It is songs such as “Two Thousand Miles,” that led a writer from the Houston Chronicle to observe, “He may not be just a contender, but a heavyweight champ.”
With the well-documented challenges facing the music industry, it does not, for an artist to have a fallback position. Temple’s ace in the hole is the fact he is only one course short of a graduate degree in clinical psychology, something that he plans to finish up this year.
When we first talked Owen Temple was preparing to embark on a tour that included gigs in Texas, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina and Arkansas. A week earlier he had hooked up with two other singer/songwriter/guitarists, Adam Carroll and Jason Eddy, as they shared the stage at New Braunfels’ (Texas) Gruene Hall. Temple caught up with me when he returned from touring with Carroll and Eddy and talked about how while on tour, the trio had reprised their song swapping experience, from their earlier concert at Gruene Hall.
“Folks who came out to the song swaps have given us some good feeback. With three songwriters, three perspectives and three different ways of expressing, it just makes for a more interesting show. When you play and sing on each other’s songs, it’s like being able to be both the performer and a member of the audience at the same time. Adam, Jason and I are going to do our Ramblin’ Revival Tour every year, because we had so much fun with it,” says Temple.
About the Gruene Hall experience, Temple says, “We were swapping songs and it felt right. Adam would play a song, I would play a song and Jason would play a song. We will be doing that three-man song swapping (on the tour). Gruene Hall was the inaugural show for the tour. When you have ninety minutes of one songwriter, everything can start to sound the same, but the cool thing about a song swap is you are always on your toes, because you are coming at songs from different directions and angles. It keeps the crowd pretty engaged, which is why we are taking this thing on the road with us.”
You may be reading this and may be asking yourself, ‘if Owen Temple is such a good singer/songwriter and guitarist why is it that I have not heard of him before?’ In 2002 when his CD Right Here And Now was released, Temple was well on his way to country music stardom, and then the record label declared bankruptcy. The Dallas Morning News had referred to Right Here And Now as one of the best independent CD releases from Texas artists during that year. It was the financial woes of the record label that convinced Temple to return to school, so he could pursue his pending graduate degree. His education provides him with an insurance policy should the music industry take another turn south. From this vantage point, it would appear that Owen Temple only has good days ahead of him as far as his music is concerned, and he may never have to rely on his clinical psychology education, unless he takes up counseling fellow musicians.
Owen Temple is the consummate storyteller, as he writes songs that come from his heart and the fabric of everyday life. Songs such as, “Rivers Run From Many Waters,” talk about family, heritage and how those who fathered and grandfathered us continue to influence our lives. More importantly, he does not write syrupy or candy coated lyrics that are packaged to appeal to the politically correct. He writes what he feels, what he sees and what he experiences. The rich timbre of Owen Temple’s voice rank him up there with the best singing cowboys on the music scene today, and his guitar licks are solid, possessing contagious riffs.
April 2008
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