Bones Owens to release new album ‘Best Western’ and join Whiskey Myers

ng in college, and so I do take pride in lyrics, but sometimes that can come after or it can come during and then feedback on the music. It just depends.

Sometimes it starts with a riff or a progression or a particular sound I’m dinking around with. Then I just kind of build and build and build. I definitely liked that on this new album because I managed to write kind of more paired-back songs. These are really built upon a riff or a chord progression rather than many individual parts coming together for a robust-sounding thing, you know?

You mentioned your producer Paul Moak a few times. How has your relationship with him evolved over the albums you’ve made together?
Paul is amazing. I don’t, I feel like I owe a lot to him, to be honest. He’s such a lover of music, and we have these deep conversations about records and the references that we’re using before we start making a record. 
Sometimes I think he knows what I want even when I don’t. I give him a lot of liberty to have creative input and to steer things if he likes. We’ve arrived at a really good place in the last — when were all the crazy stuff? Four albums that I’ve done with Paul as a producer, so we’ve gotten to know each other. A lot of times it’s something as simple as him saying like, “Well, since we’ve done it on these so many other records, maybe on this one, let’s not do it that way.”

I have a lot of respect for him and it’s gotten to a place where it’s really just about hanging out and making records and being able to joke around and try stuff. It’s always a fun process. I think we’re a good team.

With that live kind of show of yours — so raw and gritty as you just talked about—do you see that sonic choice as something that will continue in your music, or do you have any other sounds you want to explore in the future?

I mean, I’ve always kind of said, like, I want to stretch laterally rather than vertically. There’s always going to be some of that rawness in there, I think. I mean, it depends on what comes musically and lyrically. If the song calls for something different, I’m certainly open to that and I think working with our players that is such high level of me. B, Orchard, and Zach all are so very important to that sound that I think it’ll be hard to stray too far away from it, to be honest. So long as we have those guys.

The next record could sound a million different ways right now. It could change anything from the way we write to where we’re at musically and my personal life. That next album will be out in forever, really. With albums out a little less frequently sometimes when you’re an indie artist like I am, those albums have to encapsulate three years’ time instead of just one album one year after another.