LK: Hello, Keith. I’d like to ask you some questions about music and other things.

KH: All right, Loren. Let me turn off the weather channel.

LK: The weather channel?

KH: Yeah. It’s much better than a horoscope, as long as you can mute the sound.

LK: Do you spend a lot of time watching the weather channel?

KH: No. I want to see if it’s going to be warm enough to give my dog a bath in the back yard.

LK: Okay. Enough small talk. Let’s talk music.

KH: Okay, dot com.

LK: People ask where the Keith Harden Electric Blues Band is these days.

KH: Well, we’re still together. We don’t play much, but I like to think of us as a vintage car. You keep it in the garage a lot, but when you take it out for a drive, it brings back that same old feeling the minute you start it up. It still runs fine, just fine.

LK: You haven’t worn "the hat" in a long time.

KH: I replaced it with a headband quite a while ago, but I’ve got it in case of an emergency. By the way, I’m not using Grecian formula yet, either.

LK: So what’s it like being one of the longest-running full-time musicians in the C-U area?

KH: It’s like several lifetimes crammed into one. Every band I was in was like a family; sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes not, sometimes bad, sometimes extremely good. It teaches you, if you’re willing to learn, so many different things…about music, but mostly about people…bands, audiences, clubs, club owners, recording, writing, performing, starvation, love, hate, alcoholism, cigarette smoke…One of the great things is that you get to travel. Then it turns into, you have to travel, then to, you have to drive when you’re way too sleepy or tired. It’s a test of your will, and I tell you what, I’m a stubborn son-of-a-gun. Otherwise I would have been out of it a long time ago.

LK: What’s going on for you nowadays?

KH: In December of ‘99 I released my all-acoustic CD, What the Blues are For, just in time for the Y2K deadline. (You remember when everybody used to say "Y2K" ten times a day, don’t you?) But seriously, what I’m mostly doing now is writing and recording a lot, and, of course, gigging. I’m gonna release at least one CD before 2001 (the real start of the new millennium), maybe two.

LK: In what direction are you headed musically?

KH: I’ve been working on alternate guitar tunings for a few years now and have written most of my new music with these new tunings. I would call this style "modern acoustic folk-singer-songwriter" stuff. My main inspiration is my lovely wife, Karen, who by the way is typing this interview for me.

LK: When do the songs come- day, night, morning, or evening?

KH: Whenever they want. I’m ready.

LK: You say you might release two CDs?

KH: Yes. I’m also working on a "folk finger-picking good-old-blues-boy" type of CD, tentatively titled "Blues, Ballads, Roots, and Rags." I go back and forth between the styles several times a season. Hopefully, one day the "twain shall meet."

LK: Anything else?

KH: I’d like to thank Rich Cibelli for promotion and ideas, Bob Paleczny for doing my website and taking an interest in what I’m doing these days, John Gray for building me a beautiful acoustic guitar, Paul Wirth for hanging in there with acoustic music on Tuesday nights for seven and a half years, all my friends and fans who support the music, and Karen for trying to teach me how to write an e-mail.