's a really fun, lively conversation about music and songs and our life together.

Lovett: Robert always surprises me in conversation. He's so dang funny it's fun to be up there with him.

Q. You seem so close it's almost like you're brothers.

Keen: It's one of those really rare friendships, like you've been together in another time. There's something greater than just being able to hold a conversation. We talk about minutia that would bore the pants off anybody else.

Lovett: I can talk to Robert about anything that's going on in my life and vice versa. … I love his songs. I love his sense of humor. I love seeing him express parts of himself that I saw in 1976 when I first met him.

Q. How has your friendship changed over the years?

Keen: I always feel the same; every time I see Lyle I get a smile on my face. … I always thought it was a very deep relationship from the beginning – it hasn't changed a whole lot. The only difference is we don't spend the time that we spent together (years ago).

Q. Neither of you fits into a single music category.

Lovett: Conventional wisdom says it's better to fit neatly into one category or another. I've been really lucky over the course of my career to have worked with people who have not required that of me.

Q. How would you contrast your musical approach?

Keen: We have vastly different styles, but we come from the same place. We like visuals in our songs. … Lyle is brilliant about the study of people and language. Some of his songs that have speaking parts, I can never get my head totally around them because they're so great.

The dialogue he puts in there is so dead on. He has a great ear for speech, and he has a certain feel for the way the characters move in his songs. My characters are much more linear than his are. His are somewhat more mysterious, enigmatic. He writes songs about penguins, and I write songs about I don't know, somebody vomiting.

Lovett: We both appreciate narrative, and we both appreciate imagery. We both appreciate songwriters like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt who tell stories by painting pictures that allow a listener to imagine the story rather than just explaining every word.

Q. You bring imagination into your songs and use fiction to tell a deeper truth.

Keen: I love fiction because you're able create these characters that can really tell the truth, like in a Southern Gothic novel. I play my cards pretty close to my chest (so my characters can express) my real feelings about certain subjects.

Lovett: (In a song) you can get away with telling the truth in an unvarnished way. Townes Van Zandt's famous quote is, “There are two kinds of music, the blues and Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” The kind of music that really hits you and sticks with you has the element of sincerity.

Q. And your songs have a deep sense of place.

Lovett: It's just writing about things that you know. Everyone has a sense of place. If I'm writing about Texas, somebody from Ohio is listening to my songs might not think about Texas but might think about his own home.

The importance of sense of place is to try to communicate the emotional connection to that place. If you do that, if that comes through, then that can become universal.

Q. Robert, you mention Santa Cruz in “I'm Coming Home” and really seem to enjoy playing in the Bay Area.

Keen: The Bay Area is the place I think I'm going to move if I get frustrated with Texas. I love San Francisco, the vibe, the people, the weather. I even love the fact that the water is so cold it keeps people off the beach.

Q. Lyle, how do you define success?

Lovett: For me, being successful is getting to do something that you love in the way that you love to do it.

Michael Shapiro writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. Contact him via his site, michaelshapiro.net.