Keen’s Unresolved Issues

When one of Texas’ best-kept secrets--singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen--signed with the newly created Arista Austin, veteran John Keane (R.E.M., Indigo Girls, Widespread Panic, Cowboy Junkies, etc.) was enlisted to produce “a stripped-down rock ‘n’ roll record,” according to Keen.

The result is Keen’s new “Picnic.” His trademark grittiness and rich song craft remain intact. Added are clear, sturdy vocals, a hard-driving backbeat and scintillating yet economical electric guitar leads.

On “Picnic,” folk-based character sketches, such as three dudes on a partyin’ binge turned sour in “Shades of Gray,” stand side-by-side with the hard-rockin’ “Runnin’ With the Night” and a cover of Dave Alvin’s “Fourth of July” (a song originally cut by punk-rock legends X).

The 10-song collection allows the mandolin, accordion, cello and fiddle to mesh naturally with slide, electric and acoustic guitars. A single-minded yet elastic orchestra blossoms.

Much of this cohesive sound because Keen retained his own seasoned band rather than using session players. Keen and lead guitarist Rich Brotherton, fiddler Bryan Duckworth, bassist Bill Whitbeck and new drummer Tom Van Schaik appear tonight at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana.

Keen wanted his longtime collaborators to contribute something fresh to the project.

“My last two studio records [1994’s ‘Gringo Honeymoon’ and 1993’s ‘A Bigger Piece of Sky’] were companion pieces, and I just felt like I’d run the gamut on southwestern imagery and its dusty landscape, as well using a sound steeped in country and bluegrass,” Keen said last week from a tour stop in Vienna, Va. “I wanted a beefier, more rock ‘n’ roll sound this time.

“Thematically, I really needed to change things up some too because I was starting to rewrite those same kind of songs over and over. Basically, this album is different because I wanted--and really needed--to do something different.”

Keen lives in the small cowboy town of Bandera, Texas, with his wife, Kathleen, and their 3-year-old daughter, Clara Rose. He’s part of the Lone Star State’s school of rootsy, literary-minded singer-songwriters, including the likes of Joe Ely, Nanci Griffith, Steve Earle, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Kris McKay and Lyle Lovett.

Keen studied English literature at Texas A&M; with Lovett, and the two later wrote and recorded “This Old Porch”--or “The Porch Song,” depending on whose album you check. He beams with pride that one of his other songs, “The Road Goes On Forever,” has been covered by both Ely and the country-music super group the Highwaymen.

Before “Picnic,” six of his albums were released on the independent North Carolina-based Sugar Hill label. Such song titles as “Blow You Away,” “Sonora’s Death Row” and “Dreadful Selfish Crime” intimate the kind of unsavory characters who inhabit his minidramas. (The title of “Picnic” refers to Willie Nelson’s 1974 Fourth of July gathering, at which several cars, including Keen’s, were set ablaze; Keen’s flaming auto is pictured on the “Picnic” album cover.)

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Keen acknowledges there’s certainly been no shortage of outlaws and outcasts within his arsenal.

“I suppose I don’t always have the most pleasant thoughts in the world,” he said before describing himself as “a lousy student and middle-class washout while growing up.”

“Dark, scary people lead interesting, albeit not necessarily good, lives. I guess I’m drawn to that flawed side of humanity.”

While Keen, 41, insists his various sagas of dysfunctional characters are purely fictional, he adds that writing is often a constructive form of therapy for him.

“I have my ups and downs like everybody else. I think being creative, whether it’s in art, music, writing or whatever, just makes you feel more at peace with yourself. There are lots of tangled knots within everyone’s personality, and sometimes being able to write helps me untangle some of ‘em. Songs can give me clues as to what’s going on in my subconscious . . . and it makes me feel better to get it out, instead of keeping it trapped inside me.”

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Another significant point of departure for Keen on the new album--which includes Cowboy Junkie Margo Timmins’ whispery voice on five tracks--is using less narrative story lines and more abstract imagery.

The song “Over the Waterfall” came to him in dreamlike sequences, he said, and its poetic lyricism is open to interpretation. A song of desperate longing, “I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight,” is left atypically unresolved.

“I got to be totally compulsive about wrapping things up and resolving everything going on in a song,” Keen said. “On ‘Picnic,’ I decided I would leave some things open-ended, just like they are in real life--like the yearning in ‘I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight.’ That’s a deep feeling that sometimes never quits.”

Despite all this musical growth, the essential ingredient that informs Keen’s work--sincerity--remains.

“I may not be the character in a song, but I always try to write from a real perspective, one [born] of personal experience,” he said. “If I haven’t touched or seen it happen, then . . . well, like the time I tried to write a song about living in the Philippines. Man, it just didn’t work. I’m just not that good a liar.”

* Robert Earl Keen, Gina Quartaro and Kami Lyle perform tonight at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $15-$17. (714) 957-0600.