Dean Owens
Album: Into The Sea
Label: Drumfire
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.deanowens.com

Championed by both Irvine Welsh and Russell Brand, this is the Leith singer-songwriter's sixth solo album since the demise of Scottish Americana outfit The Felsons, and the first since his 2012 double whammy of Cash Back, a collection of Johnny Cash covers, and New York Hummingbird, recorded, as the title suggests, in the Big Apple itself.

For this, as with 2008's much acclaimed Whisky Hearts, Owens headed out to Nashville, hooking up again with guitarist Will Kimbrough as well as Kim Richey and Suzy Bogguss. As ever, the sound is firmly Celtic Americana, a potent cocktail of his Scottish roots and American influences, one that kicks things off in sterling twanged guitar folk-rock form with Dora, the true story of his grandmother, Dora Salvona Owens, the daughter of travelling circus family, her father a high wire performer who, still a young man. was killed in an accident at Leith docks in 1938. All this Owens discovered from an old poster and subsequent family tree research, and it sets the very personal note about friends and family that runs through the whole album. It strikes a particularly poignant note on Evergreen, a bittersweet piano-backed ballad featuring Richey on harmonies that was written in response to his sister and a friend both suffering from cancer. Rather inevitably, the album weighs heavily on themes of loss and the changes that passing years bring. Joined by Heather Donegan on backing vocals, the shuffling, pedal steel streaked Days Without You was written for a friend who partner had a terminal illness, as was the sad, tender Everlys-styled Kimbrough duet Days Without You, while, inspired by a friend's memories about a girl and a Kris Kristofferson record, Virginia Street is a lovely reflection on an old love affair and the warmth it still brings.

Back on a personal note, Kids (1979) is another true story, this time a strings-accompanied reminiscence about old friends from the school football team and the roads taken (one dead at 20, one a drunk, another a junkie) while childhood friends and dreams unfulfilled also surface in the accordion-accompanied Sally's Song (I Dreamed of Michael Marra), the melody coming from a dream about Marra, who had recently passed, playing the piano and the lyric inspired by visiting the ruins of an old housing scheme project where he'd once played.

Another Celtic-flavoured number, the slide ringing l Up On The Hill is about the place in Edinburgh where he walks his dog and finds time to think and reflect, about those he's lost and the paths he must follow while, slightly evocative of Billy Joel, the jaunty Valentine's Day In New York was written in the Chelsea Hotel in response to finding himself wandering the streets alone while all his New York friends were with their girlfriends.

The three remaining tracks aren't autobiographical, though all share a theme of longing. It Could Be Worse is a slow, late night six minute, slowly swelling country torch waltz about how chasing dreams so often keeps you apart, reprised as a brief strings-washed instrumental closer, prior to the bonus inclusion of a duet with Bogguss on honky tonk waltzer I'm Pretending I Don't Love You Anymore, a slightly more uptempo rework (with whistling intro) of a track off his Droma Tapes debut, although back then it was (quite possibly mistakenly since the lyrics are the same) titled I'm Pretending You Don't Love Me Anymore.

The final number, the second track in and one of the highlights, the acoustic strummed Closer To Home was inspired by a documentary about World War I and a soldier who, returning after the end of hostilities wrote a letter to his wife containing the emotionally wrenching lines that form the album's chorus "the closer to home, the harder it is to bear the distance."

If I'm being honest, the album's most immediate tracks are all frontloaded and you need to work at some of those towards the end before they really begin to take hold, but the more you listen, the deeper you fall into this ocean of the heart

Mike Davies