Girls’ Christopher Owens announces new solo album ‘I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair’

Girls’ Christopher Owens has announced his new solo album ‘I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair’ marking his first LP in nine years.

• READ MORE: Christopher Owens – ‘Chrissybaby Forever’

The new LP is set for release on October 18 via True Panther Records (Girls, King Krule, Grace Ives) and you can pre-order / presave it here. ‘I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair’ was co-produced by Owens and longtime collaborator Doug Boehm (Girls, French Kicks, Twin Peaks) in various San Francisco studios.

Along with the announcement of the album, Owens also shared his new single ‘No Good’. The track features a Jangly guitar rock sound with lyrics such as: “No, not another love song / Not one more song where I’m pretending / Everything will be okay / I died the day you left me,” describing a vulnerable and less optimistic place.

The song also came with a video directed by filmmaker Rebekah Sherman-Myntti which sees the singer performing the track acoustically with a 12-string guitar in an empty office space.

‘No Good’ follows Owen’s previously released single ‘I Think About Heaven’. Both songs will be featured on the forthcoming album.

Speaking about the themes and experiences that helped create the LP in a press release, the singer shared:” In the second half of the Bible, Jesus asks ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ Lately I’ve found it interesting to ask it in a different way. ‘What shall it profit a man, if he lose his whole world, and gain back his soul?’ And I think the answer would have to be something like — The Kingdom of Heaven.”

‘I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair’ tracklist is 

1.’No Good’
2. ‘Beautiful Horses’
3. ‘I Think About Heaven’
4. ‘White Flag’
5. ‘I Know’
6. ‘So’
7. ‘This Is My Guitar’ (prod. Ariel Rechtshaid & Jacob Portrait)
8. ‘Distant Drummer’
9. ‘Two Words’
10. ‘Do You Need A Friend’

Following a recent motorcycle accident that left him immobilised, battles with homelessness and the death of his former Girls bandmate Chet “JR” White in 2020, Owens turned to music for respite, referring to songwriting in a press release as his “constant companion”.

Owens announced he was leaving Girls in 2012, and has since released two solo albums — the first being 2013’s ‘Lysandre’, which he shortly followed with a free acoustic version. ‘A New Testament‘, his second solo album, was released in 2014.

In a 2012 interview with NME, he explained his reasons for departing Girls. “When we very first started, we were both very clear that we had a very specific goal for the band and that if it didn’t work out we would end it,” Owens said.

“We jumped in very quickly in the beginning because people liked what we recorded together and put on the internet, so we just put together a live band. We always believed that at some point that we would find the right people and they would stay forever but unfortunately we didn’t.”

Owens’ last solo album ‘Chrissybaby Forever‘ was released in 2015. In a four-star review, NME called the artist “a naturally intuitive pop songwriter”, and said that: “‘Chrissybaby Forever’ is a fresh slice of Californian good vibrations that arrives just in time for summer.”

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