Cleveland Magazine, September 2004

City Life – Tale of the Tape

If you want to make music, Tyler Owen is the guy to know. Having worked with the likes of the O-Jays and the James Gang, his downtown recording studio has turned out works by a host of local acts that are now creating a buzz beyond our city.

Tyler Owen ended up in Cleveland on a dare. Bill March, a classmate at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and bass player for 80’s rock act Beau Coup, frequently told him how fertile Cleveland’s rock scene was for young musicians trying to break into the business. But Owen wasn’t so sure.

“I told him I needed a gig working in a studio and I needed a salary gig playing in a band,” he recalls. “And he made me a deal and said, ‘Come out here. If you don’t find both of these things within a week, the whole trip will be on me.’”

Owen found both within the first three days. Granted the studio job was programming eight-hour tapes for roller-skating rinks, but the Rochester N.Y., native kept working and his self-ordination as a Clevelander wasn’t far behind.

After a decade of bouncing back and forth from the studio to the stage, Owen finally settled in the recording end of the business and opened CloserLook Recording on the third floor of a rented duplex. “I started off really small, very small,” he recalls. “I just had a lot of experience watching what didn’t work at other studios and what did.”

Since then, Owen’s studio has far surpassed its origins. For the past five years, CloserLook Recording has been housed in a hulking third floor warehouse space at 3615 Superior Ave., packed tight with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of audio equipment and a truck-load of comfy leather furniture. Earlier this year, Owen opened a second studio on the sixth floor of the same complex and outfitted it with a 72-channel mixing board that, at 19 feet long is the only one of it’s kind in the Midwest.

Naturally, such investment turns heads. Owen counts members of LaVert, the O-Jays, James Gang, and Bone Thugs ‘N’ Harmony among his client list. But it’s some of the newer local faces with whom Owen has worked that have generated the most buzz lately.

Eighteen-year-old singer-songwriter Will Bowen, who recorded his full length debut on a shoe string budget, recently inked a songwriting deal with former Arista and Epic Records executive Pete Ganbarg’s New Jersey-based Pure Tone Music. Meanwhile, Joe Rohan, who stepped out from behind his drum kit to a well received solo career, showcased material from his debut disc in Nashville early last month. Other local favorites on Owen’s roster include singer-songwriters Alexis Antes and Robin Stone and reggae vet Carlos Jones.

But you don’t have to be chasing platinum to book time with Owen. His door is open to anyone, whether your next gig is the talent show or the big show. “If a guy comes in here with his daughter and he just wants to hear her sing, I’m a parent, I understand what he’s saying, “ Owen offers. “I do stuff like that all the time.

We asked Tyler to recount some of his favorite moments working with Cleveland artists. Here are two that he shared with us:

Will Bowen – The Lonely Mile

“When I met him, he was a 15-year-old kid calling around to studios. Nobody who listened to his voice would give him the time of day. I certainly wasn’t that way, so I booked him and he came in and brought a bunch of his high-school buddies and he started to play. Then, after he got through a tune or two, he started whipping out great material. It made me stop and say ‘Wow! Who is this kid?’ … We made his first album here. I’d like to say it was really a tiny budget, but that’s being generous.”

Robin Stone – RushMore

“She’ll go to the ends of the earth to make sure it’s right. … She started in the middle of November and finished probably four or five months later. She’s very diverse and eclectic when she writes and there are a very limited amount of players who can actually cover that kind of stuff. … Listen to the song ‘Cold Water.’ It’s so smooth the way everything goes by you. But if you stop and really pay attention