Christopher Owens' New Testament: No Drugs, New Love, New Life

Christopher Owens is glued to a couch in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood, speaking softly and candidly about the darkest corners of his life—he was raised in a fringe religious movement before eventually finding salvation first in music and later in heroin. The former Girls singer is unflinching, even docile, when he discusses details about his background that most people wouldn’t share outside of their closest support circles. Whenever the subject turns to music, however, he becomes animated and excited, singing lines from Chet Baker songs or extolling the virtues of everyone from Nick Drake to Gravediggaz.

“For me music, for the longest time, was not any kind of rock and roll image or anything,” says Owens. “It was just music. I didn’t even think about it, it was like exercise. It was an effect of life.”

That’s the key to understanding Owens. He’s an outsider but he didn’t find salvation in music the way most people his age do, as a listener; Owens was saved by music as a social vehicle, something to share with those around him.

For most of his life, Owens—who's now 35—has been defined by his membership in someone else’s club. Raised throughout Asia and Europe in the Children of God, a religious group that straddled the line between hippie commune and cult, Owens’ childhood centered on a complex relationship with religion, authority, and his parents, who exposed him to all of this in the first place. From there, Owens went on to live among punks in Amarillo, Texas; spent time in controversial artist Stanley Marsh 3’s Dynamite Museum; and served an apprentice as a musician in haphazard underground group Holy Shit alongside Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck.

Music was the through line between these makeshift communities—often with amateurs performing live rather than listening to professional recordings as the central artistic force, and often with Owens himself on the periphery eagerly soaking in new sounds and points of view. And although Owens finally struck out on his own as a songwriter with the formation of Girls in 2008, it’s with impending release of his second solo album, A New Testament, that he has truly moved to the center of the latest of his life’s many surrogate families, assembling a hand-selected group of musicians (including three former Girls members) specifically for this country-rooted project. “I had an idea in my mind to make a Dwight Yoakam-type album—cool country, Bakersfield style California country, tight jeans,” says Owens. “When I started recording and hearing the back up vocal techs and I was like ‘Oh yeah, this is changing, this isn’t a country record.’”

A New Testament more accurately captures a unique period in American music, roughly post-rock’n’roll and pre-British Invasion, in which elements of country, soul and gospel and other less-coastal sounds intermingled—think Ray Charles or The Everly Brothers, or, a few years later, the way The Beatles would cover artists like Carl Perkins or especially Buck Owens. Rounded tones, clean dynamics and deceptive earworms abound—a far cry from his solo debut, the oddly leaden, flute-led songcycle Lysandre.

True to form, Owens is dressed in a bohemian California country style—loose, printed shirt, boots. The cowboy hat he tips on the cover of his new album isn’t present but it wouldn’t be out of place either. Despite his formative forays into the worlds of punk and noise—and avant-pop, Owens’ own work is best when it’s an intriguing blend of open-eyed optimism and painful self-awareness—sad songs from a sweet heart, to paraphrase Girls’ debut single “Hellhole Ratrace.” Owens’ love of traditional songcraft and melodies can be traced to his fondness for the Great American Songbook and the influence of the bright, uncomplicated sing-alongs of his religious childhood but the singer credits his willingness to explore such earnest material with the time spent with Pink, who he revered, and Fishbeck, who was encouraging. “It was the first time I saw somebody my age that wasn’t playing punk or noise or experimenting, they were just like ‘I write classic pop songs’ and it was like ‘Wow, you can do that?’,” says Owens. “I suddenly saw that anybody can do this. I started writing lyrics to these ditties I was writing on the guitar and they became the songs on the first Girls album.”

That simplicity and directness has been a staple of his music ever since and A New Testament itself is classic Owens with a boost in confidence and a sunnier world view—born out of sobriety and newfound contentment in his life. For a guy associated with wistful lyrics and songs that can sound like long sighs, he is wearing happiness well. “I’ve gone through the school of Hard Knocks, and I still attend the school of Hard Knocks,” says Owens in a huge understatement. The record leans into his past and makes a break from it at the same time. The title itself is a clear demarcation line, a before and after that paints Owens himself as renewed, even reborn. It’s a record of small miracles, the sound of one guy getting his life together and feeling happier and more comfortable with who he is and where he’s headed.

“I wasn’t conscious of it but there are some great things that I’ve had in my life over the past few years, like my relationship,” says Owens. “There’s a lot of cute, upbeat, positive love songs about being with someone that you like, not unrequited love for a change.”

Perhaps in part because of his rolling-stone upbringing he has a deep curiosity about the world and absorbs his surroundings without any pre-conceived biases. When he happily reads off his list of records he’s hunting down, for example, he lists folk cult hero Karen Dalton and “I Swear” balladeers All-4-One with equal gusto. His innate perspective—he is a seeker who understands the cold underbelly of the world yet still insisting on locating its warmth—is one of the biggest reasons why his songs resonate. This perspective helps place Owens in a continuum of songwriters articulating specific, almost innately human emotions while still maintaining the perspective of an outsider—think Stuart Murdoch or Sufjan Stevens for other recent examples, both of whom, perhaps not coincidentally, also have strong ties to faith.

Despite the heaviness of his life, Owens seems to have a healthy ability to compartmentalize and extract the good even from the worst situations. This is most apparent when he talks about music, and his desire to learn about everything from classical music to jazz but it also gives the overall impression that Owens is just a fun guy to be around. It’s not just that he comes across as the sort of guy who stumbles into incredible situations but that he has an innate ability locate a lesson to be learned and helps him grow in each of his experiences. In Girls, Owens came across a sensitive soul beaten back for doing the right thing—a nice guy who has gone through the wringer. Now, sober and in love, he’s on the other side of it: The good in Owens’ life seems to be beating the bad and the clarity and confidence of his new music reflects that.

“I don’t really worry about the being happy thing, I think basically I’ve opened up more emotionally,” says Owens. “I feel really proud of kicking some bad habits and it was really a long term battle and something I very recently managed to put behind me for the first time.”

That wasn’t easy. Because of an allergic reaction to the methadone prescribed to him, Owens had no choice but to attack his heroin addiction without being slowly weaned off or even working a specific long-term program. “It was awful and I knew that there was nothing, there was no magic thing,” he says. “I secluded myself outside of the city, no telephone service. I was pretty far out of town and just went through the two weeks.”

The ending was sudden but the process of getting there was not—over the course of a few years Owens had tried to quit multiple times without success.

“I didn’t want it in my life anymore and kind of just realizing how pathetic it had gotten—when I wanted to get off it I couldn’t—was embarrassing,” says Owens. “I had fooled around with it for the first few years and could get off of it when I felt like it, but suddenly the addiction becomes something completely different. It really got dark. I wasn’t saving money anymore, I knew I was doing harm to my relationship that I valued a lot. I knew the future wasn’t going to be very bright if I didn’t do it somehow.”

Owens admits that he had “a love-hate” relationship with the drugs and that, without their aid, life is a process of re-learning certain events when you take away “certain things that you’ve been dependent on to make everything more manageable.” That refusal to look at everything from being shipped around foreign countries in the Children of God to heroin addiction as neither black nor white is what shapes Owens, as both a person and a songwriter. This is a culturally omnivorous guy who can locate a silver lining in almost anything, especially now his future, which at present seems limitless and open.

“I have abstract goals,” says Owens. “I’m very prepared to lose all time of following and hype, but I’m committed to recording all the albums I want to record.”

Scott Plagenhoef is a writer based in Los Angeles. Follow Scott Plagenhoef on Twitter.