Bones Owens Collects Everything but Dust

“My mom owned an antique store when I was a kid, so I think I just got into collecting old stuff from a young age,” says Caleb “Bones” Owens. “I love collecting a lot of things, whether it be guitars, motorcycles, or records.” 

Lately, Owens has been getting a lot of mileage out of those collections. He played all the guitars, and most of the other instruments, on his third full-length solo album Best Western, out September 19. He’ll be DJing old rock and soul 45s at the release party in Nashville, where he lives. And when he goes on the road this fall, he’ll probably be riding a Harley to and from shows, as he’s often done on tours of the past few years. “I try to intersperse as much riding as possible on tour,” he says. “The rest of the equipment and everything, the other guys are traveling with that in another vehicle.”

When I connect with Owens on Zoom late one morning, though, he’s enjoying some brief downtime on the Lake of the Ozarks, a couple of hours from where he grew up in Missouri. “I’m just kickin’ back for a couple days, seein’ some family, then getting back to the grind,” he says. “I just got to go out and go on a nice little ride here around the lake on one of my bikes this morning.”

For Best Western, Owens returned to longtime producer Paul Moak’s Nashville studio, the Smoakstack. Moak, however, was out on tour as a member of the legendary band Heart. So Owens was left to his own devices to self-produce Best Western with the help of engineers and drummer Julian Dorio. “[Paul] popped in the studio for a day or two when he was home from the road, I think he played a little bit of keys on some stuff, and he played bass guitar on one song.”

Best Western sounds like a love letter to the electric guitar, full of greasy riffs and gleaming leads captured vividly on tape. “The guitars get more love and attention than maybe than just about any other aspect of the record. It’s gotta be right,” Owens says. “I experimented with some different amplifiers this time around, too. I brought in a big wall of loud British vintage amplifiers, but I also brought in a couple little Fender ‘50s and ‘60s combo amps that we can just crank all the way up. I think that soup of guitars does something, it just works.”

Owens’s proudly old-fashioned fusion of rock, country, and Americana makes him a perfect fit for one of Nashville’s most progressive labels, Thirty Tigers. “Some of the acts that have been on the label like Sturgill Simpson, or Jason Isbell or Charlie Crockett, all these guys have been pretty successful but I feel like they’ve also kinda done things their own way, and I respect that,” Owens says. “It’s an artist-friendly label. You maintain ownership of your master recordings for instance, that’s huge. And they offer you the support to make the album and get it out there and distribute and all that, but it’s very non-invasive as far as a label is concerned.”

There is one more overtly modern touch on Best Western: a guest verse by Alabama rapper Yelawolf on the title track. That collaboration feels organic in the context of the album, though, the result of a long friendship. “We actually met through a mutual friend of ours, Bam Margera from Jackass,” Owens remembers. They first wrote a song together for Yelawolf’s 2014 Shady Records album Love Story, and then Owens worked on nearly every track on the 2017 follow-up Trial By Fire, and regularly backed Yelawolf onstage. “I toured with him all over the world for a few years.”

In the last few years, mixing hip-hop and country music together has become a big business, and the pop charts are full of rap/country fusions by artists like Shaboozey and Jelly Roll. Owens, who worked with Jelly Roll on the 2017 track “Long Long Time” with Struggle Jennings, doesn’t necessarily see himself as part of that zeitgeist, but he acknowledges that his work with Yelawolf a decade ago was in some ways an early harbinger of a growing wave. “Some of the stuff that we were doing together was on the front end of it. But ultimately, I kind of feel like what we do was a little bit more gritty than the versions that have made it to mainstream at this point,” he says. “Maybe people still aren’t ready for a more trailer park version of that.”

Earlier this year, Owens marked 20 years since he dropped out of college and moved to Nashville after signing a publishing deal. “I dropped out of school with like 15 credit hours left, I think, and moved to Nashville, never looked back,” he says. At the time, he was playing in a band, The Becoming, that released one album on the Christian indie label Tooth & Nail Records in 2008. Best Western doesn’t sound anything like The Becoming, but there is a vestige of his roots in that scene: Matt Thiessen of Reliant K contributed backing vocals to a few tracks and co-wrote “Come Down to It.”

Right now, though, Owens is happy to carve out a niche as a throwback singer-songwriter who makes records with tube amplifiers and an old Solid State Logic mixing desk. “I don’t really make a habit of listening to a lot of new music. And I think my influences are still just classic rock stuff, Rolling Stones and CCR, and some blues guys, y’know, R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough,” he says. “There’s a lot of analog components that are involved in every aspect of the records that I’m making. We like to try to do it the hard way as much as possible, and the old way as much as possible.”