Liner Notes: Girls, 'Album'

| Print Post This | Like (1) | Comments (0)

CHRISTOPHER OWENS IS PERHAPS the least likely pop star of 2009.

He arrives with an oft-repeated and truly harrowing back story in which he is born and raised in a cult and risks his life to escape. More crucial, however, is the enthusiasm with which he threw himself into songwriting, a trade he picked up following a bad break-up in a city that seemed to turn on him.

The fruits of Owens' first burst of inspiration resulted in the formation of the band Girls with friend and producer Chet "JR" White and their debut album, simply titled "Album." Released in September, it has been widely and intensely praised for combining a range of influences — Elvises Presley and Costello, Buddy Holly, early not late Beach Boys, Spiritualized, My Bloody Valentine — into a cohesive work that sounds somehow original and completely unique. Owens took Express on a roundabout tour through "Album," filling the details about the songs — real-life subjects and his own infatuation with songwriting.

"Lust for Life"
» EXPRESS: Is the title a reference to the Iggy Pop song?
» OWENS: It's not, actually. The only reference is that after I'd written the song, I was thinking about what the song is about. I don't know how those words stuck in my head, but it just seemed like the perfect title, and I didn't really care that it was someone else's song. It's like this is my version of "Lust for Life."

"Laura"/"Lauren Marie"
» EXPRESS: In the liner notes, each song has a corresponding photo of a woman. How closely are they tied to the individual songs?
» OWENS: Most of them are very closely tied together. Some of them are not. For example, the song "Laura," the picture with it is Laura. For "Lust for Life" there's a line that goes, "Come on come on come on, Kayla," and there's a picture of Kayla for that song. Most of them are in a literal sense songs about those girls, but not all of them. Some of them I had this theme going, so I'd think about the kind of friend the person was and which song would suit them well.

» EXPRESS: Have Laura and Lauren Marie heard these songs? What were their reactions?
» OWENS: Oh yeah. I see each of these people on a day-to-day basis. They love it. I think they like being part of some kind of creative work. I spent four years living here, being the guy who everybody thought, "What does he do?"

I worked at a hotel during the day, and at night I was at every party. I liked to stay up. I knew everybody, and they were these creative people who had ambition. Everybody knew I worked a day job, and I didn't fit into this creative group of people. But for some reason I was best friends with everybody. And I feel like after about four years, I just exploded. I discovered the idea of songwriting, and I literally went around telling everybody I write songs now. I would literally pull out out an acoustic guitar and play them songs. I felt really fulfilled, that I was finally going to do something and show people that even though I was a member of the working class, I could still contribute art. And I think they were excited when I would say, hey I wrote a song about you. People here are happy when someone's doing well, so we all encourage each other and we all try to help each other with our endeavors.

Everybody's been really great about their songs. I've never met anyone who's unhappy about being in a song. Maybe later if I become really toxic and I start writing negative songs about people, then I'll be scared. [laughs] But at this point it's sort of reaching out to people to have a good time. And I don't think anybody would not want to be a part of that.

"Ghost Mouth"
» EXPRESS: There is some striking imagery in this song. What's the story behind it?
» OWENS: It's one of my favorites. I moved to San Francisco from Amarillo, Texas. I didn't know even one person. I just thought I had lived in Amarillo for too long, and I knew I wanted to live in a big city. I'd been to New York and Los Angeles and knew that I didn't like them enough to move there. So I came to San Francisco just to see if I would like it, and right away knew I was going to stay here.

One day I was having a walk in the park, and this really eccentric, wild California blonde screamed at me from across the park. It was terrifying. She was telling me to come over and hang out with her. I thought, this is crazy. Everybody was looking at me, but I knew I had to go over there. We went to a party that night, and we became friends and within a couple of months we were living together. She was a really outgoing, eccentric person and knew everybody in the music scene. So when I became her boyfriend, I was in with the in crowd. Suddenly, I knew everybody that I would ever want to meet, and they all treated me well because I was her boyfriend.

Two years later, when she broke up with me, this funny thing happened where most people sort of ignored me because I wasn't going out with her anymore. There were a handful of guys that I had a close bond with who remained my friends, and they're still my friends, but aside from them, people in general were giving me the cold shoulder. I was a bit mysterious, too. People didn't really know me, and they thought I was weird, but because I was going out with her, it was like, oh yeah, he's great. But as soon as she broke up with me, I was shunned.

And "Ghost Mouth" is about that exact thing. It's about the break-up. It's about feeling invisible in a city that you're very familiar with, where you know everybody, but all of a sudden, you feel like you don't matter at all and nobody really knows you. It happened so fast that it was such a shocking feeling, and I could feel it so strongly that it was easy to write about. Anyway, I didn't want to just accept that. I took it as a personal challenge to try to take on everybody in town, and now they're all my best friends again. No one will ever admit that they didn't like me. They'd all tell you that they've been my best friend for five years.

"Summertime"
» EXPRESS: There seems to be a lot of the city on this album — not just people but places and atmosphere, especially in a song like "Summertime."
» OWENS: It's again the same feeling of being dropped from this routine where I was living with my girlfriend and having a lot of free time and I would either sit in my room and whine about it and not talk to anybody and be depressed, or I could get up go out have a good time, enjoy nature, enjoy friends— and not accept things lying down. The opening line is "Get out of my grave, dust off my name, get out a good pair of shoes." Which says it all. I was so depressed that I was in my room, which was basically becoming my grave, and people were talking a lot of shit on me, because I'd just been dumped, so I had to dust off my name and get out a good pair of shoes. It's silly, but it's like, basically at some point all of us are going to have a low point, and you can take it lying down or you can get up and do something about it. I guess the summer and the nature are there because of my surroundings. I felt like that was the vibe when I would go out.

"Hellhole Racetrack"
» EXPRESS: "Hellhole Racetrack" seems very similar, almost like you're deciding in that song that you're not going to be depressed. Like it's an active decision.
» OWENS: Exactly. It's like "Lust for Life." These were all the first songs I wrote, and they were all written within a month of each other, so all the feelings are very tied in together. It's very cohesive statement being made in each song. I was very down, but not out when I wrote all these songs. I've always had a lot of self-respect, bit I really was at a low point, and I felt like total shit, but I knew inside myself, but I knew I wasn't supposed to be a loser. I'd never written songs before, but I had these strong feelings. I wanted to become a songwriter to talk about these feelings, so they all tie in. They're songs about girls I maybe would want to start dating because I was newly single, like Lauren Marie. Or songs about friends or songs about the past relationship. I was lucky in a way to only have those twelve songs written to put on the album because they're like little puzzle pieces that make one greater album.

» EXPRESS: "Album" seems very cohesive and well sequenced in that regard.
» OWENS: It's a real album. I feel like albums are something that is dying because generally people buy a song or two or download a song for a ringtone. That's what music is becoming, this disposable one-track thing that you can download from space. I think that's fine. I love the idea of a pop hit, a summer smash. But I also love the idea of the album, listening to an album all the way through and having there be a point to it. I didn't do it on purpose, but in some accidental way I made an album.

"Morning Light" / "Big Bad Mean Motherfucker"
» EXPRESS: There seem to be a few songs, like "Morning Light" and "Big Bad Mean Motherfucker," that sound a bit more lo-fi and rough around the edges.
» OWENS: My best friend was the guy who produced the album. He's an audio engineer named Chet "JR" White. We were roommates and he heard me next door singing my songs and stuff. I was making these really bad recordings on a four-track tape recorder. He said, "Look man, I'm an audio engineer. I went to college for this. I can help you." I was like, "Oh great. I thought you were just a cook."

Then we started to work together. I was just writing these songs on the acoustic guitar, so I would start playing the chords and say, I want the vocals to be really low, like when the girl sings on My Bloody Valentine, and I want the guitars to be sounding like this or that. I had the luxury of just telling him what I was going for, and he knew how to make all those sounds. My idea of using a distortion pedal was to turn the gain all the way up and just step on it and hear it blow my eardrums out, but he knew how to get different tones out of it. He knows practically everything about recording music.

On "Morning Light," I literally said to him, "I want this to sound like MBV." And I'm not embarrassed to say that. For me, making music is copying music that you love and then letting your individuality come out. Maybe because the album jumps around so much, the references are so strong that it helps give it this bigger statement.

"God Damned"
» EXPRESS: By comparison, "God Damned" sounds very stripped down.
» OWENS: That was the one song where we said, "Let's not put anything on this." I played the bongos, acoustic guitar, a little egg shaker, and this thing called a vibraslap. That was all of the instruments. Before setting out to record the album, we talked about not making an album that has just one sound. I think it's cool when someone has a sound; the Ramones sound the same on every song. But maybe just because of the day and age we live in, we're lucky to have decades of great rock and roll music.

I love shoegaze and that's what I play, but I also love Elvis Presley. And I also love Britney Spears. I think because of the internet, people our age generally like dozens of styles of music, from rap to classical. So we just said, let's take each song exactly where that song should go production-wise, and not be a band that has one sound. That was something that made it really fun to make the album, because from one day to the next we'd be a totally different band.

"Darling"
» EXPRESS: Why did you put this song as the closer?
» OWENS: I wrote the song on my 27th birthday when I was visiting my mom's house in Texas. I went there and I was like, "Mom I'm a songwriter now." And I showed her a lot of songs. It was closure for me. I came out of a negative period in my life, and I found this thing — writing songs — that gave me a whole lot of happiness, and somehow just being at my mom's and being separated from my life, so to speak, I was reflecting. And I just wrote a song about how happy I felt about discovering this tradition of songwriting and becoming part of it.

It's like a lot of people think the title "Darling" would be about a lover or something, but it's a song maybe not even about writing songs, but about finding something that brings you happiness and how that becomes the most important thing in your life.

The album complains about being lonely because my girlfriend broke up with me, but then in the end it sort of acknowledges that none of that matters because I've found some sort of purpose. So I had two requirements: that "Lust for Life" would be the first song and that "Darling" would be the last song. I think "Lust" opens up as a letter of intent, and "Darling" closes it out nicely with an ode to the whole idea of making that album.

And the reason it's called "Darling," my ex-girlfriend was a songwriter, and she had a song called "Darling" that she and I used to sing together. So I wrote my version, which is not about — it's sort of saying this is my new girlfriend.

» Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW; with Real Estate; Tues., Nov. 3, 8 p.m., $12; 202-667-4490. (U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express Contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy Beggars