"The road goes on forever …"

It's not always easy to sum up a career — let alone a life's ambition — so succinctly, but those five words from Robert Earl Keen's (REK) calling-card anthem do just that.

You can complete the lyric with the next five words — the ones routinely shouted back at Keen by thousands of fans a night "and the party never ends!" — just to punctuate the point with a flourish, but it's the part about the journey that gets right to the heart of Keen's legacy. From the get-go, Keen wanted to write and sing his own songs, and to keep writing and singing them for as long as possible.

"I always wanted to play music, and I always knew that you had to get some recognition in order to continue to play music," Keen says. "But I never thought in terms of getting to be a big star. I thought in terms of having a really, really good career writing good songs, and getting onstage to share a really good time."