How George Jones and Loretta Lynn inspired punk singer Trever Keith’s new album

When the punk band Face to Face re-recorded some of its most intense songs for the 2018 album “Hold Fast,” the band out of Victorville was far from the first punk act to unplug and slow down.

But for singer Trever Keith,the experience unlocked something. Now, eight years later, Keith has a new solo album out inspired not by the punk bands he heard as a teenager in the High Desert but the country greats he absorbed before that as a boy in Hesperia.“

After having done Face to Face for a few decades, that opened up a whole new realm of possibility,” Keith says the band’s decision to play acoustically for fans at their pre-show VIP events. “And it got me thinking maybe I want to do more to explore playing acoustic guitar.”

His move to Nashville from Southern California about 16 years ago also brought him into closer contact with the music and culture of country.

“I moved out to this part of the country because it was a place that was kind of revitalizing and there were new things happening here,” he says on a recent call from his Nashville home. “It was an interesting part of the country to move to, and we fell in love with it. That’s why we’re still here 16 years later.

“But through that experience of living in the South and being around country music and Southern culture, it started to seep into my pores, whether or not I was embracing it or not at first,” Keith says. “That combination of things led to me think I’d love to write and record in this acoustic style, but I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.”

Over the last five years, Keith says he’d go out for a short run of solo shows, mostly playing the acoustic takes on Face to Face tunes.

“I’d mix in a John Prine song, or do a little thing here and there,” he says. “I just started thinking more it would be cool to actually emulate some of the music that inspired and influenced me when I was a kid. I just turned 57, and I found that once I became a certain age, I started getting a lot more nostalgic about some of the things from my youth that I’d sort of put aside.

“There was this real interesting rediscovery of some of that stuff that I was like, ‘I’ll never get that back again. That was something that happened that will never happen again.’”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Keith talked about the era and artists that influenced his new country-Americana album “We Drank From a Poisoned Well,” what he had to learn about songwriting and singing to shift from punk to country, and why the late Marty Robbins was the greatest at what he did.

Q: What did you listen to as a boy? And what did you listen to as you were thinking of this album?

A: Like I said, it led me down this path of rediscovery, revisiting some of the stuff from the ’70s. Because I was born in 1969, grew up in the ’70s, and country music at that time was just really pervasive in the culture. You couldn’t turn on the radio or TV without seeing it or hearing it.

And I hadn’t realized how much of that really had become part of the fiber of my being. But I was looking at maybe playing acoustic and Americana music, and I was like, ‘What aspect of this is me?’ Like, where’s my voice in it? And I looked to the past to the ’70s-era stuff, which is mainly the ’60s just carrying over into the ’70s.

I started listening to a lot of the stuff I remember from being a kid and discovering a lot of stuff I’d missed out on. I became a huge fan of artists like Faron Young and George Jones, Porter Wagoner. I remember Johnny Cash as a kid and in the ’80s, the Mandrell Sisters.

Kenny Rogers and Alabama and the Oak Ridge Boys, although that wasn’t really the stuff I mean. I felt a real affinity for the ’60s era of country: Loretta Lynn and Connie Stevens, some Lefty Frizzell, Jim Reeves.

It was about five or six years of playing acoustic music live, figuring out what my voice might be with this style, and then immersing myself in a playlist of this era of country. When I started writing, this is the album that came out. I got to point where I’m like I’m actually going to book studio time, and I worked with some really amazing local musicians here that really brought the record to life for me.

Q: There’s some really sweet pedal steel and fiddle on there. “Right As Rain” has a great fiddle part.

A: Oh yeah. I got so lucky that this fiddle player was available during my session. He came in banged everything out in like three or four hours and just elevated the songs to this whole new level.

Q: As a kid in Hesperia, did your parents listen to country music around you?

A: I mean, my mom was never a country fan and my dad, sort of. He loves classic ’50s rock, which is kind of just next door to classic country. And then we moved to the High Desert, my dad, who is a musician, had to change his entire repertoire from ’50s rock and roll to incorporate like 80% country, because that was the demographic in Hesperia and Victorville, San Bernardino County at the time.

There was nobody there. It was largely undeveloped and the people that were there were kind of more like your Central California, like Bakersfield. They love country music, so my dad learned to play that and I was hearing a lot more of that in the house.

Q: I want to ask you about some of the themes you explored in the songwriting. Like “Brackish Water,” which has that kind of Western desperado story you might hear from Willie Nelson or the Texas outlaw country guys. Or even back to Marty Robbins.

A: I was trying to channel my best Marty Robbins. I mean, I was writing a gunfighter ballad, trying to emulate some of those guys from the ’60s. Marty Robbins, I don’t know if he actually invented it, but most people think of Marty Robbins when they think of the gunfighter ballad.

I absolutely love “Gunfighter Ballads [and Trail Songs].” The funny thing about that, though, we all heard “Big Iron” and stuff growing up. But it wasn’t until way later that I heard other songs from the record. I don’t think I heard the song “Cool Water” until maybe 15 years ago, and it was only because it was in a Western on Netflix. I was like, “What is the song? This song is amazing.” [He laughs}.

That led me to go find that album and that quickly because one of my favorite albums from start to finish.

Q: Tell me more about find the narratives in your lyrics on the album.

A: One of the challenges as a songwriter, for me, anyway, transitioning from writing punk songs into American-classic country songs is country songs are very specific. And my songwriting style throughout the years in Face to Face was a bit more vague, for lack of a better term.

I never wrote songs about a person with a name or about someone very specific. A lot of my music is written more about an emotion or a feeling or a generalized experience. And so writing country, I really tried my best to get a lot more descriptive and more specific. A song like “Brackish Waters,” I think, is a great example of where it’s literally telling a story about specific characters.

That was one thing that I took the challenge head on, and I don’t know if I met it 100% but it’s something that I plan to continue to work on and focus on as I write new material in this genre.

But also, semantically, I was trying to pay homage and just promote an era of country that sings mostly about cheating, drinking – outlaw, for lack of a better term. But not necessarily everything’s about whooping it up and shooting guns like a cartoon character. It’s more about these people who were sort of on the fringe of society and experiencing some of the biggest highs and lowest lows.

Q: I love those themes, too. Songs about your partner leaving, or dying, are classic types, like [the title track] “We Drank From a Poisoned Well” is.

A: Well, “Poisoned Well” more specifically is a metaphor for a troubled relationship, but what I ultimately sing about, it’s not super political, but the female object that the male narrator is singing about is meant to be America. And how he had this idea that the promise of America, or this relationship, was going to be more than it actually was.

Saying, “Hey, you can be critical of this too, but we all were kind of sold on this idea that we were going to get much more.”  And what it ultimately ended up being is an imperfect thing that maybe we set too high of expectations for in the first place.

Q: I’m glad I asked about it. That’s a deeper meaning than I was thinking.

A: Well, it is written as a metaphor, so if you listen to it the first few times, you’re probably thinking it’s about a traditional, or troubled relationship.

Q: Talk about the similarities and differences between punk and classic country. There’s a lot of frustration and disappointment in society and personal relationships in both.

A: Well, where they’re similar is that these are songs, or it’s music created mostly by songwriters and musicians who are working class. And their songs are about the working class. I would say that’s the biggest similarity.

And the difference is just it’s music out of time, era-wise, because country is one of the oldest versions of musical expression in American culture, where punk rock took a lot longer, 200 years or 150 years or so to come around. So the viewpoints aren’t necessarily the same and the solutions or proposed solutions to the problems aren’t the same.

Q: Talk more about the difference lyrically between country and punk.

A: I think in country music, at least traditional, 50 years old country music, it was more like the people or the personalities of the time where men didn’t really talk about how they felt. They dealt with their feelings with external things and often times things that were very bad behavior. Being an alcoholic, getting violent, all that type of stuff.

Punk rock has some of that as well, but especially today, it’s a little bit more maybe snowflakes kind of griping about being uncomfortable. [He laughs] Instead of maybe having a more stoic approach to calling out some of the injustice or difficulty of the world.

Q: Give me a little bit more on snowflake punks.

A: I might have gone too far with that comparison. [He laughs]. But it feels a little bit more like punk rock came from bratty kids that maybe were from wealthy families and maybe weren’t. At least American punk came from the suburbs. The original punk rock in Britain came from the underclass, but in America, maybe not so much.

Country music doesn’t necessarily come from a place of having any status, for the most part anyway. Maybe nowadays not as much. I’m talking about the country music that I’m emulating or creating.

Q: There are places where these genres have come together. Go back to X’s albums in the ’70s and ’80s. The whole cowpunk thing with bands like Rank and File.

A: Yeah, I think there’s some similarities that most people wouldn’t get unless maybe you’re a player. Once you start breaking the music down, the chord changes are similar, some of the melodies are similar. I’s just a matter of how you stylistically perform it.

You know, if you turn the distortion down on the guitar a little bit and maybe lean into the rhythm slightly different there are very close similarities between punk songs and country songs.

This is music that is meant to be created by regular people. I guess you could say punk rock came from country in a strange way because it’s part of a tradition of music that’s meant to be created by regular people about regular things. Punk rock didn’t come from classically trained musicians.

Then, hell, for that matter rock and roll didn’t either, right? So a lot of these have their roots in these traditional music forms like country and folk music.

You’re making me really think about music history and stuff for this one. I hadn’t really considered that much in some of these other interviews I’ve done, but I like the bigger picture stuff that we’re going into.

Q: Your voice sounds great on the new record, but it’s different from your Face to Face vocals. Did you have to train for this?

A: Yeah, I mean, I was just born with a more baritone-y, kind of boom-y voice, and it’s something that hasn’t served me well for some genres but seems easier to slide into a country setting. But I’ll go back to what I was talking about earlier. This was probably a five-, six-year period of me sort of seeing how I would ultimately settle into what became the album.

Through that, I was able to try things out live that worked and didn’t work. And I had to really kind of force myself to think differently about how to perform the music because after doing Face to Face for so many years, I had this sort of muscle memory or this groove I would settle into.

I’d want to do some of this music the same way, and I had to remember to not go with such hard intensity the way I would have in Face to Face. To learn how to focus more on melody and singing and tone and velocity with my voice.

Q: Will you be taking this album out to play live?

A: Absolutely. I actually did a couple of shows with a full band in California. I played with the White Buffalo at the Observatory and at Pappy & Harriet’s a month or two ago. Those were the first shows I was able to play a full album set. Going forward, I’ll probably do some combination of solo acoustic performances and full band performances.

Q: This year is also the 35th anniversary of Face to Face. Will you be playing any shows to mark it?

A: We did a 35th-anniversary show at the Novo in L.A. last month, which was awesome. We’re going to do another five of those this year, but they’re starting in the fall. We’ll be playing in Chicago, New Jersey, Nashville and Denver. And Toronto, that’s five. Those shows, we’re doing something special for the 35th anniversary. We’re playing the set list from our 1997 live album from start to finish, which is something we’ve never done before this year.

Will we make new records? I don’t know, it’s hard to say. I would never say never.