Owen w/ Empire! Empire! (I Was A Lonely Estate) & American Opera

In the past decade, Chicago’s Mike Kinsella has played a variety of instruments in a handful of bands. Owen is his solo project. When it came time to record his solo album, Mike approached Polyvinyl with the idea to take the money that normally would be spent on a recording studio and instead spend it on software so he could record the album on his own. He ended up heading to his mother’s house in Chicago and turned his old bedroom into a recording studio. Owen’s debut, Owen was a stark departure from previous Mike Kinsella projects. There no longer existed a need to play odd time signatures just for the sake of being different or writing parts that were technically challenging purely for the sake of being technically challenging. What remained was an artist finding his way through his home studio for the first time while recording all instrumentation on his own.

Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) is a band from Fenton, Michigan comprised of a husband and wife duo and two other chums. They love to play pretty music.

“Bee’s realistic songwriting tendencies come to life in waves and on a live scale, the rich storytelling is almost more astounding than anything else in recent memory.” — BLARE MAGAZINE