Dean Owens - The Burning Heart (The Desert Trilogy EPs, Vol 1) (2021)

Over the coming months, leading up to the full Sinner’s Shrine album in September, Dean Owens is releasing series of three EPs featuring his collaborations with Joey Burns and John Convertino from Calexico on a mix of new and revisited material, some from the album itself and some the sessions. The first volume opens with a revisiting of the lost love-themed New Mexico, originally from his lo-fi solo debut The Droma Tapes, the revamp being what he calls the technicolour as opposed to the black and white version. With trumpet courtesy of the band’s Jacob Valenzuela, it has the air of a spaghetti western, a note developed even further on another future album track, Here Comes Paul Newman, a brief instrumental inspired by the film Hud and, with its ghostly whistling, trumpet, thunder drums and pedal steel, Ennio Morricone soundtracks.

Joined by Kevin McGuire on upright bass and Naïm Amor on electric guitar, with a military snare pattern rattling in the background to add to that parched ambience, sung with distorted echoey vocals, the slowly building Riverline came about from reading Where The Line Becomes A River by US/Mexico border patrol agent Francisco Cantú and, with harmonium and, again, whistling, certainly captures the drama and tension of the job.

And finally, with just Owen’s voice and guitar, there’s Tombstone Rose written during lockdown with Burns, a simple, gently lilting song titled after a plant in the latter’s garden and informed by a video of him strumming guitar in his garden as he and the family were preparing to leave Arizona for Idaho.