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The Road Goes On Forever…until it doesn’t. Legendary Texas songwriter and entertainer Robert Earl Keen wraps up 41 years on the road with his 2022 Final Tour, I’m Comin’ Home: 41 Years On The Road.

Keen made the announcement in January, 2022, with a personal video posted on his social media accounts. “I’ve been blessed with a lifetime of brilliant, talented, colorful, electrical, magical folks throughout my life,” Keen said. “This chorus of joy, this parade of passion, this bull rush of creativity, this colony of kindness and generosity are foremost in my thoughts today. It’s with a mysterious concoction of joy and sadness that I want to tell you that as of September 4, 2022, I will no longer tour or perform publicly.”

With a catalog of 21 albums, his band of stellar musicians, and many thousands of shows under his belt, POLLSTAR ranked Keen in its Top 20 Global Concert Tours in July, 2021. Keen has blazed a peer, critic, and fan-lauded trail that's earned him living-legend status in the Americana music world.

The Americana genre was officially recognized by the music industry in 1998 and Keen was the first artist to be featured on The Gavin Report’s Americana Music Chart and on the debut cover of its magazine.

Keen continues to blaze a trail for other artists with Producer, Clara Rose, and their Americana Podcast. In 2019, Americana Podcast launched with the inaugural episode featuring Jamestown Revival and Lucero. The Americana Podcast has furthered the interest in artists Billy Strings, Lori McKenna, Drew Holcomb and I’m With Her.

A Houston native, Keen is one of the Lone Star State's legendary singer-songwriters. In 2019, at a homecoming at the Houston Rodeo, Robert performed with his college friend Lyle Lovett. The old friends opened the show for George Strait to a record-breaking audience of more than 80,000.

Keen was weaned on classic rock and Willie Nelson records. By the time he entered Texas A&M University, Robert taught himself how to the play the guitar and turned his poetic musings into songs. These early days are captured in spirit on the Keen/Lyle Lovett co-write, "The Front Porch Song," which both artists recorded on their respective debut albums, and in Happy Prisoner, REK’s bluegrass recording.

From the beginning, Keen took the road less travelled. He produced and financed his first album, No Kinda Dancer. Robert began to make a name for himself when he won the Kerrville Folk Festival's prestigious New Folk Songwriting Competition.

After his debut release, Robert moved to Nashville. He worked at the legendary Hatch Show Print as a pressman. When he returned to Texas, Robert had a publishing deal, a new label, and a national booking agent. He released The Live Album and West Textures, the seminal album which debuted the rowdy rockin’ fan favorite "The Road Goes on Forever."

Robert had no idea that his song about a couple of ill-fated lovers running afoul of the law would catapult into the stratosphere of classic Americana, but he credits DJ Steve Kaufman of San Antonio radio station KRIO for helping to start the fire. "Steve talked the station into doing sort of a free-form programming format during ‘drive time,’” Robert says. “It was anything he liked, which turned out to be great music and a last glimpse at the influence of the DJ on radio. With an organic boost from Kaufman, I went from playing the front room at Gruene Hall for a max of 150 people to playing a show in San Antonio for 1,500 people. That was a moment that kept me going; because before that, I'd been working for 10 years and had a lot of rejection but very little success."

Fellow Texas icon Joe Ely recorded both "The Road Goes on Forever" and "Whenever Kindness Fails" on his album, Love and Danger, and the secret was out on Keen's credentials as a songwriter's songwriter. He is now a member of the Texas Heritage Songwriter Hall of Fame, The Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Texas Institute of Letters.

Robert continued to steer clear of the waters of the country mainstream. His authentic alternative to three-and-a-half minute repetitious radio tunes formed the perfect storm of Keen's literate song craft, razor wit and killer band. It stirred up a grassroots sensation not seen since the '70s heyday of maverick outlaw country.

Two more albums, A Bigger Piece of Sky and Gringo Honeymoon, brimmed with instant classics like "Corpus Christi Bay," "Gringo Honeymoon," "Dreadful Selfish Crime," and "Merry Christmas From the Family”.

The live performance, the show, is an essential experience for REK fans. BMI acknowledged Keen’s contribution as a road warrior in 2015 when they honored Robert with the inaugural Troubadour Award.

Keen and his band hit the road, going out 180 days a year, to play dance halls, roadhouses, theaters, and festival grounds with diverse crowds of college kids, serious singer-songwriter fans, and plenty of true believers.

In 2018, Keen returned to College Station to accept the Texas A&M Distinguished Alumni Award. The prestigious honor has been granted to only a few hundred of Texas A&M’s half a million alumni. The award recognizes Aggies who have achieved excellence in their chosen professions, made meaningful contributions to Texas A&M University, and in their local Communities.

Keen will continue to write music and create, host his popular podcast, support young artists, and follow his artistic muse wherever it takes him.

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The Road Goes On Forever…until it doesn’t. Legendary Texas songwriter and entertainer Robert Earl Keen wraps up 41 years on the road with his 2022 Final Tour, I’m Comin’ Home: 41 Years On The Road.

Keen made the announcement in January, 2022, with a personal video posted on his social media accounts. “I’ve been blessed with a lifetime of brilliant, talented, colorful, electrical, magical folks throughout my life,” Keen said. “This chorus of joy, this parade of passion, this bull rush of creativity, this colony of kindness and generosity are foremost in my thoughts today. It’s with a mysterious concoction of joy and sadness that I want to tell you that as of September 4, 2022, I will no longer tour or perform publicly.”

With a catalog of 21 albums, his band of stellar musicians, and many thousands of shows under his belt, POLLSTAR ranked Keen in its Top 20 Global Concert Tours in July, 2021. Keen has blazed a peer, critic, and fan-lauded trail that's earned him living-legend status in the Americana music world.

The Americana genre was officially recognized by the music industry in 1998 and Keen was the first artist to be featured on The Gavin Report’s Americana Music Chart and on the debut cover of its magazine.

Keen continues to blaze a trail for other artists with Producer, Clara Rose, and their Americana Podcast. In 2019, Americana Podcast launched with the inaugural episode featuring Jamestown Revival and Lucero. The Americana Podcast has furthered the interest in artists Billy Strings, Lori McKenna, Drew Holcomb and I’m With Her.

A Houston native, Keen is one of the Lone Star State's legendary singer-songwriters. In 2019, at a homecoming at the Houston Rodeo, Robert performed with his college friend Lyle Lovett. The old friends opened the show for George Strait to a record-breaking audience of more than 80,000.

Keen was weaned on classic rock and Willie Nelson records. By the time he entered Texas A&M University, Robert taught himself how to the play the guitar and turned his poetic musings into songs. These early days are captured in spirit on the Keen/Lyle Lovett co-write, "The Front Porch Song," which both artists recorded on their respective debut albums, and in Happy Prisoner, REK’s bluegrass recording.

From the beginning, Keen took the road less travelled. He produced and financed his first album, No Kinda Dancer. Robert began to make a name for himself when he won the Kerrville Folk Festival's prestigious New Folk Songwriting Competition.

After his debut release, Robert moved to Nashville. He worked at the legendary Hatch Show Print as a pressman. When he returned to Texas, Robert had a publishing deal, a new label, and a national booking agent. He released The Live Album and West Textures, the seminal album which debuted the rowdy rockin’ fan favorite "The Road Goes on Forever."

Robert had no idea that his song about a couple of ill-fated lovers running afoul of the law would catapult into the stratosphere of classic Americana, but he credits DJ Steve Kaufman of San Antonio radio station KRIO for helping to start the fire. "Steve talked the station into doing sort of a free-form programming format during ‘drive time,’” Robert says. “It was anything he liked, which turned out to be great music and a last glimpse at the influence of the DJ on radio. With an organic boost from Kaufman, I went from playing the front room at Gruene Hall for a max of 150 people to playing a show in San Antonio for 1,500 people. That was a moment that kept me going; because before that, I'd been working for 10 years and had a lot of rejection but very little success."

Fellow Texas icon Joe Ely recorded both "The Road Goes on Forever" and "Whenever Kindness Fails" on his album, Love and Danger, and the secret was out on Keen's credentials as a songwriter's songwriter. He is now a member of the Texas Heritage Songwriter Hall of Fame, The Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Texas Institute of Letters.

Robert continued to steer clear of the waters of the country mainstream. His authentic alternative to three-and-a-half minute repetitious radio tunes formed the perfect storm of Keen's literate song craft, razor wit and killer band. It stirred up a grassroots sensation not seen since the '70s heyday of maverick outlaw country.

Two more albums, A Bigger Piece of Sky and Gringo Honeymoon, brimmed with instant classics like "Corpus Christi Bay," "Gringo Honeymoon," "Dreadful Selfish Crime," and "Merry Christmas From the Family”.

The live performance, the show, is an essential experience for REK fans. BMI acknowledged Keen’s contribution as a road warrior in 2015 when they honored Robert with the inaugural Troubadour Award.

Keen and his band hit the road, going out 180 days a year, to play dance halls, roadhouses, theaters, and festival grounds with diverse crowds of college kids, serious singer-songwriter fans, and plenty of true believers.

In 2018, Keen returned to College Station to accept the Texas A&M Distinguished Alumni Award. The prestigious honor has been granted to only a few hundred of Texas A&M’s half a million alumni. The award recognizes Aggies who have achieved excellence in their chosen professions, made meaningful contributions to Texas A&M University, and in their local Communities.

Keen will continue to write music and create, host his popular podcast, support young artists, and follow his artistic muse wherever it takes him.

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You’re invited to party on the plaza! Get the evening started just steps away from the venue gates on PNC Plaza at ACL Live with sips, bites, and jams from 6:00PM-8:00PM. FREE admission with your ACL Live ticket!

Old Crow Medicine Show got their start busking on street corners in 1998, from New York state and up through Canada, winning audiences along the way with their boundless energy and spirit. They eventually found themselves in Boone, North Carolina where they caught the attention of folk icon Doc Watson while playing in front of a pharmacy. He invited the band to play at his festival, MerleFest, and the rest is history.

It’s been over twenty years since these humble beginnings. The band has gone on to receive the honor of being inducted as members of the Grand Ole Opry, and have won two Grammy Awards: “Best Folk Album” for Remedy (2014) and “Best Long Form Music Video” for Big Easy Express (2013). Additionally, their classic single, “Wagon Wheel”, received the RIAA’s Double-Platinum certification in 2019 for selling over 2,000,000 copies while the band’s debut album O.C.M.S. has been certified Gold (500,000 copies).  The band’s latest release is Live At The Ryman (2019) which was released on Columbia via The Orchard. Old Crow Medicine Show’s latest endeavor was the Hartland Hootenanny, a variety show hosted on You Tube that featured music, storytelling, special guests, socially distanced square dancing and more.  

Old Crow Medicine Show’s seventh studio album, Paint This Town, will be released via ATO Records (2022).  Produced by Matt Ross-Spang, and recorded at their very own Hartland Studio, the new album shines a light on the darker aspects of the American experience with character-driven songs underpinned by the band’s vision for a more harmonious future.

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With one foot in the real world and the other in a charmed dimension of his own making, Amos Lee creates the rare kind of music that’s emotionally raw yet touched with a certain magical quality. On his eighth album Dreamland, the Philadelphia-born singer/songwriter intimately documents his real-world struggles (alienation, anxiety, loneliness, despair), an outpouring born from deliberate and often painful self-examination. “For most of my life I’ve walked into rooms thinking, ‘I don’t belong here,’” says Lee. “I’ve come to the realization that I’m too comfortable as an isolated person, and I want to reach out more. This record came from questioning my connections to other people, to myself, to my past and to the future.”

In the spirit of fostering connection, Lee made Dreamland in close collaboration with L.A.-based producer Christian “Leggy” Langdon (Banks, Meg Myers). “I met with Leggy, who I really didn’t know anything about, and before we even started to work we had a very open and vulnerable conversation about what was going on in our lives,” he recalls. “So much of what I do is solitary work, and it felt good to find someone I could connect with—sort of like, ‘I’m a lonely kid, and I wanna play.’” Thanks to that palpable sense of playfulness, Dreamland embodies an unpredictable and endlessly imaginative sound—a prime showcase for Lee’s warmly commanding voice and soul-baring songwriting.

The very first song that Lee and Langdon created together, “Hold You” set the standard for Dreamland’s open-hearted confession. With its delicate convergence of so many exquisite sonic details—luminous guitar tones, ethereal textures, tender toy-piano melodies—the track finds Lee looking inward and uncovering a deep urge to provide comfort and solace. “Especially if you’ve grown up with a less-than-appealing inner voice, you have to start with yourself,” he notes. On “Worry No More”—the mantra-like lead single to Dreamland—Lee shares his hard-won insight into riding out anxiety. “I’ve had a lot of episodes with anxiety in my life and now I feel much more equipped to handle them, partly because my family and friends have always been so supportive of me,” he says. “Music has also been so healing for me, and helped me to find a place in my mind that isn’t purely controlled by fear.” To that end, “Worry No More” gently exalts music’s power to brighten our perspective, with the song’s narrator slipping into a headphone-induced reverie as they wander a broken world (“I’m listening to the sounds of Miles/Spanish sketches, playground smiles/Crowded streets and empty vials/For all to share”).

All throughout Dreamland, Lee embraces an unfettered honesty, repeatedly shedding light on the darkest corners of his psyche. On “Into the Clearing,” for instance, the album takes on a moody intensity as Lee speaks to a desire for obliteration. “There’s always a longing to be one with the universe, to be one with nature, to be one with the sky,” he says. “And sometimes the only way you can be with the sky is to be smoke.” A powerfully uplifting track with a gospel-like energy, “See the Light” evokes a fierce resolve to hold tight to hope (“Since I know I’m going to be singing these songs over and over, I like to infuse them with helpful messages to myself,” Lee says). With its soulful piano work and soaring string arrangement, “Seeing Ghosts” reflects on anxiety’s insidious ability to warp our perception. “For a lot of people with anxiety disorders, there’s this fog that sets in, where your brain becomes overwhelmed and you disconnect,” says Lee. “I’ve definitely seen ghosts my whole life.” In a striking tonal shift, Lee then delivers one of Dreamland’s most euphoric moments on “Shoulda Known Better,” a radiant piece of R&B-pop fueled by his dreamy falsetto. “That song’s looking at the messy side of life,” he says. “It’s saying, ‘I was dumb, I shouldn’t have done that, but we had a lot of fun. I don’t regret it at all.’”

In the making of Dreamland, Lee found his songwriting indelibly informed by his recent reading of Johann Hari’s 2018 book Lost Connections. “It’s about depression, which I have a pretty deep history with, and how our society and our generation looks at mental health and healing in terms of medication rather than thinking about our personal relationship to the people and the world around us,” he says. And with the release of Dreamland, Lee hopes that his songs might inspire others to live more fully and free of fear. “Over the course of my life I’ve come to understand that music is my bridge to other people,” he says. “I have no idea what the waters are like below that bridge—it might be lava for all I know—but music allows me to float over the whole thing and connect. To me that’s the whole point of why we do this: to give people something to listen to and be enveloped by the love of another human being, and just be reminded that humanity is beautiful.”

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