Robert Earl Keen’s ‘Ready For Confetti’ Gets Colorful New Vinyl Reissue
The country singer’s 2011 album will be pressed on confetti splatter vinyl for its 15th Anniversary.
One of Robert Earl Keen’s best albums is getting a highly appropriate vinyl reissue. For its 15th anniversary, the Houston country great’s 2011 album Ready For Confetti will be pressed to confetti splatter vinyl, providing a fitting visual accompaniment to the title. The reissue will ship by Aug. 21, almost exactly 15 years after the album’s original Aug. 29, 2011 release date.
Keen diverged from his usual process to make Ready For Confetti. He wrote on the road rather than at his cabin, struck a happy-go-lucky tone, and allowed producer Lloyd Maines to apply more studio polish than usual. All that tinkering paid off. The album was greeted with rave reviews that presented the record as a pleasing curveball from a Texas country storyteller worthy of his comparisons to Townes Van Zandt.
Slant Magazine praised Ready For Confetti as “far and away his most accessible and fun album to date,” noting that it “casts his snark in cheerful, sing-along melodies and to-the-point, economical narratives.” Paste recognized it as “an album that can only be quantified as classic Keen.” Meanwhile PopMatters declared, “He’s what a country artist should be and nothing it’s not: clever, but not contrived; wise, but not intellectual; tough, but not macho; and, above all, honest.” Album highlight “I Gotta Go,” in particular, was hailed as “a three-minute masterpiece.”
“As far as the songs being more ‘conventional’ goes, it’s not like I’m out to make a hit song,” Keen told Lone Star Music in 2011. “I just kind of get these ideas about how the record should sound and how weird it should be lyrically, and then I just go with it. And with this one, I thought, lyrically, I’m going to tone it down; I’m not going to go way out there, with things like ‘A Border Trilogy’ or even ’Farm Fresh Onions.’ I’m going to leave that shit alone, and I’m going to just write some songs that you can pick up on pretty easily, where there’s not any hidden agenda.”
The Ready For Confetti reissue will arrive just a few weeks after a new 25th anniversary reissue of Keen’s 2001 album Gravitational Forces. That one will be a 2LP set out July 10 on forest green vinyl.
