Just finished watching No Country for Old Men again. That amazing movie gave us a real taste for the sparse and rough terrain of West Texas. So we jumped right back into listening to our new favorite Texas album from Owen Temple and wanted to do a quick blog about some of his songs. On his new album, Mountain Home, Temple taps into his childhood in the West Texas Hill Country. He writes story songs that dance around their own meanings, frequently calling in catchy choruses to move the song to more general territory. But there are real stories at the heart of his songs, stories inspired by people he grew up with in the small towns he knew before moving to Austin, where he currently lives. His songs are catchy, hummable, but have surprising weight thanks to the people and places he's writing about. We got curious about some of the songs off his album, and luckily he was kind enough to include some extra liner notes through Reviewshine, an online digital music service for bloggers that we highly recommend. Since we're both fans of liner notes, he gave us permission to reprint some of them here:


Mountain Home


"I grew up near Mountain Home, a small ranching community in the Texas Hill Country. It's in a part of the state - called the Edwards Plateau - with steep hillsides and valleys created over the millennia by streams and rivers cutting through a hard bedrock of limestone.

It doesn't rain much out there, so the hills are covered with one of the hardiest and most stubborn shrubs around - the mountain cedar.

The people that live in those hills are fairly stubborn themselves, from dealing with the unfarmable land - with hard rock inches below the surface - and from dealing with the blight of mountain cedar that covers any available space and consumes every inch of soil it can steal.

In the 1980s, I remember hearing stories about some folks who lived in the hills near us. Hitchhikers on Interstate 10 reported bizarre events near Mountain Home - kidnapping and forced labor - and the sheriff got involved. A high profile trial began, and the testimony was filled with surreal anecdotes:

      'Yes sir, they would play a cassette tape of Elvis singing 'Jailhouse Rock' over and over and they would not let me leave. They forced us to work on the ranch.'

     'What were you forced to do?'

      'Chop and clear cedar, repair fences, and we had to carve the cedar branches into small keychains. They sold the keychains to truckstops.'

When the trial wrapped up, a few people went to prison. A family friend of ours said, 'it was like the wild west out here in those days'."

Desdemona


"The town of Desdemona, Texas was founded and named for a Justic of the Peace's daughter during the boom times of oil production near the town in 1919. Then the oil production dropped off dramatically, due to wasteful methods, and the town dried up in the early 1920s. At its peak, the town had four gambling parlors and two brothels and a legendary lawlessness that the Texas Rangers had to finally break up and disperse.

Desdemona is one of many boom- and then bust- oil towns of West and Southeast Texas. Epic fortunes were made and lost near these towns so that lives and the land changed forever."

One Day Closer to Rain


"During the summer of 2009, one of the worst droughts in Texas history was happening. Out near Mountain Home, wells were drying up, cows were dynig, crops were burned up, and still it didn't rain. People who lived out there watched the weather on the San Antonio newscasts and tried to keep up hope that the drought would break someday. At the end of a blistering - and completely dry - August day, a friend of mine said, 'ah well, we're one day closer to rain'."


You Can Purchase Owen Temple's new album, Mountain Home, from CDBaby