SONGS
Broken Heart Land
I wrote this song with a friend of mine from Indiana, Jeff Burkhart. We were talking about the midwest and the industrial cities around the Great Lakes. He told me about a train trip he took home through Eden, Indiana, and he told me the town name has become more ironic over the last few decades - it's no longer paradise, if it ever was.
Black Diamond
Adam Carroll played some shows in Canada with Scott Nolan, and they spent some time in a town in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies called Black Diamond. (A black diamond is a lower valued dark diamond used in industry for drilling - also called a carbonado). They wrote some lines about the place but never finished the song. Adam and I finished it up after he was back in Texas. (Green dragon is a concoction made of Everclear steeped with weed for days and days and days).
Making a Life
A song about four different people paying the bills, getting by, and keeping a strong sense of what it is they're working for. Written with a friend from Chicago, Chris Anderson, and Gordy Quist.
City of the King
A song about a two characters stuck in the middle. Maybe St Louis is stuck in the middle in a lot of ways. Not really west, not really east, not deep south, not north. Not really sure what role to play, out in between. The Gateway to... wherever you're going.
Dollars and Dimes
Adam Carroll and I played the last show of a tour in Indianapolis and on the way home we took smaller roads along the Mississippi River. Thinking about musicians and sharecroppers who left the Delta to get jobs in Chicago during the war, migrant workers that move with the harvest from Michigan to Florida to California, and the labor camps that built the railroads and the levees along the river. Getting out of town to get paid, and the most logical title for the record.
Memphis
I asked a girl from Arkansas who had moved to Memphis how she liked it. She said, "Memphis is not what it used to be." But then again, what place is like it used to be?
And who is? We just move on.
Los Angeles
Converting the desert into a playground and into one of the world's largest cities is an amazing feat of imagination and engineering, but it's a fragile balance. Southern California requires water from all over the western half of the United States to keep it green, and Los Angeles requires people from cultures all over the world to move there and work there to keep it running. Like all machines, it generates friction and heat and breaks down sometimes.
I Don't Want to Do What I Do
By the pool tables, upstairs at the White Water Tavern in Little Rock, I saw an ad for lawyer in a newspaper. The lawyer had his picture in the ad and he looked weary and beaten in the photo, which was surprising because they usually try to look like Superman in those ads. Adam said, "it looks like that old boy's ready to crawl in that hole." We thought of an Ohio car dealer we knew and an anesthesiologist who got tired of practicing medicine and wrote the song in ten minutes.
Quiet Look
A song about the irretrievable past. I wrote the verses for this song and adapted the chorus from William Carlos Williams' 1934 poem The Revelation:
I shall pass her on the street
We shall say trivial things
To each other
But I shall never cease to search her eyes
For that quiet look-
This song is not about a place changing, it's about going back to an old place and finding that two people hadn't changed as much as they thought.
Golden Age
I started playing music at a club in downtown Austin called O. Henry's Back Forty. It was a wood paneled bar with shuffleboard, pool tables, and a jukebox. Smoking, domino-playing old men ruled the place from noon to 6pm. Then from 10 pm til close the twenty-one year olds took over. Even with both sets of patrons the owners were always struggling to pay the bills.
The owners were finally delivered from their month-to-month purgatory when the Hilton offered to buy the site for a couple million dollars. They tore down the bar and built the new hotel at 5th Street and Neches. The eighth floor rooftop swimming pool sits right on the old footprint of the Back Forty. I wrote this song by the pool.
Winnipeg Waltz
I lived in the Great White North for a few years, and I found out that when it's really cold, you go to a bar, drink beer, and talk about how cold it is outside.
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Click song or album title for lyrics
Broken Heart Land
Black Diamond
Making a Life
City of the King
Dollars and Dimes
Memphis
Los Angeles
I Don't Want to Do What I Do
Quiet Look
Golden Age
Winnipeg Waltz
You Want to Wear That Ring
Red Wine and Tequila
Swear It Off Again
Two Thousand Miles
Like We Still Care
Can't Drink Enough to Sing
I Just Can't Quit Loving You
Demolition Derby
You Don't Have to Be Lonely
The Pluto Blues
Rivers Run From Many Waters
On the Lonesome Road
Accidentally Break My Heart
Burning Too Hot to Last
Little Sweet Loss
This Ain't Las Vegas
No Daring Is Fatal
Move Around Money
For Old Times' Sake
Before the Night Becomes the Dawn
Trouble With You
The Madder You Are (The Cuter You Get)
Faith Without Works
Downtown
Driving Myself Crazy
Can't Keep My Mind Off You
Treat You Like I Do
Lights of Town
Open Window
Listening to the AM
House of Cards
One Less Thing to Worry About
Long Gone Daddy
Passing Through
I Wrote You A Waltz
When I Hit San Antone
Me and Maria
Tennessee Highway
Dry Creek
Jaded Lover
Wanna Wanna Bar
Mary
You Never Can Tell
James' Blues
If You Called
All songs © Owen Temple Music (BMI) except as noted
