Tommy Keene has died at the age of 59. He “passed unexpectedly and peacefully in his sleep” last night, according to a post on his official website. The Bethesda, Maryland-born power-pop and new wave songwriter released twelve albums over the course of his career, a run which started with his 1984 debut EP Places That Are Gone and extended to his most recent album, 2015’s Laugh In The Dark. Keene first drew attention as guitarist with Washington, DC band Razz, and went on to work with Paul Westerberg of the Replacements, Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices, Velvet Crush, the Goo Goo Dolls and regular collaborator Matthew Sweet, among others. While his mid-1980s work, like Songs From The Film and ‘Places That Are Gone’, is perhaps his best known,
He gathered a cult following in that time and admiration from his fellow musicians. In 2006 he released a collaborative album with Pollard under the name the Keene Brothers. Most recently, he opened for Matthew Sweet on a tour that wrapped up this past September. In 2010, Keene’s career was memorialized in the compilation Tommy Keene You Hear Me: A Retrospective 1983-2009.
Asked about the relative lack of success experienced by power pop artists, Keene said in 2016: “I do think this particular genre is almost too highbrow for a lot of people. There’s nothing really gimmicky about it. It’s not dumbed down. A lot of popular music, there’s always some element of it that’s dumbed down…
“[Power pop] tends to be a little more – probably to its own detriment – just a little purer, and it’s sort of respecting the roots of modern, ‘60s-influenced rock ‘n’ roll. I think that’s why it attracts a lot of geeky fans. People that have worn out their copy of Pet Sounds. But Elvis Costello is power-pop. Cheap Trick is power-pop. Once you get beyond a certain level and sell a certain amount of records, you’ve escaped that world.”
He observed that although he wasn’t “making a lot of money,” he was “making the records for me,” adding: “And if people like it, that’s great. That’s the bottom line.”
The brief message on his website stated: “Tommy passed unexpectedly and peacefully in his sleep. Thank you to all his fans, friend and family who he loved very much.” His discography includes 12 albums, starting with 1982’s Strange Alliance and ending with 2015’s Laugh in the Dark.
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