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.
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.”
And 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.”
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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.
“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.”
It 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.