Concert Schedule

The middle child of a geologist father and an attorney mother, Keen was weaned on classic rock (in particular, the psychedelic blues trio Cream) and his older brother's Willie Nelson records -- but it was his younger sister's downtown Houston celebrity status as a "world-champion foosball player" that exposed him to the area's acoustic folk scene. By the time he started working on his English degree at Texas A&M, he was teaching himself guitar and setting his poetic musings to song. That in turn led to a college fling with a bluegrass ensemble (featuring his childhood friend Bryan Duckworth, who would continue to play fiddle with Keen well into the '90s) and front-porch picking parties with fellow Aggie Lovett at Keen's rental house -- salad days captured in spirit on the Keen/Lovett co-write, "The Front Porch Song," which both artists would eventually record on their respective debut albums.
While Lovett's self-titled debut was released on major-label Curb Records, Keen took the road less travelled, self-financing and producing 1984's No Kinda Dancer and leasing it to the independent label Rounder Records, which issued it on its Philo imprint. "It was difficult, because I didn't know what I was doing ... I literally opened up the phonebook and looked for studios," Keen recalls. "I basically put it all together through brute force and ignorance, but I was shocked with how well it worked out and very happy with it. We had a release party at Butch Hancock's Dixie Bar and Bustop, and Lyle and Nanci Griffith and a lot of those people who were a part of the Austin folkie scene came out."
Keen himself had already started to make quite a name for himself on that scene, thanks to four years of constant regional gigging and winning the Kerrville Folk Festival's prestigious New Folk songwriting competition in 1983. After his debut's release, he began touring more and more outside of the state lines, eventually moving to Nashville in 1986. Keen's stint in Music City, U.S.A., lasted just under two years, but he returned to Texas armed with a publishing deal, a new label (another indie, Sugar Hill), and a national booking agent. He closed the decade with 1988's The Live Album and the following year's West Textures, the album that marked the debut of "The Road Goes on Forever" and, consequently, kicked his career into high gear.
With hindsight, Keen admits he no idea at the time of writing it that his song about a couple of ill-fated lovers running afoul of the law would have the legs it did, but he readily points to the forward thinking of DJ Steve Coffman of San Antonio radio station KRIO for helping to start the fire. "He talked the station into doing sort of a free-form programing format, basically anything he liked, which turned out to be some Texas music along with a lot of cool sort of pop music," he says. "So all of a sudden, I heard my song back-to-back with the Sheryl Crow song that was popular at the time, and that was the first time that I really felt like I was a real part of the music business, despite having been in it already for a pretty long time. And right after that, I went to a show in San Antonio and there were 1,500 people there -- whereas up to that point I'd been playing to, max, maybe 150. That was the real ah-hah moment for me that really got me going and kept me going, because before that I'd been doing this for eight or 10 years and had a lot of rejection but very little success."
After that, though, success came in spades. Although he continued to steer clear of the Garth Brooks-dominated waters of the country mainstream, the perfect storm of Keen's literate song craft, razor wit and killer band (more on that in a bit) stirred up a grassroots sensation in Texas not seen since the '70s heyday of maverick "outlaw country" upstarts Willie, Waylon, Kris Kristofferson and the afore-mentioned Guy Clark. Armed with two more albums (1993's A Bigger Piece of Sky and '94's Gringo Honeymoon) brimming with instant classics like "Corpus Christi Bay," "Whenever Kindness Fails," "Gringo Honeymoon," "Dreadful Selfish Crime" and "Merry Christmas From the Family," he began packing dancehalls, roadhouses, theaters, and festival grounds with diverse crowds of rowdy college kids, serious singer-songwriter fans and plenty of folks who, like Keen himself, had been around the Texas music scene long enough to remember Willie's earliest 4th of July Picnics. And the phenomenon was not confined to the Texas state lines. Famed producer and pedal steel ace Lloyd Maines (Joe Ely, Terry Allen) helped Keen and his band bottle lighting on 1996's No. 2 Live Dinner, a next-best-thing-to-being-there concert document that remains one of Keen's best-selling albums, and the burgeoning Americana music scene (bolstered by AAA radio stations across the country and magazines like No Depression) embraced Keen as one of its prime movers. In the wake of albums like 1997's Picnic and '98's Walking Distance (both released on major-label Arista), one would have been hard-pressed to tell the difference between a rabid Robert Earl Keen crowd at Texas' legendary Gruene Hall and those at New York City joints like Tramps and the Bowery Ballroom. Little wonder, then, that when the songwriter-revering "Americana" style was officially recognized by the industry 1998, Keen was the genre's first artist to be featured on the cover of the radio trade magazine Gavin.
The '90s may have been a boom period for Keen, but his momentum hasn't ebbed a bit since then -- nor has his pursuit of continued growth as a writer and artist. If anything, his output from the last decade has been marked by some of the most adventurous music of his career. "Wild Wind," an unforgettable highlight from Gravitational Forces, his Gurf Morlix-produced 2001 debut for the Nashville-based Americana label Lost Highway, captured the character (and characters) of a small Texas town with a cinematic eye reminiscent of The Last Picture Show; but the album's title track also found Keen wryly experimenting with spacey, beatnik jazz. For the freewheelin,' freak-flag-flying Farm Fresh Onions (2003, Audium/Koch), Keen and producer Rich Brotherton (his longtime guitarist) took the band into the proverbial garage to knock out their most rocking set of songs to date -- most notably the psychedelic rave-up of the title track. Brotherton also produced the more rootsy but equally playful What I Really Mean (2005, E1 Music), but Lloyd Maines was back at the helm for 2009's eclectic The Rose Hotel and 2011's spirited Ready for Confetti (both released by Lost Highway). The later was especially well received by fans and critics alike, with AllMusic's Thom Jurek raving, "Ready for Confetti is, without question, Keen's most inspired and focused project in nearly 20 years." Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Sessions, released in 2015, was a straight -ahead "love postcard to bluegrass." This was something Keen had wanted to do for a long time and it was now or never. Keen ranked Billboard's No. 2, 2015 Bluegrass Artist of the year. Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Sessions, charted as 2015's Top 5 album at Americana Radio and Billboard's 2015 No. 2 album on the Bluegrass Albums chart.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the milestone album No. 2 Live Dinner, Keen returned to the legendary John T. Floore's Country Store in the Texas Hill Country town of Helotes in the fall of 2015 where he recorded his latest project, Live Dinner Reunion, and upped the ante by inviting Joe Ely, Bruce Robison, Cory Morrow, Lyle Lovett and a few other friends and fellow Americana and Texas Music stars to sing along. Some 5,000 fans added their voices to the historic occasion.
The result, the rousing double-disc celebration Live Dinner Reunion, released in late 2016 on Dualtone Records, an Entertainment One company. The repartee of Keen and the other artists, the crowd's response, the songs, and inspired musicianship combine to magically create the album's you-are-there experience. It's these many special musical moments that propel Live Dinner Reunion into the stratosphere of live albums.
This brings Keen's career to now. In honor of the 25th anniversary of Robert Earl Keen's iconic album, A Bigger Piece of Sky, Keen and Dualtone will be releasing it on vinyl for the first time. Scheduled for release on November 16, 2019, A Bigger Piece of Sky is available now for advance order at DualtoneStore.com.
"A Bigger Piece of Sky was the most thrilling, hair-pulling, penny-pinching, cliff-hanging, scariest record I've ever made," says Keen. "I love every song on BPS."
A breakthrough album for Keen, A Bigger Piece of Sky and its songs, such as "Amarillo Highway," "Whenever Kindness Fails," and "Corpus Christi Bay" are mainstays of his live set. The album was recorded in Nashville, TN, produced by Garry Velletri, and mixed by Velletri and Jeff Coppage. The project features an amazing lineup consisting of Garry Tallent (E Street Band) on upright and electric bass, Marty Stuart on mandolin, Dave Durocher on percussion, Jay Spell on accordion, Jonathan Yudkin on violin, and Maura O'Connell on vocals. It also features guest musicians George Marinelli (Bonnie Raitt) on harmony vocal and electric guitar, Tommy Spurlock on guitar, Michael Snow on tenor banjo, Bryan Duckworth on violin, Dave Heath on upright bass, and Jennifer Prince on harmony vocals.

Drawing from a wellspring of country and back alley rock-and-roll, Feed The Kitty cultivates a bounty of neo-retro Southern California sounds; rich in singer-songwriter tradition, modest lament, and polished musicianship.  Girded by the ever-accumulating experience of thousands of live performances, the formidable trio of Jack Maher (vocals and guitar), Jed Mottley (bass), and Jon Shumway (drums) continues to extend their reputation for magnetic concert appearances, empowered with an encyclopedic knowledge of music and genuine self-effacing humor.  While these hallmarks still provide a foundational element for the band’s fourth studio set, Ain’t Dead Yet, more prevalent this time around, though, is a matured, reflective approach; introspective, and even, at times, haunting. 

Backed by their countless appearances, the self-managed SoCal group boasts, with faux-confidence, a spot in the Top Ten of “Most Shows Ever Played by a Rock Band” (offset, naturally, with an immediate disclaimer: “You know, probably.”).  In fact, this isan ensemble that averages 300 shows a year ranging from local haunts in Hollywood to famed venues in the Big Apple, across the European continent, and anywhere in between. 

Surviving the creative gauntlet of the Los Angeles/Orange County industry grind, Feed the Kitty has persevered, with their singles dotting playlists on 88.5 FM, K-EARTH 101, and the world-renowned 95.5 KLOS radio in Southern California (including an October 2018 “Stay or Go” segment of the Frosty, Heidi and Frank Show on KLOS, during which morning listeners voted to let our heroes ‘stay.’)  

“Whenever I play California Country GirlI can count on listener response,” says 88.5 FM deejay Jim Nelson. “Feed The Kitty sounds great on the air.”  

And, in the three minutes a week that they are not playing a gig or recording an album, this is a group that’s busy making mini documentaries (well, okay, just one; it’s called Feed The Kitty: The Movieand it’s a lot of fun) or placing songs in films and TV shows, including in the Oscar-nominated, Ryan Gossling vehicle Lars And The Real Girl, or National Lampoon’s Cattle Call, or a live appearance on Fox-11 TV’s Good Day LAmorning program, as well as on the police drama, Rogue; the latter utilizing three Feed The Kitty cuts for its soundtrack.  

For Ain’t Dead Yet, the three once again recorded at Dave Grohl’s famed Studio 606 in Los Angeles, with producer John Lousteau (Foo Fighters, John Fogerty, Rush) helming the board.  In addition to the group’s original songcrafting, the resulting dozen gemstones comprising the studded set employ, at times, the writing and guitar-playing talents of friend and frequent live guest, Duane Betts (Allman Betts Band), Grammy-nominated producer, Cisco Adler, and Rami Jaffee of Foo Fighters and Wallflowers fame. 

And, because sleep apparently isn’t necessary when you’re young, handsome, and in the self-described ‘hardest-working band ever,’ while ensuring that Feed The Kitty’s music is available on iTunes and everywhere music, and continuing to appear on stages anywhere and everywhere seemingly all the damn time, Jed and Jack also host the popular Feed The Kitty Power Hour podcast, always making certain to keep that kitty well-fed.