NOTE FROM PERRY BULWER - September 23, 2009
For any reader not yet aware of this, the Children of God cult in the article below is now called The Family International. For more information about this destructive religious group see this article on this site. Be sure to read the comments section of that article for more insights from survivors, including me.
************************************************************************************
Living Scotsman - September 20, 2009
The solace of Brigadoon's tartan fairyland made perfect sense to a boy growing up in the Children of God cult, Chris Owens of Girls tells Aidan Smith
MENTION Brigadoon and Scots will react in different ways, few of them positive. They will grumble about how it's made us appear too romantic, twee and kilted in the eyes of the world… that its depiction of a land which awakes once a century sums up our indecisiveness… that you need sunglasses to endure its garish plaids and glistening heather… that none of us is blessed with legs like Cyd Charisse. But for Chris Owens the Hollywood musical is a lifesaver.
************************************************************************************
Living Scotsman - September 20, 2009
The solace of Brigadoon's tartan fairyland made perfect sense to a boy growing up in the Children of God cult, Chris Owens of Girls tells Aidan Smith
MENTION Brigadoon and Scots will react in different ways, few of them positive. They will grumble about how it's made us appear too romantic, twee and kilted in the eyes of the world… that its depiction of a land which awakes once a century sums up our indecisiveness… that you need sunglasses to endure its garish plaids and glistening heather… that none of us is blessed with legs like Cyd Charisse. But for Chris Owens the Hollywood musical is a lifesaver.
Owens is one half of Girls, a pop duo who are very male, very Californian and very cool. His musical education, though, is unusual to say the least. He was born into the Children of God cult, which closed its doors on the outside world. "We had no radio, no TV, no books as you think of them – and definitely no records," he says. "All we were allowed was Movie Night every Friday: nice, wholesome films with a good message. Brigadoon was always my favourite. I must have seen it hundreds of times."
He starts singing The Heather On The Hill, performed in the 1954 movie by Gene Kelly: "Can't we two go walkin' together out beyond the valley of trees?/Out where there's a hillside of heather curtseying gently in the breeze." He laughs when I tell him that some Scots find the film couthie and a bit kitsch and offers to sing the whole musical.
"Young hotshot from the US thinks he's got it all. Visits the Highlands and meets a milk-carrying, bosom-laden young lady. She shows him what he's been missing all his life: true love. Isn't that what we're all looking for? Seriously, I hear what you're saying and I think I know Scotland isn't like in the film. But when I was ten I had to believe someplace was."
Owens is 30 now – a bit old to be a new sensation, but he's got a good excuse for having fallen so far behind – and speaks from beneath an explosion of curls you suspect he's been growing non-stop since the day he escaped the cult 14 years ago. With fellow Girl JR White he releases a debut album next week that is already attracting rave reviews. Life is good, so he's trying to find the positives in the Children of God experience.
"I mean, every teen goes through this, right? Whether it's military school or being prepped for a career you don't want, you live in a restricted fashion." Then he stops. "No, the cult was straight-up strange and scary."
Owens was brought up by his mother, his father having quit Children of God shortly after he was born, and she like other women in the communes was encouraged to take part in "flirty fishing". "Basically they were convinced it was okay to be hookers," he says. "No-one in the cult wanted to work in the traditional sense, so money was needed. We were told to believe the end of the world was coming so we had to live day to day. The women were persuaded it was cool to go with men because they were physically showing these guys the love of God.
"My mum had a lot of horrible experiences. Things were pretty messed up. I'd have to wait in hotel lobbies for her and sometimes there would be violent people and we'd have to run away." Children of God was formed in California in 1968 and its first converts were hippies. "It was extremely separatist," adds Owens. "It believed that everyone besides us was completely confused and bad. The aim was to raise a generation of kids that were not spoiled by the world."
River Phoenix and his brother Joaquin, and actress Rose McGowan, were all members of the cult before they became famous. Jeremy Spencer had been famous prior to joining, as part of the original Fleetwood Mac, and he gave Owens, who was moved between communes in more than a dozen different countries, his first guitar.
Although Owens is keen to sing me more songs from Brigadoon, it should be said that the musical's influence on San Francisco's Girls is not startlingly obvious. Mostly they sound like a punked-up (and pilled-up) Beach Boys. But there's a sweetness, and an old-fashionedness, to the tracks which can probably be traced back to his exposure to old show tunes at the expense of anything modern.
Owens says he enjoyed the singing in Children of God, even though this was confined to Christian songs and even though children's choirs were used to make money for the cult. But by 13 he'd started to rebel. "They showed us this other movie, Lean On Me, about a bad school which turns good. We were supposed to remember the ending but I just loved the stuff about smoking, riding motorcycles, wearing leather jackets and earrings and listening to the radio."
By that stage he was living in Slovenia, but walked out and made his way to Texas to live with his sister who'd escaped earlier. In Amarillo he fell in with a punk rock crowd and was taken under the wing of millionaire philanthropist and prankster Stanley Marsh 3, best known for the Cadillac Ranch public art exhibit. "He was my first father-figure. We liked the same music – him because he was old, me because I'd come from this weird place. If I've got an optimistic outlook on life now, it's down to him."
Owens' positivity is obvious. It extends to his reluctance, where possible, to criticise Children of God, though this may be because his story is deeply fascinating to everyone he meets and he's getting bored of repeating it. But then he talks of the friends from the cult who have committed suicide. "They've been dropping like flies," he says.
He had an older brother who died of pneumonia, and says he learned later it was the cult's belief the followers didn't need hospitals which precipitated his father's decision to walk out. "I know Dad now: he plays country music in Kentucky and the last time we saw each other he gave me a sitar and purple sunglasses. And I don't resent Mom for keeping us in Children of God. For the record, I love her. It was difficult for her; the cult was telling her what to do. But she left the year after I did and now she's happy doing refugee work."
All in all, a remarkable story. "Yeah," says Owens, "almost as remarkable as the story of the land that only wakes up once every hundred years and everyone's wearing kilts and dancing all day long. Now I can't wait to see Scotland for real."
Album is released on 28 September by Fantasy Trashcan records. Girls play Captain's Rest, Glasgow, on 13 October, and Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh, the following night.
This article was found at:
http://living.scotsman.com/music/The-solace-of-Brigadoon39s-tartan.5661062.jp
RELATED ARTICLES ON THIS BLOG
Posts
Christopher Owens on the Children of God and His ‘New Testament': “It’s My Own Take on Pop”
ReplyDeleteBy Shane Barnes, FlavorWire September 26, 2014
The video for Girls’ “Hellhole Ratrace” was released in June of 2009, throwing the band’s frontman, Christopher Owens, into the indie-rock spotlight. Owens was perhaps too willing to talk about everything in his early days, detailing his time spent in the Children of God cult, his since-kicked opiate habit, and his years spent with the late Amarillo art pioneer Stanley Marsh III. Girls had three excellent, critically acclaimed releases — two full-lengths, one EP — with influences that ranged far and wide: surf music, old-school country, King Crimson, Randy Newman, Felt, the Everly Brothers, and somehow others. And then, citing “heartbreak” from the band’s constant turnover of members, Owens called it quits in 2012.
But he didn’t stop making music. In 2013 he released Lysandre, an odd, under-appreciated ode to the ’70s that features recurring refrains and instrumentation that brought to mind Donovan rather than the shoegaze fuzz of his early Girls work. Now, with his latest release, A New Testament, Owens has put on his boots and his ten-gallon hat to produce one of the year’s best country and gospel albums, and it’s from a guy who, in his own words, can’t make a country album. Flavorwire spoke to Owens as he was prepping for his current ongoing tour in support of the new album, out September 30 via Turnstile.
Flavorwire: Did you set out to do anything particular with A New Testament, or did it just kind of veer toward the gospel and country side of things?
Christopher Owens: Definitely. The idea was to make an album that explored the influence country music had had on me. I love country music — classic, traditional country music — and it’s something I’ve liked for a long, long time. And it’s something I felt was already in my songs already, it wasn’t too far of a stretch. If I just changed a couple of instruments, I can kind of sound like that. I wanted to show the things I love while giving a modern take, you know?
Yeah, even with Girls, the country was always underneath everything else.
I’m glad you said that, because I’ve had a lot of people calling me up and telling me it took them by surprise. And I thought, we’ve always done it. We just didn’t do it so explicitly. This is just the first time that I’ve decided, “OK, this is what we’re going to do.” And with the Girls stuff, the first album had to be what it was.
And the second one, the EP, Broken Dreams Club, was songs that we had been playing live but hadn’t recorded, so we didn’t know exactly what we were trying to do with them, sonically.
And then, for a band’s second full album — or third record, whatever you want to call it — it’s time for them to make a big statement. So we went big on there. So, for Girls, there wasn’t really time to do a country record. It would’ve been too soon to do it as a second album.
continued below
I feel like now I can kind of get away with.
ReplyDeleteSomething about this album — the country influence is there, plus the soul stuff, but it’s definitely a pop album. If this were 30 or 40 years ago, it would be all over the radio.
Yeah. It’s like when the Beatles covered that Buck Owens song, you know? It’s not country, but it’s got that influence. They weren’t even intending to make a country song. They can’t. And in that same way, I can’t. It’s my own take on pop. I really believe that pop is just country, R&B, and Broadway hits all mashed up and made very short and accessible for everybody.
You listened to that kind of stuff in the Children of God, right? Did that have a direct influence on the sound of this album?
Well, the country influence you’re hearing on this record — the actual stuff you hear — is all stuff I’ve gotten into later in life. To be honest, the stuff I listened to in the Children of God — when I heard the Everly Brothers and stuff — it was really only about once a month, or once every six months. Typically we didn’t get much of that music at all. We only had our own music, which was very religious music that the adults wrote.
But every once in a while they’d have a dance night where they would put on a group of cassettes called “My Old Favorites,” which was our leader’s. And it was a bunch of oldies. And I mean from before 1950 in most cases. Those were deemed OK to listen to on special occasions. And those oldies were very close to country.
Do you remember any of the songs on there?
Oh, gosh. Stuff like “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” or “Love Me Tender,” a couple mop-top Beatles stuff — definitely not the psychedelic Beatles stuff. Patsy Cline. It couldn’t be too negative. It had to be just right. I’ll always remember those songs from “My Old Favorites,” and I think they did give me a taste for the oldies sound. A very simple sort of a pop song, which I still have a strong place for.
You tweeted that Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” is a “touchstone of perfection.” Do you ever worry about proclaiming your love for pop music in such a public way?
That song to me is just a classic. I don’t think American Idol has really produced another knockout like that. It was just a really special thing. And I was feeling a little nostalgic.
continued below
On the last album you said that if Beyoncé or another huge pop singer had covered “Love Like a River,” it would’ve been a huge hit. Do you feel that way about any of the songs on A New Testament?
ReplyDeleteI feel like “Oh My Love” should be a classic. To me it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written. Somebody should cover that in a couple years and let it be on Top 40 radio, and I would be over the moon.
I feel really strongly about a lot of our songs. They have a kind of classic quality that I feel like, if they could just enter the sort of general public’s subconscious, it would be part of pop culture — whatever that means, if it were in a movie or if somebody covered it — I think that would happen. They could be hits. Back in the day there would be one radio station or one Ed Sullivan show, and you could play a great song like that and the world would start to sing it. Now, it seems kind of impossible. I would need a little help with that, I think.
I heard in an interview recently that Randy Newman is one of your lyrical heroes. When did you first get into him?
Well, like a lot of people my first real exposure to Randy Newman was I think in that movie Antz—
Toy Story!
Oh, sorry! Toy Story, that song (singing), “You got a friend in me, you got a friend in me,” and I came away sort of unimpressed. But in 2007, when I really started to write lyrics for my own songs, I heard “I Just Want You To Hurt Like I Do,” and I thought, “This guy is just a fucking genius.” And he helped me realize that when you’re writing a song it doesn’t have to be “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It can be like, “I think it’s gonna rain today,” over and over. It’s just the right balance of being a smart-ass and also being very genuine.
He sort of opened a door for me, and made me feel like I could do it. You know, that song I wrote, “Jamie Marie,” on the last Girls record was a direct sort of homage to Randy Newman.
What was your inspiration was for the aesthetic of all the promo materials for this album. It’s a very, uh, distinct look — I don’t even know how to nail it down.
I don’t work with a stylist or anything like that. I just kind of have a photographer come in and I know exactly what I want. I tell them what to do, I trust myself. I kind of just wanted everything to be warm and have a certain romantic aspect to it. I try to have more specific visions for these albums.
A lot of people will go through their whole career and do the same thing. You know, James Taylor has been James Taylor for 25 years. I guess that says something about me, I do little looks. I wore a suit for the last album, now I’ve got cowboy hats and boots. There is a side of me that it’s certainly a playful guy. And why not have a good time while you have this opportunity?
Right. Not everybody gets to come out with an album people pay attention to.
Exactly. And, as they say, we only live once.
to see the links and videos embedded in this article go to:
http://flavorwire.com/479405/christopher-owens-on-the-children-of-god-and-his-new-testament-its-my-own-take-on-pop
‘I had a walloping left hook I didn’t see coming’: ex-Girls singer Christopher Owens on his journey back from rock bottom
ReplyDeleteIn seven years, the cult singer-songwriter suffered a motorbike crash, homelessness, the death of his bandmate and the end of a relationship. He talks about survival, redemption and his cathartic new album
by Tim Jonze, The Guardian August 14, 2024
In 2017 Christopher Owens was at a crossroads. After a decade spent making records and touring them – initially with cult indie band Girls, then as a solo artist – he suddenly found himself without plans. His fiancee and partner of seven years suggested they could start a family. Owens was starting to like the idea of being “the best stay at home dad” when he got on his 1982 Honda MB5 motorbike.
The crash wasn’t his fault. The SUV that pulled out was making an illegal turn. Owens heard screaming, saw blue skies and wondered what was going on. Slowly he realised he’d been knocked down – the screaming was coming from the woman who’d hit him. Although in pain, his immediate instinct was to hug her and tell her he was fine. Owens staggered home to recuperate.
“I denied the ambulance on the scene,” he says today, reliving the moment from his home in New York City. “I must have had so much adrenaline because the next day I woke up and it felt so much worse. My legs were black and blue and I think I’d broken a bone in my foot. I should have gone to hospital but the truth is I was terrified of the money I might have to pay. I didn’t know what the bill would be like.” Such is the precarity of life in the US for the countless musicians without health insurance.
What Owens, 45, didn’t know was this was just the start of his nightmare. While he was bedbound, his fiancee ended their relationship. Unable to walk – it was a week before he could get up again, and a month before he was moving around properly – he also lost his job at a local coffee store. Renting became impossible. Owens attached a camper to his car and began living a nomadic life. Then the pandemic hit. While he was on the road, somebody stole his camper – taking his cat and his best guitar with it. Heartbroken and homeless, Owens was at rock bottom.
“When you start on the downward spiral, everybody is just like, ‘Stay away from him, because something’s going wrong with that guy,’” he says. “But I guess life’s just like that, you know?”
Yeah, I say, but your life seems especially like that.
“I know,” he smiles. “What’s up with that?”
A quick recap for those unaware of the Christopher Owens backstory: he was raised in the abusive cult Children of God, escaped at 16 to the punk scene in Amarillo, Texas, and – after having his life turned around by a businessman, artist and prankster called Stanley Marsh 3 – found redemption in music. He moved to San Francisco and formed Girls with Chet “JR” White, the pair bonding over 60s surf melodies, fuzzy art-rock production and a love of prescription narcotics. When I met them, back in 2009, it didn’t take me long to realise they stood out from the pack of polite, public school bands doing the rounds at the time, not just because JR asked the waiter if he had any methadone but also because their debut album – called simply Album – was a carefree, scuzzy homage to everyone from the Beach Boys to Spiritualized.
continued below
Girls released another critically acclaimed album – 2011’s Father, Son, Holy Ghost – before they split, then Owens went on to release a series of unique solo albums including 2013’s Lysandre, a wonderfully innocent account of his bohemian touring life, all threaded through with a medieval motif. While each of Owens’ projects are radically different, there is something in his fragile vocals that fans connect with deeply: a belief that love is out there and has the power to heal your pain. “I’ve always believed that the most real songs are like prayers, and the most real prayers are like songs.”
ReplyDeleteAnd so, at his lowest moment, when he most needed his prayers answering, Owens turned to his guitar. A plan was formed for another Girls record – Owens and White had stayed in touch in the years after the band’s demise. But when it came to recording the demos, Owens realised something wasn’t right.
“It was the first time I’d seen him not be able to stay awake for a session,” he says. “Not even to be able to hit record.”
Owens was relieved to hear that White had returned to his parents’ place to get better: “I thought that was the best place he could go.” But in October 2020, he heard the terrible news that White had died at the age of 40. “It was really, really hard,” he says. “I honestly thought it was just a bad time and that, you know, maybe we’d try again in six months or something like that.” He pauses for a second. “I think all of us feel it’s something we wish we could put back together.”
Several of the songs intended for that Girls record have ended up on Owens’ first solo album in almost a decade, I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair. It may just be the finest thing he’s ever recorded, his fragile voice and trademark lovelorn melodies now backed with a more mature and reflective sound as he attempts to traipse through the wreckage of the past seven years. You wonder, on opener No Good, if Owens has lost his belief in music’s redemptive power: “No, not another love song,” he sings. “Not one more song where I’m pretending everything will be OK.”
“It’s a moment of doubt,” he admits. “Like, OK, I’ve sung about the power of love forever. I believed in love forever. And here I am humiliated. I was just sort of owning it.”
But by the end of the record, optimism has bloomed on the beautiful Distant Drummer (“I’ll be all right, as long as I follow my guiding star”) and Do You Need a Friend (“I can see the weight you carry on your back / I’d like to put it down and watch it drown”). The latter song is notable for an old Owens trick of inserting a snippet of another classic song into his own – in this case Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love.
“You spotted that?” he says. “A lot of people don’t catch it - they’re too young!”
He remembers his first ever girlfriend playing it to him. “And I would think, yeah, but that’s never going to happen to us, though.” He laughs. “It was just a short way of summarising what I’d been through.”
Perhaps the most surprising thing on the album, given Owens’ past rejection of a religious cult, is its lead single, I Think About Heaven. It contains a line taken from Psalm 42, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks”, and sees Owens reframing all his troubles as essentially meaningless in the grand schemes of the afterlife. Owens has drawn on religious texts before, but now seems to be embracing Christianity more earnestly. The accompanying press release even has him relating his personal story to the Book of Job.
continued below
“I’m still not a denominational believer,” he says. “But during the pandemic I had a lot of time to review stuff that I’d read in the past. When you’re a kid and you’re raised in that environment [the Children of God], you think: ‘Do I believe this? Or is it a bunch of bullshit?’ And then later you think maybe it’s not so black and white. Maybe there’s something that I do believe. Or maybe I believe that it’s not real per se, but it’s important for one’s life. And now that I’ve had a walloping left hook that I didn’t see coming, how do I feel about it all now? I do treasure my upbringing in the Bible. It’s maybe the most valuable thing I have.”
ReplyDeleteIt has been a steep learning curve for Owens. When he first got out of the cult he was “obsessed with rebellion … I had to try all the things I was told not to do. After a while you realise there are some things you actually shouldn’t do, and maybe I didn’t know everything”.
These days, Owens says he looks at many things through more mature eyes. He seems to hold no bitterness about the motorbike crash, even if “it’s changed how my toenails grow, stuff like that”. As for his old relationship, he eventually talked it through with his former fiancee and they’re friends again. “I thought, what are we doing if we spend all these years with people and then walk away? I’ve done that a few times in my life and it makes no sense. Like, maybe if that person is not good for you it makes sense, but we were best friends. She’s a great person. We were good for each other in many ways – but she wasn’t the right person for me to spend my life with. There are other kinds of love. There are memories that you can share for longer periods of time. And that kind of thing is very appealing to me, because I don’t have anybody who shares memories with me very far back, you know?”
Before we end our interview, I ask about I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair’s intriguing title – where did Owens come up with that?
He laughs. “I’ve had that line in my back pocket for a long time,” he says. “It’s from watching It’s a Wonderful Life as a child. Jimmy Stewart was running around outside and I remember him shouting to this woman: “I wanna run barefoot through your hair!” Then I rewatched it as an adult and it turns out he didn’t say that at all! So I thought, ‘Oh well, that’s my line then.’ It was the right time to use it now because I am definitely in that head space again, on cloud nine, feeling like I could fly from getting married.”
Married? Oh, congratulations, I say.
“Yeah, I went back to Los Angeles in October to play a show … we met there and got married three days later.”
Three days?! How did he know it was the right decision?
“I thought of the Jackson 5 song I’ll Be There and its opening line: “You and I must make a pact, we must bring salvation back.” You acknowledge that it’s not always going to be as exciting as it is right now, but you make a pact and you go for it. I believe that those old couples you see walking around that people are jealous of, I think that in those moments when maybe one of them wants to leave, they just decide to stay, and the feeling passes eventually and they get somewhere deeper.”
Having weathered the last seven years, no one deserves that stability more than Owens.
I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair will be released in October
to see the links and videos embedded in this article go to:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/aug/14/i-had-a-walloping-left-hook-i-didnt-see-coming-ex-girls-singer-christopher-owens-on-his-journey-back-from-rock-bottom
“‘I had a walloping left hook I didn’t see coming’: ex-Girls singer Christopher Owens on his journey back from rock bottom”
ReplyDeleteby Tim Jonze, The Guardian August 14, 2024
In 2017 Christopher Owens was at a crossroads. After a decade spent making records and touring them – initially with cult indie band Girls, then as a solo artist – he suddenly found himself without plans. His fiancee and partner of seven years suggested they could start a family. Owens was starting to like the idea of being “the best stay at home dad” when he got on his 1982 Honda MB5 motorbike.
The crash wasn’t his fault. The SUV that pulled out was making an illegal turn. Owens heard screaming, saw blue skies and wondered what was going on. Slowly he realised he’d been knocked down – the screaming was coming from the woman who’d hit him. Although in pain, his immediate instinct was to hug her and tell her he was fine. Owens staggered home to recuperate.
“I denied the ambulance on the scene,” he says today, reliving the moment from his home in New York City. “I must have had so much adrenaline because the next day I woke up and it felt so much worse. My legs were black and blue and I think I’d broken a bone in my foot. I should have gone to hospital but the truth is I was terrified of the money I might have to pay. I didn’t know what the bill would be like.” Such is the precarity of life in the US for the countless musicians without health insurance.
What Owens, 45, didn’t know was this was just the start of his nightmare. While he was bedbound, his fiancee ended their relationship. Unable to walk – it was a week before he could get up again, and a month before he was moving around properly – he also lost his job at a local coffee store. Renting became impossible. Owens attached a camper to his car and began living a nomadic life. Then the pandemic hit. While he was on the road, somebody stole his camper – taking his cat and his best guitar with it. Heartbroken and homeless, Owens was at rock bottom.
“When you start on the downward spiral, everybody is just like, ‘Stay away from him, because something’s going wrong with that guy,’” he says. “But I guess life’s just like that, you know?”
Yeah, I say, but your life seems especially like that.
“I know,” he smiles. “What’s up with that?”
A quick recap for those unaware of the Christopher Owens backstory: he was raised in the abusive cult Children of God, escaped at 16 to the punk scene in Amarillo, Texas, and – after having his life turned around by a businessman, artist and prankster called Stanley Marsh 3 – found redemption in music. He moved to San Francisco and formed Girls with Chet “JR” White, the pair bonding over 60s surf melodies, fuzzy art-rock production and a love of prescription narcotics. When I met them, back in 2009, it didn’t take me long to realise they stood out from the pack of polite, public school bands doing the rounds at the time, not just because JR asked the waiter if he had any methadone but also because their debut album – called simply Album – was a carefree, scuzzy homage to everyone from the Beach Boys to Spiritualized.
continued below
Girls released another critically acclaimed album – 2011’s Father, Son, Holy Ghost – before they split, then Owens went on to release a series of unique solo albums including 2013’s Lysandre, a wonderfully innocent account of his bohemian touring life, all threaded through with a medieval motif. While each of Owens’ projects are radically different, there is something in his fragile vocals that fans connect with deeply: a belief that love is out there and has the power to heal your pain. “I’ve always believed that the most real songs are like prayers, and the most real prayers are like songs.”
ReplyDeleteAnd so, at his lowest moment, when he most needed his prayers answering, Owens turned to his guitar. A plan was formed for another Girls record – Owens and White had stayed in touch in the years after the band’s demise. But when it came to recording the demos, Owens realised something wasn’t right.
“It was the first time I’d seen him not be able to stay awake for a session,” he says. “Not even to be able to hit record.”
Owens was relieved to hear that White had returned to his parents’ place to get better: “I thought that was the best place he could go.” But in October 2020, he heard the terrible news that White had died at the age of 40. “It was really, really hard,” he says. “I honestly thought it was just a bad time and that, you know, maybe we’d try again in six months or something like that.” He pauses for a second. “I think all of us feel it’s something we wish we could put back together.”
Several of the songs intended for that Girls record have ended up on Owens’ first solo album in almost a decade, I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair. It may just be the finest thing he’s ever recorded, his fragile voice and trademark lovelorn melodies now backed with a more mature and reflective sound as he attempts to traipse through the wreckage of the past seven years. You wonder, on opener No Good, if Owens has lost his belief in music’s redemptive power: “No, not another love song,” he sings. “Not one more song where I’m pretending everything will be OK.”
“It’s a moment of doubt,” he admits. “Like, OK, I’ve sung about the power of love forever. I believed in love forever. And here I am humiliated. I was just sort of owning it.”
But by the end of the record, optimism has bloomed on the beautiful Distant Drummer (“I’ll be all right, as long as I follow my guiding star”) and Do You Need a Friend (“I can see the weight you carry on your back / I’d like to put it down and watch it drown”). The latter song is notable for an old Owens trick of inserting a snippet of another classic song into his own – in this case Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love.
“You spotted that?” he says. “A lot of people don’t catch it - they’re too young!”
He remembers his first ever girlfriend playing it to him. “And I would think, yeah, but that’s never going to happen to us, though.” He laughs. “It was just a short way of summarising what I’d been through.”
Perhaps the most surprising thing on the album, given Owens’ past rejection of a religious cult, is its lead single, I Think About Heaven. It contains a line taken from Psalm 42, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks”, and sees Owens reframing all his troubles as essentially meaningless in the grand schemes of the afterlife. Owens has drawn on religious texts before, but now seems to be embracing Christianity more earnestly. The accompanying press release even has him relating his personal story to the Book of Job.
continued below
“I’m still not a denominational believer,” he says. “But during the pandemic I had a lot of time to review stuff that I’d read in the past. When you’re a kid and you’re raised in that environment [the Children of God], you think: ‘Do I believe this? Or is it a bunch of bullshit?’ And then later you think maybe it’s not so black and white. Maybe there’s something that I do believe. Or maybe I believe that it’s not real per se, but it’s important for one’s life. And now that I’ve had a walloping left hook that I didn’t see coming, how do I feel about it all now? I do treasure my upbringing in the Bible. It’s maybe the most valuable thing I have.”
ReplyDeleteIt has been a steep learning curve for Owens. When he first got out of the cult he was “obsessed with rebellion … I had to try all the things I was told not to do. After a while you realise there are some things you actually shouldn’t do, and maybe I didn’t know everything”.
These days, Owens says he looks at many things through more mature eyes. He seems to hold no bitterness about the motorbike crash, even if “it’s changed how my toenails grow, stuff like that”. As for his old relationship, he eventually talked it through with his former fiancee and they’re friends again. “I thought, what are we doing if we spend all these years with people and then walk away? I’ve done that a few times in my life and it makes no sense. Like, maybe if that person is not good for you it makes sense, but we were best friends. She’s a great person. We were good for each other in many ways – but she wasn’t the right person for me to spend my life with. There are other kinds of love. There are memories that you can share for longer periods of time. And that kind of thing is very appealing to me, because I don’t have anybody who shares memories with me very far back, you know?”
Before we end our interview, I ask about I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair’s intriguing title – where did Owens come up with that?
He laughs. “I’ve had that line in my back pocket for a long time,” he says. “It’s from watching It’s a Wonderful Life as a child. Jimmy Stewart was running around outside and I remember him shouting to this woman: “I wanna run barefoot through your hair!” Then I rewatched it as an adult and it turns out he didn’t say that at all! So I thought, ‘Oh well, that’s my line then.’ It was the right time to use it now because I am definitely in that head space again, on cloud nine, feeling like I could fly from getting married.”
Married? Oh, congratulations, I say.
“Yeah, I went back to Los Angeles in October to play a show … we met there and got married three days later.”
Three days?! How did he know it was the right decision?
“I thought of the Jackson 5 song I’ll Be There and its opening line: “You and I must make a pact, we must bring salvation back.” You acknowledge that it’s not always going to be as exciting as it is right now, but you make a pact and you go for it. I believe that those old couples you see walking around that people are jealous of, I think that in those moments when maybe one of them wants to leave, they just decide to stay, and the feeling passes eventually and they get somewhere deeper.”
Having weathered the last seven years, no one deserves that stability more than Owens.
I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair will be released in October
to see the links and photos embedded in this article go to:
www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/aug/14/i-had-a-walloping-left-hook-i-didnt-see-coming-ex-girls-singer-christopher-owens-on-his-journey-back-from-rock-bottom