GRAVES - Gary Owen: I Have Some Thoughts LP

Highly recommended.

The project of Greg Olin, who has been releasing music under the moniker for nearly two decades. And for his latest release, he takes a new name—is Gary Owens that smiling young man with the lap steel on the album cover?—to breathe fresh life into an old, old sound. These 16 tracks sway with the moonstruck sweetness of classic country, blending the sounds of golden age AM radio with a laidback West Count vibe.

“Dopey-eyed on a moonlit shore” is how Olin puts it on “Time Wasted,” a soft-strummed ballad reminiscent of the Nashville sound of Roger Miller and Merle Haggard. Many tracks feel plucked from that simpler time, from the upbeat downer “Cavin’ In” to the kitschy fun of “Atchee Ketchee” where he stumbles nonsense lines before finally singing, “I just wanna find the words to say I love you.”

Olin recorded half the record during the pandemic, and he describes the process, slowly building tracks, waiting for collaborators to send their parts, as one of excitement, “like always waiting for a check or fresh pair of socks to arrive in the via snail mail.”

Graves blends the mellow with the slightly sour, addressing aging and mortality in clever ways on songs that recall the best of David Berman’s Silver Jews and Purple Mountains projects. The harmonica and close harmonies of “Keep You From the End” find him struggling to reconcile with change and mortality, a question that finds an appropriate metaphor nestled in gentle keyboards on “Bad Teeth And Bad Wine.”

Recorded alongside Nick Aives (Sonny and the Sunsets, Ty Segall, Vetiver), Cory Gray (Delines, Dandy Warhols, Old Unconscious) Rusty Miller (Sonny and The Sunsets, Kelly Stoltz) and Jason Cirimele (Sugar Candy Mountain, Guantanamo Baywatch), Gary Owens features great new songwriting from a legendary indie musician, tackling time, love, and sadness with poise and a little humor.