Johnny Dowd

Temporary Shelter (Koch Records)

Playing Mar. 13 at Springwater

Rife with serial killers, obsessed love, lust, murder, and the kind of grief that makes your innards feel like they’re roasting over Satan’s private barbecue, Johnny Dowd’s songs evoke the specter of a dark and dysfunctional life. His first two albums, highly praised and deservedly so, are replete with these themes: “No Other Woman’s Flesh but Hers,” from Pictures From Life’s Other Side, tells a grim tale of drunken driving, and “First There Was,” from his debut, Wrong Side of Memphis, tells of a killer who just can’t relate to anyone. On his latest release, Temporary Shelter, Dowd delves again into the world of the outcast, making those dark feelings accessible to all of us—distorted, but familiar nonetheless.

Dowd’s work is peppered with characters, and like all good storytellers, he has a keen eye for details, both physical and psychological. The first cut on Temporary Shelter, “Vengeance Is Mine,” tells of a widow whose husband’s murder leaves the boss man scheming to take what he wants. But she has other ideas: “Justice will come, I swear on his grave,” she says. “I’m a widow woman, but I’m no slave.” Dowd sketches the song’s villain with equally deft precision: “He’s got one eye / wears a white shirt and a black string tie.” In “Golden Rule,” we meet a drifter luring a woman away from her family and even her baby: “I’ll take you to a motel with a TV and a pool,” he coaxes. “We’ll buy a bottle of whiskey and recite the golden rule / ...nothing comes from nothing, that’s my philosophy / If you can’t handle trouble, stay away from me!”

Speaking recently from his home in Ithaca, N.Y., where he still operates the moving company he’s owned since 1978, Dowd talked about his newfound success, capped most recently by a European tour that had him playing capacity shows in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. “When I put out Wrong Side of Memphis,” he says, “I was disgusted with the whole business. I had, in my early 30s and 40s, delusions of being a rock star and all, but nothing happened. So then I finally gave it up. And then, well, it was a pretty Zen moment, to be well-received. But it took me a couple of years of playing again to get my attitude back, because I was just so disgusted with the thing. But I have my attitude back now.”

Temporary Shelter isn’t as immediately accessible as Dowd’s first two CDs, both of which were more spare, more direct. The new album “is more of a group effort,” he explains. “I have this band, and I wanted to do something more with them.” He doesn’t see his music as very sophisticated, and he credits his band for lending the more creative touches. The overall sound, he says, comes from the collision of two very different musical ideas: “If you stripped it down, it’d really be a waltz or a country beat. The band, they wouldn’t know a country song if they heard it—they grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and Public Enemy.”

Dowd’s backing musicians include singer Kim Sherwood-Caso, who has worked with him for 10 years and whose vocals lend a classy, icy gloss. Drums and other percussion are handled by Brian Wilson, who used to work for Dowd’s moving company. Both Wilson and keyboardist/guitarist Justin Asher are just 23 years old—not even half as old as their bandleader. They take Dowd’s psychotic country-blues guitar and his drawling, raspy, at times off-key voice into the 21st century. The mix of heavy, hollow urban beats, ultra-low bass tones, layers of keyboard, mean blues guitar, and Sherwood-Caso’s pure non-vibrato vocals produces a chilly and haunting sound. This is a versatile group of musicians, segueing with ease from surf vibrations to circus calliope. It takes some getting used to, but the blend is unlike any other music being made today.

This music forms the perfect backdrop for Temporary Shelter’s stories of bewildered, angst-ridden social misfits and underdogs. Even the most vile among them cries out for love and acceptance as he shambles down a dusty path that leads to poverty, loss, and probably jail. “Those characters,” Dowd says, “they’re like everyone else—they have feelings of love, but their feelings get twisted. But they’re really the same feelings as everyone else.”

Temporary Shelter is also Dowd’s “female album,” in which he frequently explores life from a woman’s point of view. And his characters here run the gamut, from the widow in “Vengeance Is Mine,” to the mother in “Hideaway” who builds a shelter “to keep her children safe from the vacancy of fate,” to the divorcée in “Lost Avenue” who says, “Leaving is the best gift a husband can give his wife.” Dowd sings of women as victims, as mistresses of their own fate, as protectors of the innocent, and as faithful partners in life. But none of these women is subservient: They stand on their own two feet, and sometimes those feet march right over their men.

“I grew up in a house full of women,” Dowd explains, “so I know something about women and I do love them. If you went to a family reunion at my place, out in Oklahoma where I’m from, you’d see about 40 women sitting around the table going at it 100 miles an hour and about 15 guys passed out in the parlor.” The women in Dowd’s world are in charge, and that’s reflected in his lyrics. So is this album really his attempt to get in touch with his female side? “I sure hope so,” he replies.

Dowd acknowledges that as he has become more successful, he has less time to focus on his actual music. “I used to write a couple songs a day, [and] I started the moving business so that I would be able to make a decent living, not have to work for anyone else, set my own schedule.” Like many artists, he feels that his best work comes from having lots of downtime—in his case, time for “sittin’, thinkin’, thinkin’, drinkin’.” He explains, “But now, well, two hours of writing—to get those two hours is 10 hours of sitting around and drinking coffee, not really doing anything.”

People often wonder if Dowd is writing about himself in his songs; it’s hard to believe that he could have experienced all the twisted events he describes. “Well, when I was younger, I was pretty bad,” he says, without going into any detail. “So some of my material comes from that. I can’t believe sometimes how I used to be, or even why I wanted to be that way.” The promotional materials for the new album describe Temporary Shelter as being an “unsettling step into his past...as half-remembered dreams about [his] life to date.” Psychologist Carl Jung wrote about knowing and accepting the dark (i.e., shadow) side as necessary for true self-knowledge. So whether these sad, desperate, and lonely images are strictly autobiographical or the product of a fertile imagination, putting them into song may be Dowd’s way of grappling with his own demons—and helping us grapple with ours.