“He’s going to make another record soon, almost certainly,” Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene wrote of Christopher Owens while reviewing 2015’s Chrissybaby Forever. He didn’t. In 2017, the former Girls frontman’s motorcycle collided with an SUV, leaving him bedridden and unable to afford medical care. A string of losses followed that would be unendurable for most people: his fiancée, his job, his apartment, his cat, his favorite guitar. At rock bottom, he reached out to his former Girls partner Chet “JR” White for a reunion, but White was barely responsive at the sessions and died not long afterward at age 40.
Owens seems to be faring better now, married to a new partner, but his new album, I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair, is a travelogue of his journey through hell. It’s Owens’ most careful and deliberate solo album, and the tempo rarely exceeds a crawl. While Chrissybaby crammed 16 songs into just under an hour, Barefoot has 10 songs in about the same time. This makes sense: Chrissybaby was recorded almost entirely by Owens, an approach less conducive to sprawl than jamming with a band. Owens has a fine one here, led by the oozy lead guitar work of Derek Barber (of Perhapsy and Owens’ erstwhile band Curls), and he allows himself the gospel-tinged crescendos and classic ’70s album-rock majesty he hasn’t approached since Girls’ swan song Father, Son, Holy Ghost.
The physical toll Owens’ ordeal took on him is audible in his voice, which is deeper and raspier than before. Owens’ singing has traditionally been flecked with little rockabilly hiccups and vocal-fry fractures, but here every note is articulated and sung with such purpose it’s as if he’s pulled each one individually from his throat. His attention to phrasing on ballads like “Distant Drummer” and the devastating gospel song “I Think About Heaven” makes it easy to imagine him singing a jazz standard like “My Funny Valentine.” At times his voice slides from one note to another a bit too easily, indicating that some doctoring may have been necessary for Owens to sing the pop melodies rattling in his head.
The lyrics are short on specifics, but Owens has always written as if he were snipping tried-and-true lines from the annals of pop history and gluing them together. It says as much about Owens’ clarity of vision as his circumstances that “Things don’t seem so bad/Things don’t seem so sad” lands like a burst of redemptive divine light. With such a direct unburdening of pain, this blunt and unpoetic writing style is an advantage. In a pop songwriting zeitgeist where empathy and sincerity are the operative words, it’s rare to hear a song as vindictive as “No Good,” which kicks off the album on a savage tirade against his former fiancée. “Fuck off, stay gone/Look what you’ve done,” he cries. The refusal to empathize with what his ex might be feeling is kind of impressive; it’s a breakup song in its purest form.
Barefoot’s flaws, though, owe more to circumstance than any indication that Owens’ songwriting spark has dimmed. The vocal processing sometimes coexists uneasily with the rugged quality his voice has developed. Chrissybaby Forever and his second album, the come-to-Jesus country-gospel jamboree A New Testament, explode with an energy and playfulness altogether missing on Barefoot—though nobody would seriously expect a man who ends the record by singing “I’m barely making it through the days” eight times to pen skippy pop songs. This is a slow, steady album; if you thought MJ Lenderman was uncompromising in his lolling tempos, this album might make you feel like time is flowing backward after a few tracks.
What’s most promising for Owens’ music at this juncture in his career is the newfound stability he seems to be enjoying. Making it as a musician full-time is impossible for most artists, especially in rock, a genre that’s expensive to record and tour behind, and especially in San Francisco, where rising rents in the 2010s led to a mass exodus of the fertile scene that produced Girls and other acts like Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, and the Fresh & Onlys. Owens has settled in the marginally less expensive climes of New York, and an exciting second act seems to be shaping up. He’s going to make another record soon, almost certainly.
