Owen – the acclaimed solo musical guise of singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Mike Kinsella – has made an astonishing leap forward with The King of Whys, the first work in his two-decade-plus career to be made entirely outside of the greater Chicagoland area. Produced by S. Carey over 18 days last winter at April Base Studios in Eau Claire, WI, the album is Owen’s most inspired and evocative thus far, interpolating a group dynamic into what has long been an intensely intimate sound. Songs like “The Desperate Act” and “Sleep Is A Myth” remain spare but with a distinctly outward shift in scope, their open-armed sonic range a perfect foil to Kinsella’s evocative explorations of marriage, melancholia, and modern middle age. Fraught with hurt and wry humor, The King of Whys is a portrait of a restless artist grappling with doubt and ghosts of the past but searching for meaning through candor, creativity, and an ardent need for emotional release. “I think this record is totally romantic,” Kinsella says. “I told my wife, she wasn’t convinced. I said that this is how I get it all out of me. It leaves me more content to deal with reality.”
