Kasey Anderson and The Honkies

The characters in Kasey Anderson’s songs — the directionless junkies, the battered soldiers, the too-smart-not-to-ache fixtures of bars, nightclubs and crumbling bedrooms — describe the writer/musician’s own experiences with unsettling clarity. And, you should know, not a whiff of romanticism.

“Certainly, I’ve spent a fair amount of time being a shambling fuck-up, and being a bit to proud of my fucked-uppedness,” Kasey says. “But the narrative thread that runs through Let the Bloody Moon Rise (Anderson’s new album, his second recorded with his band, The Honkies) is not, ‘I gotta right this ship.’ It’s dealing with the reality that this may be as right as the ship ever gets.”

It’s this feeling for the foggy regions of the soul that has earned the Seattle-based singer/songwriter/bandleader the vocal praise of critics and the renowned likes of Steve Earle, Peter Case and Adam Duritz, whose band Counting Crows just released Anderson’s “Like Teenage Gravity” as the lead single for their latest album, Underwater Sunshine. At the same time, Duritz tapped Kasey and co-conspirators The Honkies (lead guitarist Andrew McKeag, bassist Eric Corson, drummer Mike Musburger) to be the Crows’ designated opener on their summer tour.

So how does a skinny, reflexively sardonic and frankly obscure young musician find himself in such glittery company? Anderson cites his maturation as an artist as beginning with his second album, the Eric Ambel-produced The Reckoning (2007), which spanned spare folk ballads (“Buddy Bolden’s Blues; “Don’t Look Back” and “For St. Ann’s”) and jaunty rock ‘n’ roll tunes (“Last Thin Line,” “Hometown Boys”) to achieve a major leap in the writer’s authorial voice. The mostly-autobiographical Nowhere Nights, released in 2010, raised the stakes even higher with stand-out tracks including future Counting Crows fave “Like Teenage Gravity,” the rocking “Sooner/Later” and, most strikingly, “I Was a Photograph (Blake’s Song),” which transformed the famous photograph of the Iraq war-befouled American soldier James Blake Miller (his battle-filthy face set off by an immaculately white Marlboro) into a stark portrait of the emotional toll of war: You know my face, I was a photograph on the front page, ‘neath the headline WAR/I was numb back then, boy/I ain’t even numb no more.

The buzz grew accordingly.

“A literate workingman’s poet,” sang Paste. “Equally at home with introspective ballads as he is with political dirges,” added the Onion/AV Club. And more. “One of those extraordinary brands of songwriters,” declared Performer magazine. No Depression declared Kasey “a versatile and confident singer and songwriter,” while Blurt asserted that Anderson “ought to now be considered as part of the same circle inhabited by Steve Earle, Ryan Bingham, and Townes Van Zandt.”

In the wake of that praise, and back-to-back singer/songwriter albums, Anderson got the itch to hear an entirely new sound. “I had gotten so sick of the sound of my own voice and guitar,” he says. Recalling a conversation he’d had with Seattle guitarist and longtime friend Andrew McKeag (lead guitarist for the Presidents of the United States) about the virtues of riff-rock, the two musicians pulled together the other two (sometimes three) Honkies and with McKeag as a co-writer and co-arranger, brought an element of noise to 2010‘s Heart of a Dog. The album brought in a new tide of fans, including Duritz who quickly became Kasey’s most enthusiastic supporter.

Two years of roadwork (and one live EP) later, Kasey Anderson and The Honkies roar back with Let the Bloody Moon Rise, a collection of new originals (plus a couple of well-chosen covers) that moves easily between the alt-to-the-alt country of “Some Depression” to the full-blast “Down, Lucine” to the old-school southern R&B of “Just Kids” to the Stones influenced take on You Am I’s “Older Guys” (featuring guest vocals from You Am I's own Tim Rogers) to the light-footed new spin on “Like Teenage Gravi