At 70 years old, Robert Earl Keen is as surprised as anyone to find his foot still on the gas. The beloved Texas songwriter and composer of the timeless singalong “The Road Goes on Forever” is still touring, even after his ballyhooed retirement in 2022. There’s a major difference, though, between the current version of Keen and the one from four years ago. Today, he is being thrust into the spotlight by a handful of friends who cut their teeth on Keen’s music. Thanks to the support of A-listers like Tyler Childers, Turnpike Troubadours, and Cross Canadian Ragweed, Keen and his music are being discovered by new fans, and in new arenas.
“They give me a chance to just be myself,” Keen tells Rolling Stone of his post-retirement encore. Artists who once aspired to be in Keen’s shoes now find themselves introducing Keen to the massive crowds they draw, paying tribute in song, or even welcoming Keen to the Grand Ole Opry to make his debut, as Childers did last summer.
While Turnpike enlisted Keen to open a run of sold-out theaters in February and Ragweed had him out last summer for a stadium gig in Texas, Childers, in particular, has gone the extra mile to elevate Keen. In addition to the Opry introduction, the “Bitin’ List” Grammy winner tapped Keen to open for him in Dallas at the 20,000-capacity Dos Equis Pavilion next month, and last year co-headlined Keen’s Applause for the Cause benefit, helping raise more than $3 million in relief after the devastating July 2025 floods in the Texas Hill Country. Midway through Keen’s final set at the festival, Childers took the mic, backed by Keen’s band, for 40 minutes of his own songs.
The benefit took place not far from New Braunfels’ Gruene Hall, where Keen first experienced a Childers show in 2018. He had been enamored with the song “Purgatory,” and Childers’ spin on bluegrass. They struck up a friendship.
“After that show, we just kept up with each other,” Keen says. “The more I just got to sit around and talk to him, the more I thought, “This isn’t some one-song accident deal with that song, ‘Purgatory.’ This guy is above and beyond anything.’ I started calling him the perfect mixture of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hank Williams. Even his prose is stunning. He just has a handle on the English language like no one I’ve ever known.”
Keen recalls Childers asking him how he navigates fame, just as the Kentucky songwriter was about to blow up. Keen told him that his level of fame was going to far eclipse his own.
“I told him that you’re gonna have to find somebody that really knows about protecting yourself from crowds and all that,” Keen says. “I was pretty naive about that, even at my peak, and got in a little bit of trouble because of it.”
In the post-pandemic days, when Childers became a full-fledged headliner in arenas and stadiums, Keen says he became something of a mentor and sounding board for him. He also started opening for Childers at venues like Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, and he began covering Childers’ “Whitehouse Road” in his own shows.
According to Keen, he basked in the chance to live vicariously through Childers’ unconventional approach to the country music industry.
“When he put out that Hounds record [2022’s Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven], all I could think was, ‘You’re gonna go to New York, and you’re gonna talk to all these RCA guys, and you’re gonna play that record for them?’” Keen says. “There’s gonna be guys going, ‘There’s not a fucking hit on this record.’ But I got to where I believe in Tyler so wholeheartedly that, when he decides to make something like that happen, he’s gonna make it happen.”
When Keen turned 70, a group of his musical friends surprised him with a series of Robert Earl Keen covers. The brainchild of Cameron Gott, who often works with Keen as a tour photographer and videographer, the “Three 20s and a 10 Birthday Tribute” features artists such as Parker McCollum, Hayes Carll, Brent Cobb, Turnpike’s Evan Felker, and Wade Bowen performing their interpretations of Keen standards. The project can be found on Keen’s YouTube page, and it came as a surprise to Keen: The artists and Gott worked behind his back to pull it off.
“That was probably the best birthday present I’ve ever gotten,” Keen says.
One of the standouts was Felker’s cover of “Feelin’ Good Again,” which he performed with a bluegrass group. Over the past few months, he has been reprising the cover during Turnpike shows.
“We are in a golden era for this kind of music,” Felker says. “What a shame for all those guys before who did all the work, and we’re the ones reaping the rewards when those guys didn’t get to do it. Well, Robert Earl at least gets to see it. I’m happy that he gets to see just how much his work has impacted this generation.”
During Turnpike’s ascent in the mid-2010s, Keen would often play shows — as a co-headliner — with the Red Dirt outfit. Keen says he struggled to forge a connection with Turnpike in that era. He thought the band, and Felker in particular, kept to themselves and left him feeling, at times, removed from the new generation of artists taking over Texas. After the pandemic — and Turnpike’s 2019-22 hiatus — that changed. Turnpike’s profile grew, and Keen settled into the role of opener for the band. Plus, both he and Felker found sobriety.
Eventually, their proximity and common ground led the two men to a friendship, which was on full display last summer when Keen invited Felker to be a guest on his Americana Podcast. Keen says that was when he truly understood Felker.
“He seems to have a nervousness in social situations,” Keen says, “but when we got to sit down and just talk, the more he realized I wasn’t trying to pull him into some kind of a trap with the podcast. I wanted him to do what he wanted to do and be in charge of his own effort, so that people could know him the way he wanted to be known. We talked about cows and ranches and hunting and fishing and all that stuff.
“He has a much harder time handling fame than Tyler Childers does,” Keen continues, “but he is just such a genuine person, and really loving.”
Keen’s songwriting and stage presence was heavily influential on Felker. First as a fan and later as a peer, Felker admired what Keen had built for himself. “I remember his No Kinda Dancer album, and ‘Rolling By’ striking me out of the blue, like a bolt,” Felker says. “I was really getting into Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt at the time, delving into that stuff heavily. Robert Earl, to me, was like the next iteration of those guys, but here with us. It made me feel like this is something I wanted to do.”
Last August, Turnpike and Cross Canadian Ragweed played to a crowd of 35,000 at McLane Stadium in Waco, Texas, as part of their Boys From Oklahoma series. Ragweed played last and invited Keen to join during the encore. “He’s our friend, and I want to get him on as many shows as I can,” Ragweed frontman Cody Canada says. The two men traded verses on a cover of Charlie Robison’s “My Hometown,” and Canada offered Keen one of his Paul Reed Smith electric guitars to play during the song, plugged into a stack of Marshall amplifiers.
It was a first for Keen — he plays his gigs with an acoustic guitar.
“I had just strummed that guitar, and I had never been on stage with, like, the true infamous Marshall stack. I heard the sound and thought, ‘This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done.’ I’m playing through this Marshall stack, classically turned up to 11,” Keen says. “And, as far as it reverberated out there into that stadium and in that crowd, it reverberated with me for weeks.”
Along with the Childers concert, Keen has a handful of high-profile dates booked in the spring, including a headlining slot in Bryan, Texas, at the Troubadour Festival, and a billing at the massive Railbird Festival in Lexington, Kentucky, in June.
Away from the stage, he was honored as the sportsman of the year by the Dallas-based Park Cities Quail Coalition; Felker attended the March ceremonies. (Previous honorees include George Strait and Kevin Costner.) In February, the Texas Legislative Conference named Keen as its Texan of the Year for his work organizing Applause for the Cause. For Keen’s part, he’s feeling the whole of Americana coalesce around artists and fans alike in the wake of tragedies like the Hill Country floods and the deaths of Todd Snider, Joe Ely, and Raul Malo. In a genre often caught in territorial battles over authenticity in country music, Keens says this is a refreshing change of perspective.
“This whole Americana thing is not just some sort of title. It’s a community,” he says. “I’m seeing it with stuff like the loss of Todd and the loss of Joe Ely and the loss of Raul. I think it’s bringing people together instead of going the other way.”
Keen is feeling inspired as a songwriter for the first time in years too. In a bit of irony, the prevalence of artificial intelligence in music has emboldened him. When he sees the impact AI is having — and the potential it has to damage the business of songwriting — Keen realizes two things: That he can write songs better than a computer, and that he still has something to offer the world of music.
“Frankly, for quite a while, I’ve had a jaded outlook on songs,” he says. “Especially with the crap about ‘AI can write a song.’ I’ve turned around on that, because I just see it now as one of those things that I’ve always been able to do. For artists to sit around and mope about their worth or about how they’ll be received is just a waste of time. It would be like if I were a great chess player, and all of a sudden I decided, ‘Fuck it, I’m not gonna play chess anymore. Everybody can play chess. You can play chess with a computer.’
“I’m settled with that. What I need now is some more easygoing time to dig into some thoughts and things that I would like to put into song, you know?”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.
