Bay Area Record Spotlight: Girls – “Album”
I’m excited to start a new monthly feature where I spotlight some of my favorite local albums from the past few decades.
The first choice for this column is an obvious one–”Album,” the seminal 2009 release from Girls. One of the greatest albums of all time, and perhaps the single most impactful record to ever come out of San Francisco, this 12-song masterpiece helped introduce the world to Christopher Owens and kickstarted the too-brief, but wonderful tenure of one of the city’s most beloved bands:
Perched on the outer edge of the continental United States, overlooking the vast Pacific Ocean, San Francisco has always been viewed as a strange, welcoming beacon for outsiders.
People move here from afar for a variety of reasons, some anodyne (a new job, or whimsical wish fulfillment), and some serious (escaping an insular community or a cloistered, repressed family life.) Either way, it has long been a city of transplants—a place for urban nomads living thousands of miles away from their homes.
As a result, the relationships borne here take on ever greater significance. Without the immediate ties of a traditional family to bind and guide people, friends assume that role.
Like so many others here, I consider my friends my family, and no one has captured that specific San Francisco dynamic more articulately and profoundly than Christopher Owens of the band Girls.
It is only natural that Owens would be the avatar for all romantically marooned San Francisco wanderers, given his bio. Born into a religious cult, Owens moved constantly during his childhood, never having a stable family life.
He fell in with a benevolent benefactor in Amarillo, Texas, before moving to Los Angeles where he connected with like-minded outsider musicians Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck. Eventually, Owens found his way up to San Francisco, where he connected with producer and bassist Chet “JR” White, who was from nearby Santa Cruz.
White and Owens quickly bonded, and as a result, Girls was formed in 2007. From the beginning there was something indescribably unique and exciting about the duo.
I have such vivid memories of being captivated by the early photos of the band—one in particular, in which Owens—long-haired, youthful and beaming—and White posed on a Muni bus with a coterie of female friends behind them. They seemed like a throwback from a different era—but which one?—and the fact that they called my city home only heightened my curiosity further.
The hype train began pretty early for Girls—I cannot ever remember anticipating a debut release album more—much of it to do with Owen’s uniquely tragic backstory, but that endless chatter was more than justified by the band’s early songs. The two lead singles that first leaked out as part of their inaugural 2009 release—simply titled “Album”—were the defining tracks of the band’s tenure—“Lust for Life” and “Hellhole Ratrace.”
The former was a spitfire, ringing indie-pop number highlighted by Owens’ wounded, knotty lines like “I wish I had a father,” while the latter was a titanic shoegaze number, a slow-burning masterpiece about the vitality of defying expectations and convention.
Those twin releases offered a preview of what made the Girls’ sound so vital. Equally infatuated with the Beach Boys as they were Spacemen 3, the band were fearless genre-hoppers, blending the melodic sensibilities of 60s doo-wops groups with the exploratory, lo-fi approach of 90s indie rockers.
If “Lust for Life” and “Hellhole Ratrace” were the only two songs to come from Girls, the band would easily sit among the pantheon of great San Francisco bands, but incredibly, the rest of “Album” nearly matches the towering heights of those early releases.
“Ghost Mouth” is a starlit pop ballad, the kind of song you’d hear playing at your high school prom; “Morning Light” is a thrilling shoegaze race through the empty streets of San Francisco, while “Summertime” is an inverse Lynchian number, a creation that reimagines “Twin Peaks” taking place in the sunny climes of California instead of rain-drenched Oregon.
But as mentioned before, what makes this album so special and so uniquely San Franciscan, is Owen’s clear devotion to his friends and the city they inhabit. It’s no coincidence that two of the best songs on the album—“Laura” and “Lauren Marie”—are named after people (and Owens always seemed to connect better with his female friends, which is perhaps why he named the band Girls.) The videos for “Lust for Life” and “Hellhole Ratrace” so vividly encapsulate the wildness and wonder of being in San Francisco in your 20s. They’re brimming with shots of youthful people—partying, playing, cavorting, communing, living and loving in this great city.
From cramped Mission District apartments to Dolores Park to the dearly missed Silver Crest Donut Shop, these scenes gloriously pinpoint that wondrous moment in time when you can stay up all night partying and still keep it going through the next morning, provided you have enough loose change to pay for breakfast. All these things are possible because you’re surrounded by the ones you love—fellow misfits and outsiders who also found comfort and solace in a distant city.
That euphoria can make you feel unstoppable, permitting you to scream out “I wear my short jean shorts on a sunny San Francisco day/I like to heal by the water in the sunny San Francisco Bay.” Plenty of bands have played up their San Francisco credentials, but none have been more suited to represent this city than Girls. I mean, there is a reason I named this website after a Girl record.
Paradoxically, Owens also expertly and heartbreakingly details the downside to living in a place with such an ephemeral nature. Without longstanding roots keeping people moored here, transplants vanish from San Francisco as frequently as they arrive. Friends you’ve bonded with so closely over the years feel the urge to return back to their true home, something that’s particularly true for a place that’s as prohibitively expensive as San Francisco.
Owens has spoken at length about feeling devastated by those departures and on Girls’ equally beautiful second LP, “Father, Son, Holy Ghost,” he summarizes those emotions to a shattering degree, singing “It just feels like it's gone/All of it's gone, gone away.”
San Francisco is always changing, for good or for bad. Sadly, we can no longer claim Owens as one of our favorite native sons. Even more tragically, White—the truly underrated engine of the band and a wonderful, weary soul—passed away tragically in 2020. Already dormant for years, his death ensured that Girls would never live again.
I’ve been fortunate to talk with Owens on numerous occasions, including not long after the passing of White. He spoke with such profound sadness and regret about his close friend’s death. At the time, he was still living in San Francisco, and it seemed so utterly clear that the things he cherished most–those precious, invaluable friendships–were never to return.
Feeling utterly abandoned, Owens decamped to New York City, where he’s now happily married and fulfilling his promise as a teary-eyed troubadour—a forlorn soothsayer who sees both beauty and pain in the world. His withdrawal truly felt like the end of an era–I’ve encountered countless people my age who have lamented his departure, deeply saddened that San Francisco couldn’t hold on to its own poet laureate.
Perhaps knowing full well that the good times in San Francisco were eventually going to end made Owens and Girls find a special kind of beauty in living for the moment. “Album” is a document of a time and a place and scene that we will never get back. But we were all there—no one can take that away from us—and those memories will be relived for as long as we want. All we have to do is put on “Album,” and wait to be transported back.
“Album” is available for purchase on True Panther Sounds.