Considering: Girls' "Father, Son, Holy Ghost" ten years later

Girls are probably the last band of the blog era to have such an un-searchable name and still find success. Even then, their run from their 2009 debut Album, the Broken Dreams Club EP in 2010, and their final album, 2011’s Father, Son, Holy Ghost has a blink-and-miss-it aura that floats like a fog over one of San Francisco’s greatest modern indie rock bands.
Girls was primarily a two piece, joining Christopher Owens as songwriter and lead singer with Chet “JR” White who played bass guitar and produced. Touring and studio members filling in the band’s soundscapes came and went through a revolving door, which Owens cited as a reason for leaving the band, tweeting: “I didn’t feel like I had other people that were in the band over the years. It was 21 – a giant amount of people. That’s feeling disappointed 21 times over.”
After leaving Girls, White receded into his role as a producer, most recently adding his signature retro sheen to Tobias Jesso Jr.’s (excellent) 2015 album Goon. Sniping at each other in interviews, it became clear their partnership and friendship were deeply wounded. Tragically, White passed away in October of 2020 at only 40 years old, ending both the possibility for more production work from White and a reunion of Girls.
In “Die,” which is the album’s most rocking track with loud, soloing guitars high in the mix, Owens shouts “no, nothings gonna be alright / no, we’re all gonna get fucked up tonight / no, nothings gonna be okay / no, it’s all going down the drain tonight” you can’t help but wonder how much of his dissolving relationship with White he’s writing about, how much Girls is wrestling with their massive fame from album hype and touring between 2009 and 2011, and at the risk of being craven about White’s passing, also a little prophetic: “we’re all gonna die / we’re all gonna die / we’re all gonna die.” Like every partnership, friendship, every band, and every classic album, “Die” winds down, first with some furious guitar riffing, but then, it merely echoes out into an abyss.
The end and epilogue of Girls is extremely sad. Owens, without the studio magic White brings into his songwriting, goes on to release three solo albums: the conceptual, ornate if not pretentious rock opera Lysandre (2013), the gospel-infused roots rockin’ A New Testament (2014), and a back-to-basics Chrissybaby Forever (2015), which mostly succeeds at bringing Owens’ solo sound as close as possible to what Girls did so right. In 2017, Owens released an EP called Vante with a new group called Curls but promises for more music fizzed out.
In “Vomit,” which is the album’s most epic track, with sprawling refrains and soaring choirs weaving between tight verses and little stabbing guitar work like a motorbike darting around traffic in San Francisco’s hilly streets, Owens whispers: “Nights I spend alone / I spend ‘em running ‘round looking for you, baby” and then howls: “looking for love / looking for love / looking for love / looking for love.” You could read “Vomit” as an artist’s statement of purpose: “there’s something that I get from myself / and there’s something that you give to me / well, I got one / without the other, well, it’s not enough.” As Girls, Owens finds that something. Beyond Girls, Owens’ drive to create, to give, gets swallowed up by its own ambition. Mournfully, “Vomit” chugs along, chanting “come into my heart / my love” long into the track’s run time. I’ve never heard a song with such a fun guitar part sound so miserable.
These days, Owens isn’t talking about music as much. In “Magic,” he opines for a lover: “just a look was all it took / suddenly I’m on the hook / it’s magic.” Between their three releases, Girls only gave us 30 proper songs – barely a look – but in Father, Son, Holy Ghost, listeners are treated to such a memorable universe of music it seems almost like magic.
Owens is a lyricist (and social media personality) who wears his heart on his sleeve, so it makes sense that the cover of Father, Son, Holy Ghost, would feature a stark white color with the lyrics from all 11 songs printed in black using various typefaces. Inside the gatefold are similarly black and white photographs of famous San Francisco locales: the Golden Gate Bridge and Café Zoetrope, flanked by the Transamerica Pyramid with more lyrics superimposed over them: “looking for love” haunts this concrete skyscraper. The artwork volunteers this geographical allusion so I know it isn’t just because I happened to live in San Francisco during the public break down of the band that Father, Son, Holy Ghost is such a Bay Area piece of art. It couldn’t also be that my apartment was a few blocks from Christopher Owens’ and that occasionally he’d be getting coffee at our local spot, or that sometimes – more than you’d think – he’d be on walks in Panhandle Park playing a flute while I was on the phone with my wife, both of us pacing waiting for better days to come. Once, Owens bummed a light off of me outside of Amoeba Records before an in-store performance by Real Estate (remember those guys?).
I don’t mean to brag, and I certainly don’t mean to name drop, but when you’ve seen the guy who wrote “Love Like a River” in the flesh, can read the weight of the question, “lay my burden down / down by the river’s edge” while just existing in a city, the emotional stakes become higher. When Owens sings “And don’t you know I’d hold you / if I could find a way / if I could only catch you / if only you would stay” you really understand what he means. Girls made no pretentions: you were in the broken hearts, broken dreams, broken whatever club with them.
Maybe that’s what’s so remarkable about Father, Son, Holy Ghost to begin with: these aren’t sadsack songs, or, they are sadsack songs that don’t sound like sadsack songs. Take for example the album opener, “Honey Bunny.” Its got a guitar dive Vampire Weekend later borrow in 2013 for “Dianne Young” and it absolutely sweats exuberance. “I know you’re out there,” Owens confidently sings, “You might be right around the corner / and you’ll be the girl that I love.” This isn’t the emo shit that “Vomit” or essentially all of the Broken Dreams Club, lists into. This is unabashed crushin’ music: “I need a woman who loves / me! Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!” It is impossible to not fall for this infectious of an album opener.
Or how about “Alex,” another semi-surf rocker, that only takes a few minutes to get from the playful “Alex has blue eyes / well who cares? No I don’t” to “Alex has a boyfriend / oh well, I’m in hell / I’ll sing you a song.” Its funny, its melodramatic, but between the talented cast of players (many of who would go on to play these songs with Owens during 2014’s A New Testament tour dates) and White’s precise nostalgic ear for production, “Alex” mostly rips. It makes you want to dance. Not all these songs are rockers necessarily, but they are all rooted in pure pop. Some more nakedly than others, like the excellent “Saying I Love You” which could have been in the arsenal of any singer-songwriter troubadour from Golden Gate Park’s halcyon era of love and grooviness. It reads trite on paper – “I hear you crying now / what can I do? / You threw my heart away / you made me blue” – but when you dress it up in the lush world of Girls’ music, its like the best song you’ve ever heard.
And that’s just about the best way to sum up any song from Girls’ too short run. I think, like any mythic band with a sad ending, and an even more upsetting epilogue, it makes sense to end with “Forgiveness.” Whispering, Owens sings that “Nothing’s gonna get any better / if you don’t have a little hope” (a drum patters) “if you don’t have a little love / in your soul” (a cymbal crashes, he repeats himself) “Nothings gonna get any better / if you’re drowning in your fear” (White’s baseline fills in the empty space) “if you’ve got nothing but sorrow / in your soul” (the song starts to warm up) “and you’ll have to forgive me, brother / and you’ll have to forgive me, sister / and I’ll have to forgive you” (Owens warbles, his voice nearly falling apart) “if we’re ever gonna move on.”
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Like any band, like any song, like any guitar solo, like anything shared between friends, “Forgiveness” eventually ends. I like to think somewhere after the end of Girls Owens and White came together, or at the very least, came to understand what happened between each other.
Maybe that came in a whisper, or in words, or in the fog lifting over their adopted San Francisco homes. Who knows. We can never know the personal lives of professional musicians, but in the sad case of Girls, and their tremendous final album, we can hope they found closer like the final chorus of “Forgiveness:”
 
And I can hear so much music
And I can feel everything now
And I can see so much clearer
When I just close my eyes.
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