Robert Earl Keen A Bigger Piece Of Sky

Arguably his finest record, Robert Earl Keen's A Bigger Piece of Sky is a transitional album for him -- he begins to evolve out of the terrain of his organic small-town Texas songwriting comfort zone and to walk the knife's edge between a more expansive meld of roots rock, honky tonk country, and Western back-porch folk. Keen is an inheritor of that particular brand of songwriting that Jerry Jeff Walker established in the 1970s, where the good times and wandering life of a minstrel are juxtaposed against a small-town view of a confounding world. Produced with crisp attention to detail by Garry Velletri, Keen's songs observe the smaller details in a private life, whether that life remains in the same place mentally and physically or, because of some mercurial and difficult-to-place event, slips over the line into forbidden territory. Both kinds of songs are here. The album opens slowly with "So I Can Take My Rest." This is Keen at his very best. He records loneliness, uncertainty, and t