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d. mark Owen - respite

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Many a gifted musician can speak about having a day job, but since 2011 d. mark owen has held down a “night job” in Las Vegas as the Associate Conductor of Cirque Du Soleil’s mammoth production KÁ. A fine pianist, keyboardist, producer, arranger, music director, mixing and mastering engineer, and proprietor of his own innovatively designed studio, Owen has a way of bringing his considerable acumen and wide-ranging experience to bear in every professional context. But with his beautiful new album Respite, he shifts attention to his own artistic journey, working as a largely one-man operation, creating a set of original instrumental pieces with ample tonal and thematic sophistication, engaging melodies, and richly contrasting moods.
 
“We’re constantly bombarded with music and images in an effort to sell us something or lead us in a certain direction,” says Owen. “I wanted this record to be a place beyond that. A place where you could sit for an hour and just listen, and hopefully come away feeling like you had been given something. A creative endeavor that somehow enriched your day. I wanted it to do for other people what art has done for me over the years: make me reflect, give me pause, make me feel like perhaps there is hope after all.”
 
The bulk of Respite finds Owen in full solo mode, connecting sparkling acoustic piano, lush synth pads and intriguing harmonies to clear and expressive melodic lines, grounded in a percussive groove sensibility. Three tracks, “Anesthetic,” “Stretched” and “The Traveler,” feature bassist Derek Jones and drummer Cameron (“Cam”) Tyler, bringing the rhythmic aspect of Owen’s writing into even sharper relief. Tyler and Owen share a strong bond as partners in Nonebody Productions as well as their pop-oriented duo project Cryptic Cadet, which released the album Disconnected in 2021. This album features vocalist Olivia Rubini singing Owen’s original lyrics, as well as electric bass giant Tim Lefebvre (David Bowie, Wayne Krantz, Elvis Costello) and other fine musicians. Tyler also works with Owen at KÁ as an on-call, and has also worked with Marie Osmond and Jim Belushi. Jones is the bassist in KÁ and has performed with everyone from Jerry Douglas and Béla Fleck to Sheila E. to David Liebman.
 

Using state-of-the-art studio techniques and guided by a highly sophisticated ear, Owen built these pieces up from their beginnings (usually on acoustic piano) to become broad, cinematic, fully orchestrated musical stories. They touch on complex feelings related to raising a son (“Toddle,” “1410”), experiences gained working as a commercial fisherman to pay for college (“Lost at Sea”), the inspiration that can strike in moments of semi-consciousness (“In Between”), and the frustrations of life as a working musician paying the bills (“Anesthetic,” “On the Run,” “Breathe”). Throughout, Owen reveals a penchant for arresting sonic detail and a deeply melodic sense as both a writer and soloist. The vamps, phrases and harmonic choices have a way of being highly accessible while also eschewing the obvious. “Bruce Hornsby once said that he wanted his music to have ‘a sense of place,’” remarks Owen, “and that is something I’ve also tried to achieve. And while his is a musical sense of Americana and the South in general, I have tried to make my ‘place’ one that is more of the imagination — one that I invent with each composition.”

Featuring:

Piano | Programming | Composer | Arranger: d. mark owen
Bass (tracks 1, 4, 6): Derek Jones
Drums (tracks 1, 4, 6): Cameron Tyler
Recording Engineer/Mixing/Mastering: d. mark owen
d. mark owen's Official Website: dmarkowen.com

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Liner Notes | About The Songs

Personal notes from d. mark owen
1. Anesthetic
​
This was written during a period where I was playing an enormous number of really bad arrangements. Sometimes, they were arrangements of what was, originally, very good music. I found it very disheartening to say the least, and, to get through it I would just drift off mentally once I had it memorized. During these periods I would sometimes hear alterations to what I was playing, perhaps in another key. So I started trying to sneak things in in such a way that it didn’t disrupt the music. And those little experiments bore the fruit that would become Anesthetic. Ultimately, it’s about how, sometimes, making a living as a musician can be a very creatively numbing experience, and what one does to try and keep the fires burning.
2. On The Run
​
Originally conceived as a solo piano piece, I adapted that melody and married it with another synthetic piece I was working on. It’s about how you spend so much time as an artist avoiding that voice inside you (for whatever reason), the inner tension that avoidance creates, and the peace that comes when you finally answer to it, the voices in your head be damned.
3. In Between
​
I’ve always been fascinated with dreams. In fact, I’ve gotten a fair amount of compositional material by waking up and singing an idea into my phone, going back to sleep, and then taking that recording into the studio and fleshing it out. This piece is about that space where you’re not fully asleep, but you’re not awake either. That in between space where you kind of think you’re awake, and then strange things start to happen, and then you open your eyes and realize you were dreaming.
4. Stretched
​
This melody is one that I woke up, sang into my phone, and went back to sleep. It was such a simple melody, that at first I didn’t really like it. So, I tried to stretch it out, add angular harmonies, put it into an odd time signature, and suddenly it just took on life of its own. One of the few that isn’t actually about anything. Just a compositional exercise that I ended up falling in love with the more I worked on it. 
​
5. Toddle
​
If you have kids now, or have already raised them, you’re well aware of the fact that as soon as they can walk, they are trying to walk AWAY from you, until that culminates in them actually going out into the world on their own. It is a bittersweet journey, particularly when they are young and vulnerable and don’t want to take any of your hard earned advice. I remember when my son was very young I said to him, “don’t put your waffle in the VCR!”, and thought to myself, “My GOD. Do I have to teach you everything!?!?!?” And it hit me that...yes, I did have to teach him EVERYTHING. Or at least as much as I could get into his head before he left. And it was just overwhelming. And I started REALLY trying to pay attention and value every minute we had together, even though he would be toddling off one day soon. This song tries to capture that somewhat sad feeling of knowing what’s coming and not being able, or even wanting, to stop it.
6. The Traveller
​
I’ve always been fascinated with Native American culture. It seems as though, in so many ways, they had life figured out, for the most part, until that way of life was wiped out. I always felt like they had a deep relationship with the world around them, believing that we are all part of the same cycle, and what we do to the land and animals around us has meaning, and a direct bearing upon us and our lives. Hopefully that way of thinking, the spirit that works that magic, and has been missing for so long, is beginning to reemerge. That spirit is the basis for this song.
7. Lost At Sea
When I was a younger, I worked as a commercial fisherman for a few years to pay for college. That had a profound effect on me, and when one of the men that I worked alongside was lost at sea, it struck me much harder than I would have expected it to. Years later, when reading about the first Vendee Globe solo sailing race around the world, I was struck again by the story of Donald Crowhurst, one of the contestants who was also lost lost at sea, leaving behind a wife and several children. His boat was found and his logbook chronicled his descent into madness, and probably suicide. None of which made the story any less sad. So, this song is in memory of all of the men who have gone to sea and not come back.
8. Breathe
Who among us hasn’t worked a job that was such a daily crushing of the spirit that you wondered if you would even survive the remainder of the day? I was lucky enough to do those jobs when I was young, with only a few interim slogs to connect my playing gigs after I started playing professionally. But I remember them like they were yesterday. And I remember how I would drift off, hearing music in whatever office sound was going on. Typing. A copier. People talking. A pointless meeting. And I remember sitting there, coming back to reality and having no idea how long I’d been “gone”. And I would tell myself, “Breathe. This is only temporary.”
9. 1410
​
When my son was born, the nurses whisked him away, and when whey brought him back, he was wearing a hospital wristband with his name, and the time of his birth in military time:1410. And so when I went home and went in to the studio to try and capture the feelings that were running through my head, 1410 keep coming back to me. I tried to start with a single note. Something simple. Something that happens every day. A child is born. And then I tried to make it complex to match how I felt. Because I was not ready to be a Father at all. I don’t think anyone is with their first kid. Then I just tried to make it happy and joyful. The funny thing is, he was in his 20’s and had heard it all his life and, for some reason, didn’t know I had written if for him. It made for a good reveal.

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