Joe Ely shows no signs whatsoever of slowing down and easing into the easy chair as he hits 60. First off, Ely releases a new CD, "Happy Songs From Rattlesnake Gulch" in February on his own Rack 'Em label, yet itself a new venture.

Later in February is publication of Ely's poetic musings of life as a musician on the road, "Bonfire of Roadmaps," on the University of Texas Press.

March brings an exhibit of the Texan's drawings at the University of Texas.

Then, there's the release of another - sort of - new album in March, "Silver City," featuring age-old songs penned by Ely, but only recently recorded, followed by two spoken word CDs in April from the "Bonfire" book.

Not to mention reissues of a few of his CDs later in the year, probable studio time with The Flatlanders (Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock and Ely) this summer, future recording projects and a novel.

Lest we forget...Ely is still a road warrior. He's now on the road with a bunch of songwriter friends with names like Lovett, Clark and Hiatt, sprinkled with solo acoustic dates and potential tours of Europe and Australia later this year.

Joe Ely may be Texas country's renaissance man.

"I had a high school English teacher that said I would never make it to 21, and then I had other people that... warned me of my gypsy lifestyle," says Ely, via cell phone from the Austin area. "The whole time, ever since I left home and lived out on the road, I might appear to have been homeless and a vagabond, but actually I was on a great mission discovering about every place that I was going, drawing stuff and writing stuff down and making songs out of it."

"I'll be 60 in a few days, and I'm busier than ever," says Ely, joking, "I guess I just don't watch enough television is what my problem is. I need to catch up more on TV and things to take up my time like miniature golf and stuff like that. I'm always working on just other stuff, so I don't have time to do the important things in life."

But Ely quickly gets serious, listing his various projects about ready to hit the streets.

First up are the two CDs "Rattlesnake Gulch" and "Silver City," which Ely ties to the book.

"That whole idea came about when the book idea came about," says Ely. "I look at both of these records to be companion pieces to the book because they were written at different periods of time, and most of the recordings, the majority, were finished in the last year. Some of them were started at other periods of time. The time that was covered in the book."

"'Rattlesnake' is the rough and tumble side of it and 'Silver City' is the easy side of it."

Ely, who spent most of his recording career with MCA, HighTone and Rounder, considered going with a label, but ultimately decided that would not work based on his productivity.

"I talked with a couple of record companies and approached them. New West really didn't know what to do with it. (I want to) put out two records on practically no notice."

"I probably have another, I don't know how many whole collections of stuff that I've always wanted to put out, but I've never had the record company that was able to do things other than just one big project every two years."

"I'm looking out especially over the next five years, there are several (projects), I can't say how many, I'm going to put out including a novel and several more records."

"Rattlesnake Gulch" has the typical assortment of Ely songs ranging from story songs about characters to love songs and even a political one.

"Those are characters that...passed through my life when I was on the road. The song, 'Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes,' started at another time, but I finished it around the time of Hurricane Katrina. I...think the record as going from Viet Nam to Hurricane Katrina."

The lead-off song makes direct references to New Orleans starting with "All my people need food and water/And Baby needs a new pair of shoes."

The track for the humorous "Miss Bonnie & Clyde," about escaping with Bonnie from famed bank robber Clyde Barrow, was cut in 1998.

"The reason that I kept that track is my friend, Donald Lindley, who played drums, died soon after we put that track down. We laid down a track, and I had the sketchings of a story, and I saved the track. Then Donald died, and I put the track away for a few years and never really finished the song until just about a year ago. I finished the lyric, and I dusted off the track. It was the last track he recorded."

"I thought I've got to keep that," Ely says.

"Hard Luck Saint" is about a drifter Ely once knew. "It's actually about a guy from Turkey who came to Ellis Island when he was a teenager and literally lost his parents in Brooklyn never to see them again, and he looked for them for weeks and weeks," says Ely. "He came to Texas because of some picture of a windmill or some dusty old scene and asked someone where it was, and they said it probably looked like Texas. He hitchhiked or jumped trains to Texas, and he worked in oil' fields. I met him."

"He helped my daddy with his used clothing store. He was the most amazing cat. He was a tough old coot, but had the most amazing sense of humor (and) just had this incredibly sweet spirit that he shows up not only in this song, but has a big part in the novel that I wrote. Everybody just calls him Bob the Turk."

"When my father died, he... helped my mother try to save the store. He drove the truck and did the stuff, to no avail. He then just...anished."

On its face, "Up a Tree" is about someone caught up a tree with the dogs nipping away.

For Ely, it's political.

"It was originally just written about someone who gets themselves in a situation they can't get themselves out of, but the very first verse of it was written when Nixon was in Watergate. I just...left that (alone). When I was going through (papers) a few years ago - going through my writings and stuff - and I found that verse. It was ...ironic because I saw George Bush up that same tree. I just finished that song because some things just go around in a big old circle. I said this song has to be finished because if I wrote that song in Nixon's day, it's the same song now. I just wrote it about another leader going up the tree. He knows he has to come down sometime."

"Bonfire of Roadmaps" is a mixture of Ely's musings - many poetic, some a bit hard to decipher, about life on the road and music - from different periods of Ely's life.

"It's really a project that I've been working on all my life, so it's not something that I've been doing (only) in the past few months. The book is a journal I've been doing. Song ideas. They started being out notes for future songs, and then they ended up being a rhythm. So, they end up being 40, 50, 60 pages long of snapshots from the road."

The set is not complete because some were destroyed in a flood, and four years worth were left in the back of a taxicab in New York City, years that Ely had gotten his band together and toured with British punkers New Wave heroes The Clash.

Ely was born Feb. 9, 1947 in Amarillo, Texas. By eight, he took violin lessons, followed several years later by steel-guitar lessons. Interestingly, a door-to-door music lesson salesman, who also happened to teach Buddy Holly, taught Ely, who also took guitar lessons.

"That slide guitar just took me to a whole 'nother place. I was just instantly transported out of Lubbock...(It was) Hawaiian style guitar, and it completely mesmerized me."

"The guy who taught me how to play electric guitar also was living in a house that Buddy Holly lived in about five years earlier. There were all kinds of coincidences in Lubbock that have to do with Buddy Holly."

"After Buddy died, everybody in Lubbock was playing a Stratocaster. He was the catalyst for me anyway that made me think about writing songs and going out in the world and playing them."

"I knew that was going to be a part of my life," says Ely of music. "I had no idea that everything I did revolved around it. I knew that I had...discovered something that was real close to me."

"My granddad was always singing in the church choir when I was a kid. There was always a piano in my house. Nobody played it except me. I would tinker around on it and find melodies."

As a kid, Ely remembers seeing Texas swing great Bob Wills through the cracks in the wall of a Amarillo honky tonk and Jerry Lee Lewis playing a show at a car dealership.

Books were not where it was at for Ely. "I failed English. I pretty much left high school. I never made it through the 11th grade. I hit the road when I was about 17."

"Most of the stuff that I wrote down, I wrote for my enjoyment."

He played in Dallas and Houston, heading out to Los Angeles. Ely went to New York in 1969 to join a Texas theatrical troupe there and later hit Europe.

When he returned to the U.S., he entered a different path - tending the animals at the Ringling Brothers Circus for a few months until it hit Lubbock, and Ely's circus career was history.

Ely hung long enough to form a band with Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, fiddler Steve Wesson and mandolin player Tony Pearson. With a demo in hand, they hit Nashville, but turned down a deal. Ely went home.

A new band formed, The Flatlanders, with Gilmore, Hancock and his brother Tommy, Wesson and Sylvester Wright.

The legend of The Flatlanders soon began with the release of "One More Road" in 1970, but only on the Charly label in England. The disc was not released in the U.S. for several decades, helping The Flatlanders reach cult status although an inactive band for about 30 years.

As for Ely, a tape of his music made its way to Jerry Jeff Walker, who recommended that the folks at his label, MCA, give it a listen. The label execs apparently liked what they heard because they signed Ely, who released a self-titled debut in 1977.

Ely's reputation grew markedly with the releases of the follow-up CDs, "Honky Tonk Masquerade" in 1978 and "Down on the Drag" in 1979.

A fourth CD - the first of three live discs Ely would eventually release, "Live Shots" - made its way to The Clash. Ely soon opened dates for the Brits in their homeland with The Clash and Ely also playing U.S. dates together.

Ely continued recording for MCA and later did several discs for HighTone Records before settling with Rounder. "Happy Songs" is only his second solo disc in nine years.

In recent years, he devoted a lot of energy and effort to The Flatlanders, which toured a good amount and released "Now Again" in 2002 and "Wheels of Fortune" 2 years later, both on New West.

He also recorded two albums as part of the Tex-Mex rootsy collective, Los Super Seven, which included Rick Trevino, Raul Malo, Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimenez.

Once again, though, Ely seems intent on focusing on his own career for the time being.

After "Rattlesnake Gulch, a new "old" album, "Silver City," is due in March. All 10 songs were written between 1968 and 1972, but recorded in the past 1 1/2 years.

"A few of the songs I've recorded on other albums, but I went back to the original words," says Ely.

With so much going on, why bother going back to songs that are more than three decades old?

"That's another thing of my new philosophy in this...individual age of why not? I think for one thing I... feel it's ...loosely connected with this (book) project because it's... the beginning of where I was when I started hitting the road. You can hear it in those songs. There's...an innocence there. 'Rattlesnake Gulch' is a little more road weary. I just thought that the record is not ever (going to come out) because it's more acoustic oriented, not something the radio is ever going to play. It should just be part of a collection, and that's...my new way of thinking."

"Most of them are things that I left behind because I got together with Butch and Jimmie from the Flatlanders, and we went off and recorded the songs that we...played together and these other songs were...written in my book, and I never pulled them out at the time."

"I pulled them out last year, and I thought people might want to hear these early acoustic songs." Accordionist Joel Guzman plays with Ely on the set.

"I had the melodies in my head, and I would sometime go and... mess with them and...find something that sort of worked, but it just didn't fit into the particular record I was working in at the time."

"When something becomes a song, I somehow remember the melody even if it's 30 years ago. There were a couple of them I remember having to rewrite because the melody didn't work."

"Every once in awhile, I'd hit a little snag and record a little chorus or change the chorus to make it work. It was real interesting to take songs from that era and ... look at them...from a new perspective."

Two spoken word albums of chapters from the "Bonfire" book are due in April

. Once upon a time, Ely recorded a real special disc, a Christmas present for his daughter, Marie, when she was about three.

"I put this whole record together, got the band out, and we recorded several days before Christmas. We finished mixing it about 3 a.m. Christmas morning, and that was my present to her that year and never thought anything of it until other kids around the neighborhood wanted it, and their parents wanted it. Over the years, I've given it to my friends who had kids coming into the world. Pretty funny stories, Mr. Ghost, a pretty lullaby that me and Butch wrote years ago. (There's) one that me and Jimmie Gilmore's daughter wrote years ago."

Like other parts of Ely's past, this may be resurfacing.

"Now, I'm...approaching people about making an animated film that goes along with it or possibly a book. So, that's one more example of the things I'm going to do with Rack 'Em. I'm going to do whatever I damn well please instead of the rigmarole you go through with a record company. I feel a certain freedom."

In the near term, Ely will hit the road as part of a singer/songwriter package including Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark and John Hiatt, a tour that has been going on for several years.

Ely also is interspersing those with solo and band dates.

This summer, The Flatlanders may regroup for more recording. Touring is a possibility with the group set to play the first StageCoach Fest in early May in California.

The relationship between the three dates back to Lubbock, which had a bit of a beatnik scene, according to Ely.

"I was...playing those places, and Jimmie was too. We started doing...some songs together. He introduced me to Butch. The three of us hit it off so good that we decided to get a house together."

"We literally stayed up day and night playing music. We hardly ever played anywhere out in the world. Everybody ... came to us because our house always had music going on."

"We always...joked the fact that between the 5 of us living in that house, $80 a month (rent), we usually (could) come up with the $80 if we had a girlfriend who would help us out. We really didn't help out. We mainly ate corned bread and black-eyed peas. Our expenses weren't all that large. I think we had to come up with about $20 a month."

"It was probably even more serious than musicians who went out and tried to make money at their craft. Because we had no ambition whatsoever. I mean literally, and we still don't, none of us. We always looked at an ambitious musician who was trying to sell what they were making and not really trying to explore it. We were always...accused of not being serious at what we were doing. I guess we just didn't take it seriously. We looked at it as something we had to do for the rest of our lives because we loved it so much."

"When I look back at all that time, we didn't really consider ever doing anything else. I guess we've been lucky and being able to do that our whole lives."

Long-term, there are projects such as a tribute to Ely's songwriting buddies - Butch Hancock and Terry Allen or those whose songs he has learned (Townes Van Zant, Woody Guthrie).

"This is a project that probably wouldn't interest a record label, especially in the ... timeframe that I'm looking at. I'm looking at releasing three albums."

"I guess I just like to work and have all these projects sketched out."

"Several other records are recorded, but not finished," says Ely. "I don't really care if it makes sense or not...I'm at the point my life, I just don't really care about all of that stuff that I used to care about with record companies - whether something is smart or whether I should put something out in the spring or the fall and all that bullshit. I feel totally liberated about being to do these things and being able to release things as a project and not just another record coming out."

Does Ely ever need a break? "I don't need downtime. I really don't. I just don't know what I'd do with downtime. I've tried it. It just doesn't work with me. I like things to move and vibrate. And music is a way good way to make things vibrate. Touring is a good way to make things move."