Ready For Confetti opens with the jangling lilt of a spaghetti western anthem, which settles into a simple shuffle mandolin flourishes. “Black Baldy Canyon” clever avoids cliches as he turns a long, rugged trip into a metaphor for a relationship. The title track is a joyous song that borrows steel drums and rhythms for a celebration of the weird and the mundane. “Get ready for confetti everyday” he advises his audience as he walks them past former prostitutes and alien abductees. “I Gotta Go’ brings to mind Mary Gauthier’s painful “Goodbye,” with its tale of a child left at birth who spends his life saying his farewells. Keen manages a perfect blend of forced detachment and underlying weary pain as he sings, “born one morning on the day of the dead, in a bombed out bungalow, my mama kissed my cheek and said I gotta go.” “Lay Down My Brother” finds Keen returning to the over-produced, auto-tuned vocal tweaks that he likes playing around with from time to time. However, unleashes the most somber side of his dark baritone and, combined with an almost tinny guitar backing, the production does not sound out of place on the song or on the album.
“The Road Goes On and On” is a snarling invective hurled at the posers in music industry with their fake patriotism and their country suburbs. “I never liked you anyway, wouldn’t give you the time of day if I had the time to spend,” he spits to the guy “all duded up in your cowboy crocs, singing the same old song.” “Real cowboys say the party never ends and the road goes on and on and on and on,” he sneers. “Show the World” would be preachy in any other hands, but Keen sings it with a quiet melancholia that saves the song. For “Waves on the Ocean” Keen borrows a smidgen from both Island and Latin beats for a song that sound not unlike Raul Malo’s recent work. He fuses these new sounds with a chorus that is vintage Keen. “Everything is happening and everything is new, everyone is clapping and its all about you,” Keen sings in “Top Down.” It is a song that flips the scripts on “The Road Goes On and On,” catching a singer in their early days, leaving room for both celebration and warning.
The next track finds Keen covering Todd Snider’s “Play A Train Song,” a ballad about the beautiful memories left behind when a close friend lies fast and dies young. With its wailing harmonica and driving guitars, Keen stays pretty close to the original. While he adds little to the song, it is a good version none the less. Keen follows this up with “Who Do Man’ a sprawling, bluesy song that could well be the life story of “Play A Train Songs” dead man dancing. “If you want the dirt on so and so,” he advises, “don’t go asking just any old Joe.” “Paint the Town Beige” finds Keen settling into an uneasy middle age on a quiet country road. The song finds him carefully balanced between wistful longing for his younger days and a solid knowledge time rather than proximity or activity ended them. The song made it first appearance on 1993’s Paint the Town Beige, but Keen feels like he has worn his way into it, like a good pair of jeans. The album closes with his cover of “Soul of a Man,” covered most notably by Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. It is a gorgeous, gospel side of Robert Earl Keen which has long been kept under wraps.
Robert Earl Keen is a pillar of the Texas Music Scene, one that held it together when everyone else was moving to Nashville. With credentials like that under his belt, an audience could understand if he took an album or two simply to rest on his laurels. If, having spent the last few decades creating a sound, he opted to dwell in it for a while. However, you don’t inspire an entire generation of new musicians by playing it safe. Ready For Confetti finds Robert Earl Keen exploring new subjects and new sounds, while revisiting old and comfortable ones. Ready for Confetti is the portrait of the songwriter as an artist, and the artists as a man
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