Thomas says he approached Morricone’s music not as some sharp analytical thinker, but rather as someone who takes a good look at his own handicaps and influences and draws towards the music from an emotional standpoint. He let the Morricone themes swirl around in his head until he felt it was his own music playing in his mind. As a youngster, Thomas had seen Sergio Leone’s monumental film, Once Upon a Time in America, and was struck by its pictorial power. It was only later that he became aware of how deeply the music had touched him, and how "unbelievably sentimental" it had made him. When Jens played or wrote a ballad, he would often feel the influence of Morricone’s music. As Thomas was composing a piece for string quartet commissioned by the Goethe Institute in Lisbon, it was evident to him how much Morricone’s style had bled into his own, especially in the slow passages of the composition.

You Can’t Keep a Good Cowboy Down contains some of Morricone’s most important themes, themes that God knows are not just simply background music for spaghetti Westerns. With an amazing feeling for musical images, with a loving rearranging of the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic source, Thomas demonstrates how one can treat the material both freely and at the same time with respect. When Jens sent him a copy of the recording, Ennio Morricone reacted enthusiastically to the music. He wrote back, "The quality of your piano playing and improvisation is remarkable. Your fantasy and technique is on the highest level".  Eight pieces are recorded in solo, at times accompanied by the ticking pendulum of a metronome. On four compositions Jens Thomas is accompanied by two important players in the Italian jazz scene: the Sardinian trumpeter Paolo Fresu and the accordion virtuoso Antonello Salis.

Cologne’s Stadtanzeiger newspaper calls Jens Thomas "The Jimi Hendrix of the piano". Speaking of Thomas’s solo CD Endlich Allein in his article in the Zeit newspaper’s feuilleton section, Michael Naura marveled that Jens "didn’t kowtow to the American superstars; instead, he developed a European format". With Jens Thomas’s first album for ACT, You Can’t Keep a Good Cowboy Down, Thomas focuses his unique personal creativity on the  interpretation of the music of the great film composer Ennio Morricone.