“In Texas, we had to sneak around, but California teens in San Francisco, they just did whatever the fuck they wanted. And everybody was so cool. It was exciting. I felt at home.” — Christopher Owens (SFGate)
Christopher Owens lives in New York now, but at one point his San Francisco-based group Girls was music royalty. That was around 2009-2011, when the Bay Area had a thriving garage rock scene helmed by Thee Oh Sees, The Fresh & Onlys, Ty Segall, and Kelley Stoltz. Over the years, that scene evaporated, and Owens fell into a heartbreaking downward spiral fueled by painful loss after loss.
All this context is and isn’t important in listening to the purifying indie rock performances that make up I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair, Owens’ first solo album in more than a decade. Neither depressingly weighed down by years of pain nor a joyfully exuberant hallelujah in transformation (though the backup vocals sometimes do go to church), these songs on the surface mostly sound like singer-songwriter pleasantries. But even a modicum of close attention reveals the sad, difficult revelations that had to be endured to arrive here. After trodding through the album with the humble momentum of a simple guitarist and poet, Owens presents the climactic seven-minute closer “Do You Need a Friend,” working in an interpolation of Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love” between his rising voice and the stewing distortion to say “the loneliness is always the same.”
The Chapel added a second show for Christopher Owens on Saturday, December 14.
