Judith Owen

What Judith Owen's new album Ebb and Flow evokes the spirit of the halcyon days of the great 1970s troubadours is not accidental.

In a set of potent songs about love and loss, pain and joy, dreams and despair, the Welsh singer-songwriter fearlessly explores the duality of the human condition - and to do justice to the songs she turned to the legendary musicians who created the seventies troubadour sound.

Between them, her core band of drummer Russ Kunkel, bassist Leland Sklar and guitarist Waddy Wachtel played on many of the landmark albums from the era by the likes of Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne.

The three musicians who "created the sound of the 1970s" (Rolling Stone) were always the band Owen wanted to work with. "I fell in love with them; that soothing sound and the consummate side-men who helped create it," says Owen. David Crosby described them simply as "the best." With Ebb and Flow, they recorded together for the first time in fifteen years.

"The kind of music I write is so influenced by that sound and period that I wanted to go direct to the source," Owen explains. "When I write songs, I'm hearing a sound in my head - and they knew the sound because they invented it."

The songs on Ebb and Flow touch on the deepest emotions of Owen's own storied life with an unswerving honesty. But although her songs are highly personal, the emotions are universal.

"Singing about the human condition, living under the shadow of loss and frustration and sadness and loneliness and not being gratuitously sentimental about it, instead making something beautiful out of it - that's the songwriter's job," Owen says.