Brian Owens brings the spirit of Marvin Gaye to life in ‘Motown in Your Town’

In 2017, singer Brian Owens, one of St. Louis’s most celebrated artists, spearheaded a national tour of performing arts centers called The Marvin Gaye Experience. The tour was an extension of a series of well-received concerts at The Sheldon, during which Owens paid tribute to some of the all-time soul greats. “These are the soul masters,” Owens says, “whose music we don’t hear that much anymore but who are so vitally important.” One show paid tribute to Ray Charles, another to Otis Redding, another to Al Green. But it was inhabiting the music and persona of Marvin Gaye to which Owens felt the deepest and most intuitive connection. 

St. Louis will get an encore performance of Owens’ tribute to Marvin Gaye this Saturday night at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. But this time Owens will share the stage with the New York–based That Motown Band, a group led by powerhouse singer Garfield Fleming, best known for his long tenure with The Delfonics. As you would expect, Saturday’s Motown in Your Town—filled with horns, a dynamic rhythmic section, and backing vocalists—specializes in faithful renditions of hits by the Temptations, The Four Tops, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson, and Stevie Wonder. And, of course, Marvin. 

That’s where Owens comes in. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a more suitable singer to recreate maximum Marvin-ness. With his range, versatility, blend of flash and restraint, and encyclopedic knowledge of soul history, Owens is a singer’s singer and a mesmerizing performer. And it doesn’t hurt that can channel not only Marvin’s tone and timbre but also the legend’s countenance and stage mannerisms. 

However, Owens insists that his Marvin Gaye tribute is not so much an impression as a reflection of how much of Gaye’s legacy he has absorbed over his lifetime. “I don’t try to sound like Marvin,” Owens says. “I just sing, but it’s so much in me that doing the Marvin thing is just kind of me partly doing Brian. I’ve ingested so much of it that I don’t have to think about it.” 

The evening at Touhill is also a benefit for Life Creative STL, the organization Owens founded in 2016 to build community development through the arts. Life Creative generates money and opportunities for young people working across a wide range of artistic disciplines whom the organization empowers with financial, entrepreneurial, artistic, and social support. 

Owens’ Life Creative STL is also partnered with Refuge and Restoration, a faith-based nonprofit providing transitional housing, economic opportunities, and spiritual guidance to those in need in the St. Louis area. The two organizations—collaborating as R&R for Life Creative Partnership—extend Owens’ vision of mentorship, nurturing artistic talent, and faith-driven community building. 

“It’s a night that’s about more than music,” Owens says. “It supports the new kinds of initiatives that surround our main area of creative and financial literacy development for young creatives. So when we thought about a way for us to spread the message about what we’re doing and have a lot of fun doing it, it was like, Let’s have a concert.”

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Owens gets excited when talking about his service organization, talking so passionately about creatives and ecosystems and community and synergy and scaling up and partnerships that it is sometimes hard to keep up. “We want to build a sustainable creative ecosystem for us to be able to learn how to diversify and utilize our services and our brand identities in a way that can still serve the community and generate revenue,” he explains. 

Owens now has six houses in his Ferguson neighborhood that support his organization’s professional, artistic, and economic development. And running Life Creative has become so all-consuming that Owens often places his own career as a musician and singer as a secondary priority. “It isn’t about me,” Owens says. “It isn’t about my career. It’s about the stuff that really matters. I serve, man! God has protected me from my own selfish ambition and positioned me to do so many of the things now that I wanted to do, and now I actually have the infrastructure and support to do it.” 

It’s been a long road for Owens to get from soul singer to civic builder. For years, he seemed poised for national stardom as one of the most talented young singers in the country. The Belleville native was a member of the elite Grammy Jazz Choir in Chicago; sang with Miss America on ABC’s Good Morning America; was part of an Air National Guard pop combo that went viral in 2011, leading to spots on The Ellen Degeneres Show and Entertainment Tonight; was one of four artists nationwide selected for a weeklong masterclass at Carnegie Hall; and he sang “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch of Game 1 of the 2011 World Series. 

After a couple of solo albums of soul originals, 2012’s Moods and Messages and 2014’s Preach, Owens went viral again in 2013, this time with his father, Thomas Owens, with their duet of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” to support the charity Kids Rock Cancer. A black-and-white video of the father-and-son performance exploded across the internet, surpassing 100 million views. 

Then Owens caught more fire in 2017 when he made a full album that transformed Johnny Cash classics into his own style. The album, Soul of Cash, was something of an epiphany for Owens as it helped him refine his own voice. “With Marvin, I wanted people to come to the show and hear Marvin,” he says. “But with Cash, I sang it like me.”

All along, despite the attention and success he was getting as a performer, Owens was working tirelessly behind the scenes on his service initiatives and on highlighting the works of others: building Life Creative; acting as Artist-in-Residence for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s IN UNISON program, which provides mentorship and college assistance to kids and young adults; and curating the concert series at the World Chess Hall of Fame as its musical director, a position he still holds today. 

Still, as much as Owens prefers to talk about service, the performer in him never stops, and he always has his own projects as a singer in the works. Duets with Dad, a full album recorded with his father featuring classics such as “Try a Little Tenderness, “Stand By Me,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” came out earlier this year, and a PBS special on the father-son team ran in July. 

Also look for Brian Owens Soul, an online series of music, talk, and documentary shows (Sunday Soul, Owens Family Soul), as well as the podcast The Inventory, featuring conversations with folks in the “creative ecosystem” of St. Louis. Plus, building on the Johnny Cash project, Owens was in Nashville recently recording some Kris Kristofferson covers, for an upcoming album (working title: Soul Kristofferson.) 

But things always tend to come back to Marvin Gaye. In fact, Owens is developing a new Marvin Gaye show to take on the road called The Soul of Marvin Experience. “All Marvin, all night,” Owens says. “Like Marvin as if he never left but also Marvin if he had stayed clean.” That alternative Marvin Gaye includes a revised history that imagines that Marvin had released the lost album You’re the Man in 1972 as the follow-up to What’s Going On as originally intended. You’re the Man was shelved after the title song underperformed as the lead single, but Owens sees You’re the Man—which finally saw an official release in 2019—as some of Gaye’s best material. 

“I’m going back and listening to this stuff, and I’m going, Man, this is where Marvin was headed?” Owens says. “The love songs were about romance and not just eroticism, and it’s full of messages of God and injustice. So I want to pick up there and then put all of the hits around that and bring people into a cinematic, immersive experience of Marvin.” 

In the meantime, St. Louis will get a big preview of Owens as Marvin on Saturday in a venue that Owens knows well. “You know, I kind of grew up in the Touhill as a student back in the day, so it’s always good to come back there,” he says. “The crew is great and the production staff is great, so it’s really cool for me to be able to bring this band that I tour with and do things with around the country to my hometown.”

Moreover, a Motown revue, Owens says, is the ideal musical vehicle to bring people together. “It’s the soundtrack of so many people’s lives,” he says. “[Motown] cuts across age, race, class, and culture. So it’s a perfect backdrop to the things that we are trying to do in the community.”