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Tasters for next year’s new album, Spirit Ridge, Dean Owens has already digitally released two of The Ridge Trilogy EPs, with a third due in November. At that point, there will also be a limited-edition CD that gathers them together and will be available via his website and Bandcamp for pre-order.
Recorded in Italy with The Stone Buffalo Band, among them co-producer Don Antonio, serving as The Ridge Trilogy session backing band variously on lap steel, keys, drums, dobro, guitars and double bass, and backing vocals from Kristin Adamson in Edinburgh, there are 13 songs over the three EPs, some from the album sessions, others as demos with four from the album itself.
The Ridge Trilogy Volume 1, Ghost Walking, has two of these as radio edits, the first being the twangy slow-paced My Beloved Hills, a song about connection to the land inspired by the landscape around Antonio’s Crinele home and on which Calexico’s Tom Hagerman and Martin Wenk on strings and trumpet respectively. That’s followed by the equally rhythmically steady, organ-anchored Tame The Lion (one of his Italian ancestors was a lion tamer) about feeling the spirits of those who walk alongside you. It’s completed by the moody instrumental Sergio’s Kitchen, named in honour of the studio chef, with Owens on Leone-styled whistling, and, recorded in Scotland, a demo of the dark soul-themed Sinner Of Sinners.
The Ridge Trilogy Vol 2, Ridgeline, opens with future album track Light This World, a brass-burnished, upbeat, driving number about finding yourself on a lonely dark road looking for light at the end, on which, alongside Wenk’s trumpet, Calexico’s John Convertino joins Piero Perelli on drums to give it some fulsome muscle. The demo here, again from Scotland, is The Buzzard and The Crow, a number inspired by the avian life around his border country home and sung about watching the world from their viewpoint. The two other cuts are both exclusive to the EP, the measured rhythm of the atmospherically widescreen On The Ridge, another inspired by the Crinale landscape, while a drums thump slow walker with guitar twang, echoey keys and vocals, Come With Me summons a dark, almost spectral feel.
The yet-to-be-released final Ridge Trilogy EP, Sacri Cuori, has five tracks; first up, another slow and moody number with Convertino cameoing on drums and vibraphone, being the last of the album version advance releases, Spirit Of Us, a song written for Owen’s wife and daughter back before she was born and with a nod to It’s A Wonderful Life. The demo here is the strummed guitar and sparse piano notes of A Divine Tragedy, written around close friends going through a divorce and the heartbreak and loss that brings. The three others are again all EP exclusives, the brief burping El Minuto and, with more Spaghetti Western whistling, the wholly instrumental, lightly fingerpicked The Gloaming, and, finally, the near six-minute slow walking beat of the horns-swathed True Of You, a soaring celebration of things that lift the spirit. Both tantalising, appetite-whetting snapshots of a work in progress and an atmospheric collection in its own right, Owens is mining gold in them thar hills.
Website: https://www.deanowens.com/
