Guest
RFK Media artist Ron Keel has chosen the intimate personal ballad “The Last Bottle On Earth” as his first single of 2024. The new album KEELWORLD promises to combine Keel’s 80’s metal roots with melodic rock, southern rock, and this acoustic piece which he claims is “one of the best songs I’ve ever written.” The album features many hard and heavy tracks recorded by the Ron Keel Band, Keel, and Steeler, but “The Last Bottle On Earth” is all Ron, alone with an acoustic guitar. It’s a format that he’s become extremely comfortable with the past twenty years, having toured the world as an acoustic artist, and he insists some songs are just better that way. “Man, I was tempted to bring the band in on this session. I almost threw down a powerful electric guitar solo like Priest’s ‘Before The Dawn,’ which I always thought was so cool. Then I was gonna use a string quartet, but that ended up just being one lonely cello track, which I played on the guitar synthesizer. Sometimes less really is more. “The song was born when a friend of mine from Sioux Falls, a great guitar player by the name of Dale Hennings, said hey Ron – we should write a song called ‘The Last Bottle On Earth.’ See, Dale knows that I like to have a drink now and then (Ron smiles) and I guess he thought we were going to write some rowdy drinking song. But the title just slammed into me like an avalanche, and I took it as a metaphor for life, and for real love. I believe in living every moment to the fullest, and while there’s still a drop left, I’m going to make the most of it.” The official music video happened in the same way – on a cross country road trip. “I was taking a turn behind the wheel of our RV, and I had the song playing on the stereo and of course I was singing along, so my sidekick Brandon Beck just started shooting video. Found a ghost town in New Mexico, and we decided to shoot outside some old haunted saloon. Stopped for a break in Arizona, looked out at that prairie and shot some more video. I was gonna make a big production video, with a girl, and a bottle, and some kind of concept, but when I saw what we had I thought it fit the song perfectly and just left it alone.” Keel had been including “The Last Bottle On Earth” in recent solo acoustic shows and experiencing an immediate reaction. “Fans would send me messages on social media saying hey, we’re coming to the show tonight but we’re running late – don’t play that ‘Last Bottle’ song until we get there! And then people started asking me if they could use it as a wedding song, which is really special, so I went ahead and finished the session quickly so they could play it.” Ron emphasizes the new album KEELWORLD will deliver plenty of full band tracks with thunderous drums, blazing guitars, and screaming vocals, and that “The Last Bottle On Earth” is an outlier. From anthems like the opening track “Hard On The Outside (Heart On The Inside)” to songs from other projects like Keel and Steeler, KEELWORLD promises to cover the vast musical landscape that has become home for Ron Keel. “And we did end up with a rowdy drinking song called ‘Weekend With My Friends,’ which sounds like if Van Halen was from Texas - so I think we covered all the bases!” And he smiles again. The 2024 “KEELWORLD Tour” kicks off at The Whisky in Hollywood, CA on April 6th and will take him coast to coast across the US, and into Central America and South America (Columbia/Brazil) in May.
