We just caught up with Christopher Owens, frontman of the hypetastic-but-fantastic Girls, as he slogged his way through the greater PA interstate system for a discussion on the band’s past, present and future—and a former band with a pretty outstanding name.
Phrequency: Before we start: how are you?
Christopher Owens: We’re good. We’re playing good shows, sold out shows so far on the whole tour. The music’s going great. The people that have been at the shows have been enjoying themselves and have been pretty supportive. We’ve been pretty happy with touring, you know?
P: How much of the tour is left?
CO: There’s another two weeks, maybe even more. We just came back from a European tour that was five weeks long, so that was very long. We were home for about five days, and we pretty much had to spend all our free time doing things that needed to be done—our guitar player quit on the last tour, so we had to replace him and start from scratch with a new guitar player.
P: How’s that transition been working out?
CO: Really well. The guy had about three days to learn all the songs, and he did it—he pulled it off!
P: Give me a 20-second reader’s digest version of the pre-Girls life you led.
CO: Well, I was playing in a band called Holy Shit, a band from LA—they were my favorite band at the time, so I just started playing guitar with them. It really kind of changed my life. The guys in that band were really what inspired me to write my own songs. I started playing with Holy Shit in 2006, and it was within a couple months of playing with them that I started to write songs.
P: Your album, Album has a really distinct feel to the music and lyrics and meaning—is this mold that the album is in something you want to stay in, or would you rather see the band go in a completely different direction the next time around?
CO: Of course we want to mature as a band, and I have a whole lot of songs written that we could do for the next album, which I think are great songs, but I think we’d like to do some things we haven’t done on the next album—maybe play with more people and stuff like that. I think the general idea is the same. Basically I write the songs, and JR is the audio engineer. I feel like we have a pretty good system, so I think we’ll probably stick with that. We have talked about maybe adding some more instrumentation and playing with all kinds of people.
P: Anyone in particular in mind?
CO: There’s this jazz band that I go see that plays at a bookstore in San Francisco. There’s been a couple of them that I’ve made friends with that I thought about bringing some of their instruments in, maybe just for a bit here and there.
P: How’s it feel being on the East coast?
CO: In general, it’s not that different. I feel like we’re all pretty connected these days. Internet keeps people pretty well-connected. When we come here I feel like people are in touch with what we’re doing, and seem to be pretty well-informed of what’s going on. Other than that, it’s always a nice crowd and good reception, venues are always really nice…I like coming to the east coast.
P: I’ve been reading a lot of how growing up your music was a bit hand-picked, so to speak. When you get out of there, you leave that scene behind—where do you start to open your ears to all the shit that’s been going on in the music world since then? It seems pretty overwhelming.
CO: Yeah, it was really overwhelming. When I first left, I watched a lot of MTV, and I’d go to record stores and pick out things by the cover, or look for things that I always heard about like black Sabbath or something like that. Within about a year all my friends were in the punk scene. For the first four years after I moved out on my own, I was very absorbed in the punk scene. I was pretty much only listening to punk rock and going to punk shows and buying punk records.
P: That’s about as different as you can get from where you were at.
CO: It was something that I right away connected with. I could relate to a lot of the feelings that are in punk rock music…outsider, frustrated sound of oppressed youth…I felt right away like another one of those punk kids hanging out in the house. I figured my story was a little different, but we kind of had the same feelings about life.
P: Are you still in that musical area? Have you moved on in your tastes since then?
CO: I still love punk rock, but in my 20s I’ve definitely kind of moved on from that. Now I just kind of listen to everything. There’s not any genre that I don’t appreciate something. I like country music and I like pop music and I like all types of rock n roll, rap music, reggae music…I like it all. I think it’s all great, you know? I’m still pretty behind—I haven’t had the sort of regular young adult music listener experience, so there’s a lot of things that people will play for me and I’ll have never heard it. It’s just exciting for me in general to listen to music and learn about music. I still haven’t gotten any of the Beatles albums.
P: Well they just got remastered, so now’s a good opportunity.
CO: Yeah. I’m sure if I wanted to I could spend the next two years listening to the Beatles. There’s just so much music, it’s like “what do you pick to listen to,” you know?
