Interview: Billy Keane Talks About His Life’s Journey Ahead of Rhythm & Roots
Labor Day Weekend is approaching in Rhode Island, which means that the Rhythm & Roots Festival is returning to Ninigret Park in Charlestown. There’s going to be a ton of talented acts, and even a few legends, performing on the Rhythm Stage, the Roots Stage and the Dance Stage from August 30 — September 1. There are even a few acts taking part who hail from various parts of New England, including Billy Keane. The Western Massachusetts based singer-songwriter is going to be playing with his backing band The Waking Dream as part of the festival’s final day. He and his musical compadres will kick things off on the Rhythm Stage at 1pm.
We had a talk ahead of the event about traveling all over before settling down in his current surroundings, a few new songs he has out, how it’s an honor to be part of Rhythm & Roots and his plans for the near future.
You’ve been quite a troubadour in your life due to being born in Australia, raised in Connecticut and living in Brooklyn, Seattle and even Africa while currently being based in Western Massachusetts. What brought you to all these places? Did your parents do a lot of traveling for work and you ended up doing the same?
Being born in Australia was due to both of my parents working there, and then we moved back to the United States when I was really young. The rest of that has just been part of my life’s journey so far. I traveled around Africa when I was in my late teens for a few months because I felt like I wanted to gain some perspective. I was a deep-sea diver for a while, and then music brought me back up into New England. It’s been infinite causes and infinite effects for a lot of different reasons, but it’s a part of my life.
How did you get into deep-sea diving and what were you doing with that job? Were you looking for artifacts, or were you just cleaning up the ocean?
It was commercial diving with a hard hat and a tether while doing heavy construction and pipeline inspection, that kind of thing.
Wow.
Yeah, it’s kind of a strange story. This was forever ago, but I had dropped out of college when I was around 19 and 20. I was studying philosophy, I had gotten tired of intellectualizing, and I really wanted to explore life from a purely physical perspective. Commercial diving certainly requires that physical component and also a lot of problem solving, so it was definitely interesting.
I can totally imagine. So far this year, you’ve released a few singles, which include “Returning to the Garden”, “Front Porch Swing”, “Just Before the Morning” and “Girl Ain’t Mine”, so were these all done at separate instances or were they done all during the same session?
These were all different sessions. “Returning to the Garden” was the first thing I released this year, and I wrote it last summer. I was spending some time in Southern France with some other songwriter friends who had invited me out there and I forgot who, but somebody referred to it as a “Buddhist gospel song” and I like that. I had written it while exploring these themes of interconnectedness and the impermanence of life, and right after I wrote it, I thought of my friends in The Mammals. They are folk music legends and they’re musical heroes of mine, so when I got back home, I sent them the track while asking if they would be interested in recording with me.
They were immediately down, so we recorded it at their house studio near Woodstock, New York. I was really proud of it, being able to create music with people who I respect deeply, and they walk the walk. The other ones were a bit different, I recorded “Front Porch Swing” live at Studio 9 in North Adams through the FreshGrass Foundation, who put on their own festival as well. They offered me a recording residency last May, so I put together a little band with Miles Lally on bass and Tim Morrison on drums. They set us up for about a week at the studio and we recorded live, we did the whole Oh, These Days record as a trio and then I had a couple other new songs.
I played “Front Porch Swing” right there for those guys, so what ended up being the recording was the first or second time they had ever even heard the song after I performed it. I like the way it sounded, and it came out well, so we put it out. As far as singles go, it had one of the biggest receptions of everything that we’ve put out so far. Then of course, “Just Before the Morning” was part of a two-track sort of a thing that I did recently. “Girl Ain’t Mine” was recorded at the same time, so I’m sorry for the long-winded answer, but there’s a lot in there.
No worries, it sounds like you’ve been busy. A lot of folks know you from being part of the band the Whisky Treaty Roadshow, but when it comes to your solo material, do you put yourself in a completely different mindset when it comes to the songwriting, or do you consider it all to be relatively fluid?
The Whisky Treaty is such a beautiful project on its own right, and we all kind of wrote individually for that, but I’ll say that my solo work comes from a different place. It’s really what I’ve homed in on over the last couple years and it just of a different intention. The music is different, the performance is different and it’s a real blessing to be able to explore these different creative avenues.
That’s wicked cool. What are your thoughts on being part of the Rhythm & Roots Festival? I know you’ve played in Providence before, but what do you think of coming down to South County?
I’m so excited. I’ve played Rhode Island many times, I’ve played the Knickerbocker in Westerly. It’s an honor to be asked to do it and with Billy Keane & The Waking Dream, it’s only been two years at most with that project, so I don’t take it lightly that festivals and venues all over the country have been digging into my stuff. They’ve been giving me an opportunity, they’ve been liking it, and I feel grateful for that. It’s not easy getting booked on a festival these days, there’s a lot of really great acts out there and a lot of wonderful musicians & songwriters.
It’s truly an honor to be part of that lineup, it’s totally stacked.
Absolutely, it’s going to be great. After the festival, do you have any more singles that you’re going to be releasing? What are your plans going into 2025?
Next month, I’m going to be releasing a whole live record that I recorded during that FreshGrass residency from last year. We’re going to be putting all of those track out, which is the Oh, These Days album, but live as a trio. When I’m not on the road, I’ve been spending a lot of my time writing, so I have a backlog of music that I’ve intended to record. Lately, I’ve felt compelled to write new material that I hope is going to correlate into an album. With these things, I can’t force it.
That cosmic energy kind of has to flow in the way that it’s going to flow, and I try to fit into that flow, but right now it definitely feels like I’m being pushed and inspired to write a new record. I’ve been talking to some producer friends who I respect deeply and hopefully we’ll be getting into the studio, so that’s the plan.
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