Album Review: Gary Owens, "I Have Some Thoughts"

Those Perpetual Doom record label folks strike gold again. California-based singer-songwriter Greg Olin has been crafting Americana magic for the better part of two decades now under the moniker Graves, but on his latest offering, Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts (Perpetual Doom) he trots out a new persona, Gary Owens.

Pieced together during the pandemic with indie sidemen help (dig that slow-flanged Merle Haggard chicken-pickin’ Telecaster on “Cavin’ In,” or the trippy Mellotron and Pet Sounds plucked bass on “Bad Teeth & Bad Wine”), these sixteen tracks (sixteen!) exude an AM country vibe backdropping hard-luck poet lyrics a la Guy Clark or Jerry Jeff. Or better yet, imagine Roger Miller time-traveling to spread his mellow good news to us, the moping modern masses.

These songs are so richly resonant and deeply personal that it's almost a shame to obscure them through the veils of multiple aliases. Almost! Olin ends up getting away with it, both stylistically and artistically. Life itself, he seems to be crooning, is an absurd experience made even more so by all the odd little moments that come with aging. So why not obfuscate the artist's persona/ego even further, so as to focus on the art itself? Late in the album, Olin/Graves/Gary Owens sings, “This heart is an open book / Dog-eared and dusty but worth a look.” Indeed. And worth a listen — multiple listens — as well.

Harold Whit Williams is a prize-winning poet and longtime guitarist for the indie rock band Cotton Mather. He is the recipient of the 2020 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, the 2014 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. With six books of poetry, one short story collection, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations under his belt, Williams lives in Austin, Texas where he records lo-fi jangle pop music as Daily Worker, all the while cataloging the KUT Collection for the University of Texas Libraries.