Garrett Owen — Current Clients

Photo credit: Melissa Laree Cunningham

Texas-born Garrett Owen had a musical awakening at age 14 that manifested as an intense desire to learn guitar and an insatiable love for all things heavy metal. Eventually, he began exploring other genres, diligently saving his weekly allowance to afford mail-order CDs to satisfy his typical childhood curiosity. But, Owen’s childhood was anything but typical.

Instead of Little League and sleepovers, Owen’s earliest memories involve frequent trips across the Serengeti and backyard wildlife most of us only experience at our local zoos. The son of church-building missionaries, he grew up in Tanzania and Kenya, riding on the luggage rack of the family’s Nissan Patrol, with vast clear skies above him and gazelles running beside. After leaving Africa, the family completed a stint in Ecuador before Owen’s parents moved the family back to Texas. Life as he knew it became a difficult endeavor; rimmed with the sharp edges of reality in an unfamiliar place, his attempts to settle into a culture he didn’t understand resulted in distress and a suicide attempt - a far cry from the idyllic landscape of his upbringing.

“Getting to the point where songs could even come out of me at all again took some time,” he remembers. However, Owen’s decision to step up to the mic at a songwriters’ night in Fort Worth changed his trajectory and reminded him that the goal of pursuing music was no longer at home on the backburner.

Now, the award-winning artist, who calls to mind legends like Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Elliot Smith, and Jesse Winchester, is gearing up to release his second full-length album, Quiet Lives, on September 18th. Though he revisits familiar subject matter such as the push-pull of relationships, love, and loss, Quiet Lives is about growth, informed by the perspective gained from life experience. The diverse 10-track collection delves into more experimental musical territory, as Owen toyed with complex chord changes, melodic dissonance, and intriguing storylines.

“My relationship with technology and connection to nature are a new combination in my songwriting,” he says, as evidenced in the album’s lead single, “These Modern Times.” Its blend of folk-tinged finger-picking, synth-infused verses, and anthemic pop choruses illustrate the juxtaposition of old and new as he contemplates the ups and downs of our constant and instant access to digital information. “Hour In The Forest,” which begins as a dreamy folk-pop tune that explodes into searing, Queen-esque guitar rock in its second half, was inspired by two women - one, a potential love interest, the other the bearer of an unforgettable tattoo, while “No One To Save You” ventures into familiar territory as he revisits a past relationship that couldn’t withstand the pressures of life on the road. “I Must Be Evil,” a quirky tune wearing the uniform of a murder ballad, tells the story of vigilante justice. Owen even pays homage to the late great Waylon Jennings as he puts his unique and jazz-folk spin on Jennings’ 1977 tune “The Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want To Get Over You).”

“At its core, all art is based on a ‘true story,’ and by true, I mean the version we carry in our head and heart - the one that can lift or crush your spirit with equal capacity,” the golden-voiced troubadour, who has shared stages with artists like Parker Millsap, Charlie Sexton, and Marty Stuart, explains. “Some suggest that your upbringing explains quirks of personality like my shyness, a tendency for introspection, and streaks of perfectionism. Maybe. I’m not so fatalistic as to believe our earliest experiences necessarily determine the arc of adult life, but my slightly foreign childhood never leaves my music or me. Everybody’s got a story to tell,” he adds. “I’m no different.”