This is Dean Owens' fifth and, to my ear, best release to date.
Produced by Neilson Hubbard ,it is the third he has recorded in the U.S. and the second, along with 2008's Whisky Hearts, to be made in Nashville.
Owens' affection for Music City is most evident on the bonus track I'm Pretending I Don't Love You Anymore a light-hearted duet with Suzy Bogguss and a re-recording of a country song from his debut album, The Droma Tapes.
Meanwhile, his love of American life is plain from Valentine's Day In New York, a cheery love song to the Big Apple.
However, neither of these tracks is representative of an album in which the majority of the songs are set in and around Owens' home district of Leith in Scotland.
Dora, for example,is about his grandmother who grew up in a family of circus performers and Upon The Hill is about a hill near Edinburgh where he goes to think.
The strongest of these more personal tunes finds Owens reflecting wistfully upon real or imagined past lives, wondering 'where have we been?' and "Where will we end up?".
The second of these questions is a line from Kids (1979). Here, Owens muses on the various fates of kids in the back row of an old school picture.
The single, and one of the record's many highlights, is Closer To Home, inspired by a heartbreaking letter from a soldier during WWII with bitter-sweet thoughts of "the way things used to be".
Evergreen (with Kim Richey on backing vocals) and Virginia Street are similarly tender songs full of what might have beens. These match the mood of a pair of touching break-up songs (written with the same woman in mind): Days Without You and The Only One.
Sally's Song (I Dreamed Of Michael Marra) encapsulates Owens' ability to combine personal feelings with broader themes of love and loss. This is dedicated to Scottish singer-songwriter Michael Marra, known as the Bard of Dundee, who died in 2012 but also contains a reference to another of Scotland's "golden" voices, The Associates' Billy MacKenzie who passed in 1997.
In addition, the song relates to Owens own past. Wandering around the old neighbourhood where he grew up, he reflects laconically: "I went by the old school today, seemed like yesterday. I had it all in front of me, now it's all behind me".
Overall, this kind of elegiac quality gives the record a melancholy flavour but this is well balanced by the philosophical mood of a track like It Could Be Better where consolation comes through the notion that "It could have been better, but it could be worse".
This fine set of songs document life as a constant process of adjusting dreams to reality and recognise how the past is always part of the present.
