Survivor's tale
Whether you call it jazz, rock, or folk, Judith Owen's music brought her back from the brink
Judith Owen's CDs can be found in the jazz section of record stores, except when they're in rock, or folk, or vocal (where an album evidently goes when somebody decides that the singing is more important than the piano or guitar). Owen belongs in all of those bins, which says a lot about her range, and that's also why you've probably never heard of her. Uncompromising women with gallows humor and a fondness for Oscar Peterson, Joni Mitchell, and Soundgarden aren't exactly hot properties in the music business.
For 10 years the Welsh-born singer, songwriter, and pianist has been releasing records that blur the line between troubadour and chanteuse, pastoral beauty and urbane sophistication. Her songs are literate, and often melancholy, but also pithy and blunt. She's been accurately described as the female Randy Newman, but there's one big difference: Owen's voice is gorgeous. It's a phenomenally forthright instrument that whispers when necessary and wails when the moment calls for candor.
Owen enjoys a cultish fan base and a telling assortment of admiring peers: Cassandra Wilson, Richard Thompson, Keb' Mo, Ian Shaw, and Julia Fordham appear on her albums. So does actor (and bass player) Harry Shearer, but he doesn't really count: He's Owen's husband. "Happy This Way," the artist's sixth album, came out in May, and she'll perform at Club Passim Wednesday.
"Don't do bright and don't do breezy/ So I stick with what comes easy/ I just want some cream on my cornflakes/ I just want to sugar my tea," Owen sings on "Painting by Numbers," a darkly jaunty Britpop tune. Survival is the theme of the artist's new album, and it's been the challenge of her life. Luxuries like peace of mind are relatively recent acquisitions -- the spoils of a lifelong battle with depression, from which Owen is emerging the victor thanks to a potent cocktail of therapy, comedy, and music.
"In Wales people sing," says Owen, who was born in the tiny UK country and grew up in London. "In a place where you can't express yourself, where it's, you know, 'chin up,' music is the greatest form of self-medication. And I'm so grateful because I could have easily been hideously messed up."
"Happy This Way" is an homage of sorts to her homeland. Owen wistfully evokes the Celtic landscape and its musical traditions on "Conway Bay" and makes jazzy mincemeat of the "Cool Life" (spray-on tans and rehab) that, to Owen's horror, has become de rigueur across the pond. She honors her opera-singer dad on the tender ballad "My Father's Voice," and in the defiantly buoyant title track she sends a missive to her late mother, who committed suicide when Owen was 15. The loss closed her down emotionally, and she began to channel her unspeakable feelings of shame and guilt into songs.
"Judith is like a woman warrior poet," says Wilson. "She's fearless."
The album also includes an elegant ode to a kindred spirit, the late British singer-songwriter Nick Drake, whose untimely death served as a cautionary tale for Owen. "Your gift was your curse/ You were best through the worst," she sings on "Nicholas Drake," and confirms during a long, rambling phone conversation that, "I identify with him completely. My game face is confident and powerful. I was trained as an actress. But after meetings, I'd shut myself in a room for two weeks. I had no skills to live."
Owen left Britain and moved to the United States in 1993, the year she met Shearer in a London hotel lobby -- she had a weeklong brunch gig, and the "This Is Spinal Tap" star was dining in full Derek Smalls facial hair and metal gear. Two months later she packed her bags, flew to Los Angeles, and asked Shearer to marry her. The pair now divide their time between homes in Santa Monica, Calif., and New Orleans. "I came here because I was in love," Owen says, "but also because I was lost and ill and really felt in my gut that this was maybe the last chance to be OK."
Owen self-released her debut album, "Emotions on a Postcard," in 1996, and it drew the attention of several major labels. Superproducer Glen Ballard (Alanis Morissette) signed Owen to his Capitol Records imprint Java and told her that she was going to be Joni Mitchell and Carole King combined. But soon after the album was finished at the end of 2000, Capitol became embroiled in corporate restructuring and "everything went to hell in a handbasket," Owen says. "I will never get into that situation again."
After much legal wrangling, Owen bought the disc back and recouped her costs almost immediately by placing some of the songs in films and television shows. She now releases her albums, which arrive annually, on her own Courgette label.
Owen also performs original musical-comedy sketches with her husband and records and tours frequently with British folk-rock icon (and Fairport Convention founder) Thompson, who names Owen's musical intelligence as her distinguishing quality.
"She has good instincts. She makes good decisions," Thompson says. "There are bucketloads of singer-songwriters and piano players out there, but Judith has the greatest gift of all: individuality."
In today's fiscally stressed, niche-marketed industry, though, individuality isn't generally rewarded with commercial success. Even if she wanted it, the major-label machine would be unlikely to throw its weight behind Owen's old-school, genre-spanning songcraft. Still, for a long time Owen believed that adoring throngs were her ticket to happiness, and that her inability to cope with "the business" was derailing her dreams. So it was a life-altering epiphany for Owen when it dawned on her that all the small steps -- the crappy gigs and indie albums and unheralded creative strides -- are the reason she's here today.
"Here's how you know you haven't failed," Owen says. "When you realize, through therapy, of course, that you might have ended up like Nick Drake, that you do what you do when you can do it, that hiding out and retreating from the hoopla saved my life. And you hope that when beautiful things happen, you are in a place to receive it with gratitude, and not be destroyed by it."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, visit boston.com/ae/ music/blog. 