Dean Owens - The Man From Leith: The Best of Dean Owens (2020)

The first Scottish musician to officially showcase at Nashville’s Americana Fest in 2017 and the title track from Southern Wind winning the American Music Association UK Song of the Year Award for 2019, Edinburgh-born Owens has had a long and celebrated near 20-year career. Starting initially as the frontman for Scottish alt-country outfit The Felsons and, most recently, as part of Buffalo Blood alongside Neilson Hubbard, Audrey Spillman and Joshua Britt.

Cherry-picking from his seven official solo albums, this collection highlights his strengths as both storyteller and singer, imbuing his love for Americana with a Scottish sensibility with songs that are both personal and universal, factual and fantasy.

Three numbers, relate directly to his family, the first, from Whisky Hearts, being the six-minute plus the opening title track, a tribute to his father who worked both the Leith dockyards and on the roads across Scotland, beginning with church organ and etched out with a hymnal melody and back porch steel guitar.

The other two are both taken from 2015’s Into The Sea, Dora being a Celtic tingled steady drumbeat Americana jangle, complete with whistling, that tells 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. As he sings “you never know what’s up there, way up in the family tree”, the song also references his great-great Italian grandfather Ambrose Salvona (and his dancing bear), the circus founder and lion tamer, noting “He’s buried in the Highlands/but we’re not sure where.” Following the album’s release, his grave was tracked down to Inverness along with the fact he was a buried, to a Salvation Army band salute. The other, featuring Kim Richey on harmonies, is Evergreen, a bittersweet piano-backed ballad written in response to his sister and a friend both suffering from cancer.

The same album also includes two songs inspired by where he grew up. Up On The Hill is about the place in Edinburgh where he walks his dog and finds time to think and reflect on those he’s lost and the paths he must follow. While Virginia Street, inspired by a conversation with a friend in a Glasgow pub, takes what I would assume to be the Leith thoroughfare as the backdrop for a warm reflection on an old love affair.

The final number from the album is the simple strummed Closer to Home, inspired by a documentary about World War I, the chorus of “the closer to home, the harder it is to bear the distance” taken from a letter written to his wife by a soldier returning after the end of hostilities.

The earliest track, the fiddle accompanied lost love Hispanic–toned slow jogging New Mexico (incidentally, where he recorded the Buffalo Blood album) dates from his 2001 solo debut The Droma Tapes, while the 2004 follow-up, My Town, provides two. First up is the title cut love letter to home with its warm brass band opening and slow waltz rhythm, the other being the uptempo countrified brushed drums waltzing Strangers Again, a lovely broken relationship duet with Karine Polwart, who, as this shows, really should record Americana more often.

Moving on to what is generally regarded as his breakthrough album, 2008’s Whisky Hearts, the sway-along mandolin-strummed title track about the effects of the dockland closures with its snapshots of drowning broken hearts and the ache of loss is paired with the classic homesick Raining In Glasgow, a slow march, piano-backed number written in Australia where he imagines himself at Barrowlands “watching Elvis Costello and the Attractions playing Pump It Up”.

The remaining three cuts are lifted from 2018’s Southern Wind, a return to strong form with two numbers here co-penned with guitarist Will Kimbrough, the big production title track being a slow march, blues and gospel-informed number about the call of home also featuring swirling organ from Dean Mitchell, the Worry Dolls on harmonies and the big voice backing vocals of Kira Small. The other, The Last Song, though, paradoxically, the first written for the album and its opening track, a bouncy end of the night countrified pub rock number drawing on a mutual love of Ronnie Lane and The Waterboys.

The final number again draws on real-life and stories told, this being Elvis Was My Brother, a jaunty, guitar twanging song inspired by a letter from a friend who, raised by his mother, frequently uprooted and with little contact with his father, found a friend and brother listening to Elvis on his mother’s cassettes.