Fully drawn songwriting distinguishes Kasey Anderson

Listen to Kasey Anderson songs closely and you'll start seeing the characters in your head, creating your own visions of them like you do when you read a book.

They're kissing on a corner or a walking the carpet of a cheap motel, fighting or falling into each other. This is not the sort of trick any songwriter can pull off. It requires lyrical specificity. It requires an ear for detail and image. Guys like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan used to write songs like that. Anderson, the Portland-based singer who plays Ellensburg on Saturday with his band The Honkies, is their direct stylistic descendent. Along with other contemporary songwriters like Patterson Hood of The Drive-By Truckers and Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, Anderson writes songs about very specific characters.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, that precision makes the songs more relatable. They're distinct enough that they seem real, whereas songs with lyrics that attempt to be broadly relatable often just seem uninteresting.

"It's dangerous territory for writers to tread, when you start to be vague and rhetorical," Anderson said in a phone interview last week.

That doesn't mean his stuff is entirely literal or unambiguous. But it is fully drawn. Take these lines from "Kasey Anderson's Dream," the title of which is a reference to a Dylan song:

The St. James hotel has 29 floors./I get the feeling, Rosie, you've been here before/I got a hand full of feathers and a pocket full of dimes./Got nothing to lose, I got nothing but time./The chambermaid said, "You've got a generous smile."/I said, "If you like it so much, why don't you stay a while?"/She said, "Where I come from, you're either honest or proud."/Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Music writers have compared Anderson to Dylan, Springsteen and Steve Earle repeatedly. Those sorts of lyrics -- not just stylistically but in terms of subject matter -- explain why. Anderson acknowledges the debt and doesn't mind the comparisons.

"It's definitely pretty heady company to be mentioned in, so it is flattering," he says. "It's mostly that those are the records I grew up with. ... Until I was 10, I thought everybody sang like Bruce Springsteen."

Like all of those artists, Anderson has evolved over the course of his now decadelong singing career. His early songs clearly are the work of a talented writer, but they can be uneven. His later efforts, particularly on his last two albums, "Nowhere Nights" and "Heart of a Dog," are more fully realized.

"I've always been clever," Anderson says. "I've always been a really smart cat. And on those first couple of records, it's a lot of me relying on knowing how to turn a phrase."

It's noteworthy, too, that Anderson really has a band now. His albums prior to this year's "Heart of a Dog" were solo recordings with a backing band. Now it's an official lineup called Kasey Anderson and The Honkies -- Anderson on guitar and vocals, Andrew McKeag on guitar and backing vocals, Eric Corson on Bass and Mike Musburger on drums. The band has a full, dynamic sound on record.

"It's a tremendously big sound for four guys," Anderson says. "And it's an even bigger sound on stage than it is on the record."

It's essentially an Americana country-rock sound. And it's refreshingly brash in an age of twee Northwest acoustic music. Anderson and The Honkies are not your standard Portland-based pastoral folk-rock outfit. Though their sound is often melodic, it's rarely what you would call pretty. That, too, gives it the ring of truth.

"One thing about the Northwest that is both a blessing and a curse is that people are very polite," Anderson says. "That can't help but influence the music. But I like Tom Waits. I like The Rolling Stones. I don't need my music to say please and thank you."

Indeed, compelling as it is, Anderson's music is not always easy. His songs are filled with anguish and loss as much as they're filled with love. They are occasionally political -- sometimes overtly, as in his soldier's-point-of-view song "I Was a Photograph."

Though Anderson's wit comes through in some of the songs, it's generally a dark wit. The same cannot be said of his absurdist Twitter account, which is acerbic but mostly just funny. (Sample tweet: "I play it down but the fact is, I can eat quite a bit of beef jerky before I have to pull over and throw up in a gas station restroom.") With more than 15,000 followers as of last week, Anderson says he occasionally runs into fans of his comic writing who don't even know he's a recording artist.

"Twitter for me is really the text messages that I used to send my friends in the middle of the day," he says. "Now there's an audience for it."

Anderson doesn't see a need to reconcile the two sides of his public persona -- the brooding songwriter and the lighthearted jokester. They're both among those "multitudes" Walt Whitman wrote about. And they're both characteristic of Anderson's predecessors. Dylan, after all, could be as funny as anyone. Same thing with Springsteen, Earle, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and a bunch of others Anderson cites as influences.

Like theirs, Anderson's songs allow for humor and darkness to coexist.

* Pat Muir can be reached at 509-577-7693 or pmuir@yakimaherald.com.

If you go

WHAT: Kasey Anderson and The Honkies opening for Star Anna and The Laughing Dogs.

WHEN: 9 p.m. Saturday.

WHERE: Raw Space, 117 E. Fourth Ave. in Ellensburg.

TICKETS: $12, www.rawspacemusic.com or 509-933-1304.

MORE INFO: www.kaseyanderson.com.