Bones Owens Has a New Album Coming Out and a Motorcycle Ride to Take (Exclusive)

Bones Owens has had many an unfinished motorcycle trip.

“I had decided that I was going to ride out to California about 10 years ago, but myself and my bike probably weren’t really prepared for the trip,” Owens, 40, tells PEOPLE while pacing around the basement of his Nashville home. “I was just shy of El Paso, and my bike started breaking down, so I had to turn around and come back.”

It took a decade for the revered Nashville troubadour to try again to make this monumental trip, but as he tested out some new cold weather riding gear on the day before his scheduled trip back in October of 2023, fate once again reared its ugly head. 

“I hit a deer on the bike going about 60 mph,” Owens remembers of the accident that occurred last Halloween. “Thankfully, I stayed up. I didn’t go down. It could have been a lot worse, but I did fracture my ankle and it sidelined the trip again.”

But Owens does not give up easily, and it’s this trip that he is going to attempt to take again next month as he climbs on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle for a solo trek across the Midwest to celebrate the July release of his new LP, Love Out of Lemons. 

“It’s either going to be one of those, ‘third time’s the charm’ sort of things or not,” chuckles Owens, who was born Caleb Owens in rural Missouri and took up the guitar at just 10 years old. “I’m preparing myself that the unexpected is almost to be expected in this situation.”

It’s a feeling that Owens has felt throughout his life and his career. 

“I’ve been in this business for a couple of decades,” says Owens, who spent many years as a sought-after session and touring guitarist for artists from Yelawolf, Jelly Roll and Bon Jovi. “It requires a lot of maneuvering and fluidity and ability to shift at times and roll with the punches.”

But it is amongst the majestic musical beauty of the 11 tracks that will soon make up the album that just might solidify Owens’ worthy place in this industry that one finds a unique artistry amongst a rock edge. Take for example Owens’ new single “Get It On,” premiering exclusively on PEOPLE.

“It’s one of the ones where I would say it was really written with the live show in mind,” explains Owens of the song he serves as sole writer on. “I want some songs with that kind of energy for a rock and roll live show. That song was built around that.” 

Produced by Paul Moak at his Smoakstack studio in Nashville,  Love Out of Lemons also has some necessary pauses, places in which the listener and the artist himself could catch one’s breath.

“I felt like the last rock record that I did, I didn’t give very many breaths, if you will,” explains Owens. “But I think I wanted to include a song or two in the record just for a little bit of a chance to bring it down. Just a little bit of a laid-back vibe.”

It’s this laid-back vibe that seems to cut through the hard edges of Owens and instead, show off the bluesy vibe that seems to seep from his very soul. Indeed, his roots find themselves deeply embedded in the rock bands of his youth, and it’s those roots that take center stage on Love Out of Lemons . 

“Creedence Clearwater Revival is deeply in my wheelhouse of a group that I was listening to in the formative years,” says Owens. “I’ve always been enticed by the idea of going to the source. Who’s the influence of the influence? Because that’s the real source. If I’m influenced by CCR, it’s not going to sound like CCR. You might hear little bits of it, but it’s like another perspective on the same influence. So yeah, I listen to newer music, but those classic things, and even the people that influenced the blues artists that influenced The Stones or CCR, those are influences of mine as well.”