Garrett Owen’s music has the raw, rustic twang of a Texan, but his origin story is not that of your typical cowboy troubadour. The son of career missionaries, Owen spent his childhood in Tanzania and Kenya, his adolescence in South Louisiana, before coming of age in Ecuador. Asked about the most palpable effect of such eclectic settings, he cites not the musical, but the psychological. “I think it made me a really open person,” Owen shares. “I’ve seen a lot. And I have a really hard time with rules.” On Owen’s upcoming third album ‘Memoriam,’ this much is obvious—and celebrated.
Owen’s song structures dip, twist, and burst with a twister-like thrill. He can shift from tender, taletelling balladeering into a wholly rock and roll torrent and back, without losing the emotional plot. “Growing up, I was very opposed to learning—I broke a lot of toys.” But what once might have once been considered a behavioral hindrance is now a benefit to listeners. Owen’s dynamic song structures and the indisputable technical capacity required to pull them off make for an unabashed adventure of an album.
Owen started at age fourteen with an affinity for the delectable angst of heavy metal. “I was always going to be a guitar head,” he says. In time, he shifted focus to the classics—Jim Croce, Jackson Brown, James Taylor—and in college, started to explore Jazz. Though that didn’t last long. “I got into Jazz to try and communicate that sad beauty Chet Baker and Bill Evans do so well, but I pretty quickly got tired of the excess and intricacies, slobbering notes all over each other.” Owen discovered he could apply the picking patterns of his gritter influences—Doc Watson, Elliott Smith—to Jazz structures, and create a fuller, more modern and emotional kind of folk music, a sound that felt truer to his way of moving through the world. To embrace Owen’s music is to embrace the unexpected; you never know what’s coming next.
This truth resonates through the life circumstances which bore the album as well. Owen wrote much of it while taking care of his grandmother over the last four years, as she gradually regressed into Alzheimer’s and eventually passed. “She was the most interesting woman. She always had the coolest art, and a potpourri that filled her home in a way I’ll never forget. I always told everyone, ‘My Japanese grandmother is my favorite person in the world.’” Having emigrated as a young woman, Owen’s grandmother carried stories of tribulation, resilience, and gratitude which he folded into his worldview. “Toward the end, she’d go out into the yard and collect branches and leaves, and put them in small bowls of water, believing she could bring them back to life,” he shares. “In a way, she was fighting her own death.” Owen references this moving display on “Rosemary and Thieves,” singing, She used to keep / Such a beautiful garden / But now she just waters the weeds / Rosemary and thieves. He embraces the vital beauty of remembering what was, while mourning what’s been taken.
Loss permeates ‘Memoriam,’ and Owen handles it with a stark honesty that sways from affectingly reverent to cathartically comedic. He laments more than one failed romance and—as in the case of the spellbinding album opener—with an intense, poetic wistfulness: Just let me remain / A spot on your brain / A beautiful stain. He shares, “Making music is therapeutic, but it’s not therapy. It feels good to do, but that doesn’t mean you’re better now.” That self-awareness is essential to his lyricism. Owen is a man cracked open—diligently mining his own human pain and presenting the findings, a generous offering in which listeners can see themselves. “I have a musical comrade who often says to me, ‘We’re all miracles, Garrett—don’t forget.’ It’s hard to hold onto that, when at times, I feel like all I’m doing is watching stuff die. But I definitely feel, more than ever, that life is precious.”
Garrett Owen’s third full-length album ‘Memoriam’ will be released November 1, 2024.