About

By Richard Skanse

Make something, shake something, up and go
Believe me when I say
The clock ain’t moving slow
Make something while you can
If you want to live forever,
Better make something man
While you can, make something man.

Owen Temple was 37 years old when he released that song, “Make Something,” on his eighth album, Stories They Tell, 16 years into a recording career now moving quicker every day to twice that span. With hindsight, the timing was perfect. Had the song surfaced any earlier on his journey, its message might have caught on with some of his OG fans paying close enough attention over the beer-bottle din (or sometimes crickets) of Temple’s happy-hour salad days. But more likely, it would have slipped through the cracks like an unplucked gem — or, worse, brushed aside as youthful bravado pushing unripened wisdom. Because honestly, who wants to hear legacy advice from a 20-something kid? But coming from a road-and-life seasoned troubadour and grown-ass man with kids of his own? Well, that gave “Make Something” the heft of experience one can really get behind and believe in: Not just as arguably one of Temple’s absolute best songs, but as the mantra the Texan actually lives by full-tilt.

“I want to show up every day, because it feels wrong not to honor that,” Temple says of his creative discipline. “Sometimes I’ll write on a computer, sometimes on a notepad, and sometimes I might get a song — or maybe just a list of complaints! But I try to get at least 15 minutes of flow, just to find out what I’m feeling and thinking.”

“I am a collector of experiences,” he continues, “and songs are a great way to archive those experiences and make them permanent. And when you get these artifacts, these stories that you think are cool, you want to share them with your friends — including friends you may not know yet! That’s why I like making art: to share it.”

Going all the way back to his 1997 debut, General Store, Temple has made and shared a lot of art over the course of his career — and he’s only gathering steam. In September 2026, three years after releasing his super-sized opus Rings on a Tree, he marked his 50th trip around the sun with the publication of his first coffee table book, Watch It Shine: Drawings, Watercolors, and Lyrics, followed a month later by his 12th album, Closer, Says Love. “And I’ve got another record with 13 songs already recorded,” he says, acknowledging the veritable flood of Owen output with a “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop” grin. “It’s like I’ve gotta beat the clock before the world ends, because I’m just delusional enough to think that these might help it not end!”

He laughs saying this, but his belief in the way shared experiences can bring people together is unmistakably sincere. “Right now, so many different forces are trying to divide us into these different rivalries and camps and isolated experiences,” he says. “But Closer, Says Love is about how we’re really better together. It’s just sort of an operating system I’ve been trying on, and it’s really been working.”

If that sounds like the kind of earnest optimism that might be hatched around a hippie campfire, you’re not too far off — at least not geographically. Temple was born and raised just outside of Kerrville, Texas, home to one of the country’s most revered folk festivals. His dad was a rancher and his mother a teacher, but both made a point to introduce Owen and his younger sister to the robust Hill Country arts scene. His grandfather, an artist, encouraged him to draw and paint, and he also sang in church. But it was his dad’s Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins 8-track tapes, a stack of Hemingway novels he plowed through over a three-day in-school suspension, and discovering Jerry Jeff Walker’s seminal ¡Viva Terlingua! and Robert Earl Keen’s first live album that ultimately sealed his fate. By his late teens, Temple knew for sure that whatever else he might end up doing for a living, at heart he would first and foremost be a songwriter.

Just to be clear here, the notion of an actual music career never seriously crossed his mind at the time. He dual majored in liberal arts and business, and upon graduation jumped straight into a job at a bank. But because the college he attended happened to be The University of Texas at Austin, a city which at the time (mid-to-late ’90s) was very much in its heyday as “the Live Music Capital of the World,” opportunities to scratch his itch for playing guitar and singing his story songs just enough to make beer money abounded. He landed a regular happy hour spot almost straight away, and though those Tuesday nights weren’t exactly hopping, Temple was in the right place at the right time to catch the ear of Cory Morrow, a rising star on the Texas music scene only a few years older than he was. “Cory came in one night, heard a couple of songs I’d written, and told me, ‘I just made a record with Lloyd Maines — you should make a record with Lloyd Maines! Here’s his phone number.’” Temple reached out, Maines got back to him, and four months later, they were recording his first album. It was finished before Temple had even turned 21. And two years after General Store’s release, Temple was back in the studio with Maines (and, per Lloyd’s standard as one of the most renowned producers in Texas, a who’s who of some of the scene’s best musicians), recording his second album, 1999’s Passing Through. Temple’s days at the bank were numbered.

“I was there for a couple of years, but then someone said, ‘Hey, do you want to open a show for Guy Clark?’ And that show was going to make it really difficult with work. But I was like, ‘YES, I want to open for Guy Clark.’ And that was it for the bank job.”

By the early aughts, Temple was well on his way to establishing his rep as a seasoned performer on stages statewide and as a thinking-man’s troubadour in the Guy Clark/Townes Van Zandt tradition. He had no designs on ever being the biggest name on a festival or dancehall bill, but song for song he held his own. But come time to make his third album, 2002’s Right Here and Now, he felt ready to change things up a bit — opting to record not in Austin, but rather in Nashville with producer Phil Madeira and a whole new crew of studio aces. Musically speaking, that new adventure on his artistic journey was everything he had hoped it would be — but the bump in the road he hit right after was a doozy. “The orders on that record were big, because Walmart was stocking Texas music by that point,” says Temple, who released that album, like all of his others both before and since, on his own El Paisano Records label. “So after spending more on that one than I ever had on a record before, I also purchased more inventory than I ever had before. And then my distributor went bankrupt.”

That same distributor in Texas had warehoused thousands of CDs by independent artists statewide and beyond, effectively throwing many music careers for a serious lurch. Temple was lucky enough to get his inventory out just in time, but the whole deal was still “a real gut punch.” “It took a while to recover from that,” he says, “which is why my fourth record didn’t come out until six years later.”

Fortunately, Temple and his wife had a more important release to celebrate together in the wake of Right Here and Now: the birth of their first of four children. Meanwhile, he continued to write — and not exactly in a void, either: He won the B.W. Stevenson Songwriting Competition in 2007, and placed as a finalist in the Kerrville New Folk competition the same year (as he would again in 2011). And he continued to tour, too, staying in peak performance shape so that by the time he was finally able to record his fourth album, he was ready. That album, 2008’s Two Thousand Miles, found Temple reuniting with Lloyd Maines while continuing to evolve his sound, thanks to an MVP assist from famed guitar slinger David Grissom (Joe Ely, John Mellencamp, Dixie Chicks). It also kicked off the busiest run ever, both on the road (averaging more than 100 shows — in Texas and beyond, including overseas — a year between 2006 and 2016) and in the studio. His next three albums — 2009’s Dollars and Dimes, 2011’s Mountain Home, and 2013’s Stories They Tell, all produced by the brilliant guitarist Gabriel Rhodes — netted Temple some of the best reviews of his career. Critics (along with fans and esteemed peers) invariably focused on the appealing warmth of Temple’s vocals, wry sense of humor, and “knack for blending melancholy melodies with ingenious wordplay” (J. Poet of AllMusic), though Temple himself insists that his proudest achievements have always been group efforts.

“I’m so lucky to have these amazing talents as friends,” he enthuses. “And the best part is discovering what you can learn from them and where you can go that you haven’t gone before. Gabe is the most musical person I’ve ever met. Each of those three records was like a soundtrack in a certain way, soundtracks for movies that don’t exist. And the landscapes they each invoked — that was all Gabe.”

Rhodes remains one of his most trusted go-to collaborators to the present day, Temple revealing with a laugh that they’re currently working on a radio play (“Because what does the world need now?”). But the last decade has found this avowed “collector of experiences” expanding his talented friend list even more. When he took another extended break from recording (and scaled his touring down to a few shows a year) to focus on his growing family, co-writing appointments with the likes of Walt Wilkins, Kelley Mickwee, Jamie Lin Wilson, Adam Carroll, and others helped him stay on top of his daily “Make Something” regimen. He also co-wrote a book on songwriting (2015’s Songfarmer: Writing More and Better Songs) with Gordy Quist of Austin’s Band of Heathens, and it was Quist he turned to once his three youngest kids were just old enough for him to return to a more robust touring schedule — and to make his first new album in 10 years.

“Gordy’s been a buddy of mine for a while — in fact, it was actually Gordy who first introduced me to Gabe as someone I should work with, years ago,” says Temple. “But I went to Gordy for Rings on a Tree because he had recently taken over (the late) George Reiff’s studio, and he was like, ‘Hey, you want to hear what a record sounds like here?’ I had a mess of songs by then, so it ended up being a double album.” Make that a double concept album, collecting 15 of Temple’s best-ever songs (including the Walt Wilkins co-writes “Watch It Shine” and “Days” and the Kelley Mickwee collaboration “Beautiful Accidents”), all reflecting in their own way on the overarching big-picture themes of oneness and “the miracle of the particular”: i.e., across generations of family, we’re all rings on the same tree — but every one of us is also “the whole freaking tree.” In case all that doesn’t make it clear, suffice it to say that Temple’s spent a fair amount of time of late studying “a bit of Buddhism.”

As bountiful a harvest as Rings on a Tree was, Temple definitely hasn’t held back on writing, recording, and sharing even more new material in the three years since. In 2025 he released Weathered, a three-song EP recorded with Rhodes, and Live in Austin, recorded at the Saxon Pub in 2023 (both the EP and live album — Temple’s second — have since been reissued together on a single CD). Then from December 2025 through most of 2026, he kept the tap flowing with a succession of seemingly stand-alone singles, each one lovingly introduced into the world with the fanfare of its own blog entry/newsletter and Temple-painted cover art. It wasn’t until late summer that Temple finally revealed that he’d been sharing what was in fact a brand new album, the Quist-produced Closer, Says Love, piece by piece — saving only two songs in reserve for the final release.

“I just wanted to take the time to tell the story of each song — kind of like how at a gig I sometimes like to tell the story of a song before I play it,” he says. “I still love albums and still think songs on an album all need to cohere, but if I release 10 new songs all at once, I might only have time to tell the story behind one or two of them. This way, they all get their moment. And I think from now on, that’s the way I’m going to keep doing it.”

Whether or not he sticks to that strategy a year from now remains to be seen. But this much you can count on: Whether he tells them song by song, album by album, or watercolor by watercolor, Owen Temple still has a lot more stories to tell. Including some he doesn’t even know yet. And to loosely quote the chorus from the opening song on Closer, Says Love, ain’t we all lucky for that?