Songwriting
Cowrites
Songs I have written with friends are on these albums.
Songwriting
Stories They Tell
(Released 9/2013)
The eleven songs add up to a retrospective, big picture look at what humans have been doing over the last 10,000 years. Making tools and stuff, forming relationships based on power, money, or love, and, most importantly, telling stories of how it all went down.
Songwriting
Live at the Saxon Pub
(Released 9/2013)
Recorded live in Austin during South By Southwest 2013.
Songwriting
Mountain Home
(Released 4/2011)
The sixth studio record is a collection of songs and stories about eccentric characters set in small towns and on the fringes of big cities. Mountain Home may be his strongest collection yet.
The characters are all on edge- on the verge of freedom, catastrophe, and hope- and the songs tell of strange happenings in rural landscapes both past and present.
Songwriting
Dollars and Dimes
(Released 6/2009)
The fifth studio record is a collection of eleven songs about people making their way through hard times in the different regions of North America, a concept album focused on regional incarnations of continent-wide drama.
“Playing off North America’s regions, travel album delivers concept richly” –Dave Hoekstra, Chicago Sun-Times
Songwriting
Two Thousand Miles
(Released 1/2008)
“His songs, even the rowdy ones, barrel straight through the roadhouse on the way to better, safer places, like the center of a woman’s heart. He has a curl of Townes Van Zandt’s spoken-word style of singing, which lifts the sincerity and power of his lyrics.” -No Depression
“Great lyrics full of insight and plainspoken poetry.”-All Music Guide
Songwriting
Right Here and Now
(Released 3/2002)
From the fear of getting hurt that walks hand in hand with the rush of falling in love (“Accidentally Break My Heart”) to the futility of running a race that can’t be won (“Move Around Money”), Owen Temple knows a thing or two about the little (and big) contradictions that make life interesting.
Songwriting
Passing Through
(Released 10/1999)
Small towns have a kind of stark, quiet beauty to them. Even after Wal-Marts move in and decimate Main Street, there’s still a solemn dignity in those boarded up storefronts and dusty, ramshackle feed stores. Kerrville native Owen Temple writes about these places, as common to Texas as they are to Indiana or Alabama.
–Austin Chronicle
Songwriting
General Store
(Released 10/1997)
Temple has a sharp eye for observation like Keen (“So I inched across the fencelines and rushed across the roads/I was watching close for green and white INS Broncos”), a voice like a young Ray Wylie Hubbard, and the good sense to write a song about an unsung Austin landmark like the Dry Creek Café (“So if you want to keep the bulldozers back/Stop and take a drink at the Dry Creek shack”).
–Austin Chronicle