Owsley had a brief but distinguished career as a band member, solo artist, and session/touring musician. Sadly, he apparently took his own life at age 44 in 2010, but his short discography is memorable. AllMusic reports: “Alabama-born multi-instrumentalist Will Owsley followed a career path not unlike Sheryl Crow‘s, by backing up big mainstream pop artists, collecting the rewards and channeling them into his own solo work. Owsley plied his wares in the bands of Shania Twain and Amy Grant in the mid-’90s, then recorded his own material at home, and offered the finished product to record companies on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.” Owsley’s early-90s band, The Semantics, briefly featured a young Ben Folds on keyboards; AllMusic describes the two musicians’ “likemindedness” as “hard to miss.”
“Oh No the Radio” (1999) is an account of the hold that radio had on music fans’ lives during a time when that medium was the primary way that music reached our ears. The tune seems to describe a music fan’s love/hate relationship with a medium so omnipresent that going to a drive-in movie provides a welcome but brief respite.
The intro and verse, both in C# major, feature the guitar’s crunchy, relentless battery of eighth-note seventh chords in a I7 – bVII7 vamp. This rock-solid foundation frees up the bass to intermittently depart from covering the roots, going airborne and adding harmonic context from the rafters. The chorus shifts to C# minor (for the first time at 1:47), bringing with it a far smoother and lyrical feel, before returning to the original C# major.
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