Q: The three songs on “Three” each take on a specific narrative. Were any inspired by personal experience?
YOUNG: Virtually all of my songs are at least sparked by personal experience, although considerable poetic licence is typically taken in developing the story beyond that spark. However, one of the things that distinguishes the songs on “Three” is that they are totally based on personal experience. I was a Fine Arts student at UCLA in the late Sixties where I hoped to develop skills as a writer and documentary film maker. In the 1970s I shifted my focus to law. Both were political and social activist environments. For years my legal work was centered on the historic treaty rights of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. I hope that one can hear the perspectives developed through that evolution in the songs of “Three.”
Q: Walk us through your writing and production process in making “Three.”
YOUNG: Through the pandemic shutdown I did much of my writing on foot, walking my dog. That’s true of “Voices”, “Runnin’” and “Could Have Been You”. All are grounded in similar activist periods of my life. All are built around common experiences and emotions: less nostalgia than sorrow, frustration and anger. As a result, they were all written together, in parallel. As with most of my songs, I tried out progressions on guitar and keyboard. In the case of the “Three” songs, this took months of going back and going back to them. Once I had the basic progressions, I turned to every acoustic, electronic and digital tool at my disposal to develop and roughly arrange the tracks. I unloaded the resulting stems on engineer Jill Zimmermann at Jukasa Studios where she recorded the vocals and worked a lot of magic on the tracks to make them what you hear on “Three.”
Q: Who would you most like to collaborate with, if it could be anyone in the world?
YOUNG: I’m not sure what I could usefully contribute in a collaboration. I think I could benefit more from teachers. But if I could name anyone it would be John Prine. Unfortunately he’s lost to us now. Another would be Joni Mitchell. But a third might surprise you: Waxahatchee. I’d love to see inside her crafting of lyrics and stories.
Q: What has been one of the highlights of your music career so far?
YOUNG: It might be pretentious to call the path I am on a “career”, but there have been some wonderful moments along the way. I started out in the mid-1960s performing in coffee houses in Toronto on what might now be called open-mic nights but were then described as “hootenannies”. Perhaps not exactly a highlight but the embarrassing night I learned very publicly that, with a twelve string, one does indeed spend half the time tuning it and for the other half it is out of tune is still burned into my mind. As for a true highlight, seeing and hearing the “Muddy River” album cycle, including “Three”, slowly come to life at Jukasa was quite simply the best.
Q: In your own words, how would you describe the music that you typically create?
YOUNG: I don’t really know. I create what I like to hear. It’s not folk. It’s not rock. I’ve heard others refer to it as Americana “but not the front-porch type.” That’s okay by me, although it may be odd for a Canadian who does work on some of his songs on the front porch.
Q: Do you have a personal favorite out of these three songs? Which one, and why?
YOUNG: “Voices In The Dust”. It’s about a dear friend I worked alongside for years on Indigenous rights claims across Canada. We grew up in the same part of the country. He is Indigenous. I am not. We battled together, becoming very close through our efforts to see into one another’s worlds. I thought at times I could hear faint echoes, but it was clear to me that he loudly heard the songs of the past and future, the voices in the dust. For me, the song always brings him to mind.
FOLLOW OWEN YOUNG:
