Review: Robert Earl Keen & Lyle Lovett, old friends back together at the Keswick
Texas tunesmiths team up for an old fashioned guitar pull.
Lyle Lovett is such a self-contained entity - from his tailored suits and tightly knotted tie to the precise, pearly notes he finger picks on his capoed guitar - that it's a surprise to realize that the high-haired Texas tunesmith also plays well with others.
Along with touring with his Large Band, Lovett has a nice sideline going pairing off with other seasoned songwriters for what they refer to down South as a guitar pull. He's played frequently with John Hiatt and Joe Ely, and last year turned in a sterling one-off gig at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside with Vince Gill.
But as memorable as those collaborations have been, they couldn't match the musical and personal connection apparent onstage at the Keswick Thursday night when Lovett teamed up with his old buddy Robert Earl Keen.
As Lovett put it, "Robert Earl and I are real friends, we're not fake show business friends." The troubadours shared history goes back to their late '70s student days at Texas A&M University, when they were so forlorn they took to putting their own names in each other's songs to advertise themselves and combat the reality that no one had heard of either of them. Thursday night's leisurely paced, never dull 2 1/2-hour set built towards "This Old Porch," the keenly determined song that sounds as sturdy and worldly wise now as when they wrote it together as Aggies.
With Lovett seated to Keen's right, the duo alternated songs, mixing in occasional covers sung in tandem in winningly imperfect harmony such as Jimmie Rodgers' "T for Texas," and the show-closing "Texas 1947," in tribute to Guy Clark, the master craftsman and hero to both men who died earlier this year. And there was one other sterling cover of note that followed a tender story about Keen and Lovett coming up together in Lone Star State listening rooms: the latter's gorgeous take on the late David Rodriguez' "Ballad of the Snow Leopard & the Tanqueray Cowboy."
But for the most part, these two don't need anybody else's songs: They've got plenty of their own.
Onstage, they're a study in contrasts. Lovett is all right angles as he perfectly enunciates the lyrics to his puzzle-piece songs, which occasionally go for the big laugh, as in "She's No Lady (She's My Wife)," which was set off by an impressive, jazzy guitar solo by Keen. Lovett's best songs are the beauties that seem self-confident but reveal themselves to be self-lacerating, such as the stately "If I Were The Man You Wanted" and devastating "Nobody Knows Me."
Keen is rounded rather than angular, slumped in his chair, with a tendency to run syllables together in his comparatively unguarded, frequently seriously funny songs. An exception to the no-holiday-music-before-Thanksgiving rule was earned with the charming singalong sentiments in "Merry Christmas From the Family." The piquant "Copenhagen," a song about chewing tobacco, elicited a story about the one and only time Lovett tried a pinch. The memory is "a continuing admonition that keeps me on the straight and narrow," he said.
The patter was unpracticed, the set list largely decided in the moment. When Lovett needed to tune up, Keen kept the audience occupied with two-men-walk-into-a-bar jokes.
"When a song seems to be about a real person, is it?" Lovett asked, after Keen sang the open-hearted love song "Feelin' Good Again." "Yes, and no," his compadre replied. After Lovett delivered a robust "Private Conversation" upon request, Keen allowed people to call out titles at length. "You haven't guessed it yet," he said with a sly grin, before announcing he was instead going to do "Village Inn," a song that nobody asked for. "That's OK," he said. "I like it."
