> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hearingthings.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Tubs’ Owen Williams on the Lyrics That Changed His Life - URL: https://www.hearingthings.co/the-tubs-owen-williams-on-the-lyrics-that-changed-his-life/ - Published: 2026-09-09T12:00:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-09T12:00:34.000Z - Description: The hilarious and big-hearted guitar-pop songwriter talks about balancing irony and sincerity, roasting your friends on record, and the genius of “Fast Car.” - Author: Andy Cush - Tags: Words Matter, The Tubs, Feature, #4:3 [*Words Matter*](https://www.hearingthings.co/tag/words-matter/) *is an interview series where songwriters whose work means a lot to us talk about lyrics that mean a lot to them.* --- *Hard Life*, the beery and sharp-witted third album by London quartet the Tubs, is one of those fall-in-love-with-rock-n-roll-all-over-again records for me, as I told songwriter Owen Williams a few weeks ago. He was in a sunny cafe backyard in England and I was in my kitchen in Brooklyn. The service wasn’t great and his devices kept dying, but a friend of his was working that day and supplied him with a backup charger. From 3,500 miles away, that struck me as poignant. One of *Hard Life*’s many winning qualities is the window it gives on a certain tumbledown millennial bohemian existence that’s quite familiar to me. Perhaps you’re working the sort of service job you thought you’d outgrown after your career in some “creative industry” hit the skids; the money’s no good, but with loneliness at an all-time high, at least you’ve got plenty of fellow burnouts to hang with. Perhaps you even play in a band. Some misguided part of me may have thought I’d outgrown the kind of music the Tubs play, too: fast and rowdy, but tuneful; not above sentimental turns of melody and teenage sorts of pain; meant, above all, for singing along. The guitars are clean and jangly, the drum fills relentless. Just when you think a song is winding down, the band crashes in again. Imagine a Welshman fronting the Replacements, or the punk album Richard Thompson never made. The possibility that there’s something just a little embarrassing about all this racket *at your age* is part of what the music is about. Williams is always poking fun at himself, at least a little, but not because the feelings he writes about aren’t real. As he said about Stephin Merritt, one of the songwriters he chose to discuss in our interview: “He’s allowing the emotion of the cliché to become even more felt because he’s parodying it.” Williams is also an accomplished prose writer. Early this year, he published a book of essays called [*Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld*](https://roughtradebooks.com/products/atrocity-exhibitions-grieving-in-the-tiktok-underworld-owen-williams?ref=hearingthings.co). His Substack is filled with [self-deprecating tour diaries](https://thetubstack.substack.com/p/tubs-on-tour), [cheeky meditations on the aesthetics of contemporary political writing](https://thetubstack.substack.com/p/sympathy-for-the-discourse-writer), and [more audacious and historically informed rock criticism than most pros can muster](https://thetubstack.substack.com/p/tubstack-10-bourgeois-neoprog), even if you disagree with his conclusions about prog. He writes excellent lyrics, too, but not in the verbosely intellectual way that his bona fides might lead you to expect. He favors everyday vocabulary and syntax, and focuses his literary energies on manipulating the ironic distance between what his narrators say and what we as listeners take them to mean. There’s a line from the fiddlin’ pub-rock breakup song “[Stoop to Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqyxUkQ-H6M&ref=hearingthings.co)” that cracks me up every time I hear it: “You *basically* promised that you would stay.” The sniveling adverb conveys everything we need to know about the guy delivering the harangue. Williams’ men are often pathetic, but that doesn’t stop us from sympathizing with them. He’s a master of what Walter Becker called the “a sneer and a tear” approach to Steely Dan’s songwriting, though one suspects the Dan’s arsenal of jazz chords is probably a touch too fussy for him. Laugh all you want at the blowhards, browbeaters, and no-good boyfriends that populate his songs. You can’t help but feel their pain, too. *Hard Life* is out via Merge Records this Friday, September 11\. Our interview—which touches on Hank Williams, Jr., the Smiths, Tracy Chapman, and more—is below. --- ## Iris Dement: “[No Time To Cry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfyqbkuV%5Fe8&ref=hearingthings.co)” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/09/45019--1-.jpg) **Owen Williams:** I love a lot of country music, especially from this ’80s-’90s alt-country era. Her songs are in that country-music tradition of managing to write about very specific nuance in a very poppy way. And I really like songs about people touring too much and not being able to juggle their music and life. It’s particularly relatable to me. She also touches on other stuff that I find interesting to write about, like lack of feeling, or not feeling the way you’re supposed to in a given moment. That’s what I was writing about quite a lot on the last Tubs album. **I love songs where the narrator is insisting they’re OK and it’s obvious to the listener that they’re not. Usually I think about that in terms of a breakup, but in this song it’s about losing a parent instead. There’s a dramatic irony to a line like “There’s just so many people trying to get me on the phone” as an explanation of why she has no time to cry, as if an obligation that small might be more important than grieving. You’re feeling things as you listen that are bigger than what she’s putting into the text of the song.** With writing songs in particular, you can use the sonics, the chords, the music itself, to undermine whatever it is you’re saying. So just by the fact that the song *sounds* so sad, you can tell that there’s a deeper layer of feeling than what is being acknowledged. I quite like that line because it’s like a humble brag as well, like *I’ve got too much stuff going on.* --- ## The Magnetic Fields: “[The Book of Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Nh28saKYwI&ref=hearingthings.co)” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/09/57123.jpg) Not to be too wanky about it, but Stephin Merritt has a bit of a postmodern thing going on where he likes writing in the pop song tradition, using all the clichés, and creating an ironic distance while still giving in to the truth of the cliché. I really like that technique. And “The Book of Love” is almost *about* that technique. He lists clichés and sings in that pop-song way while hovering above it at the same time. It’s just interesting to me how he manages to make a song about clichés so beautiful and emotional. It should be a slightly cold thing. But he does his big trick, which he’s the master of. Morrissey does it as well. You demolish the cliché, and wrongfoot the listener, and allow yourself to be sentimental in the process. **There’s something about his particular vocal delivery that allows him to use the deflating language of a line like “Some of it’s just really dumb” in a way that is both so funny and so sweet. Like, if you’ve heard the** [**Peter Gabriel cover**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZQIfEN%5Fp2A&ref=hearingthings.co) **of this song, the humor just does not come across at all, because he doesn’t sing it like Stephin Merritt does.** Yeah, it’s really terrible. It’s such a precise thing that Stephin Merritt is doing, balancing that line between sentimentality and irony. And the Peter Gabriel version doesn’t even seem to acknowledge that it’s there. It just veers off into weird power ballad territory. Baffling stuff from Peter Gabriel. --- ## The Smiths: “[This Night Has Opened My Eyes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWcQqWW3QCI&ref=hearingthings.co)” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/09/825646642854.jpg) He’s just doing the plot from \[Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play\] *A Taste of Honey*. He had this early style of songwriting, just giving a synopsis of a play or a film he liked. But it’s a good example of a song where he’s playing a character. I think people tend to assume that the singer is singing about himself. I certainly occupy characters in my songs a lot. And I think Morrissey occupies different characters and perspectives a lot more than people might think. It’s kind of odd for someone like him to make a song so emotional about the situation of giving away a child. It’s kind of like fiction writing, which appeals to me. **So many Smiths fans have a tortured relationship to the music now because of Morrissey the public figure. Does your perception of him as a person impact your relationship with his songs at all?** His politics are quite odd and idiosyncratic. I don’t agree with a lot of what he says, and I also don’t really agree with it on an aesthetic level. He’s one of these guys who got completely sidetracked by political stuff and thus started writing insanely bad, dogmatic lyrics. I think it’s a really bad thing for an artist to get too into the discourse stuff. And he’s been into that since the ’90s. It’s just weird to me, because his lyrics, when they’re good, are so nuanced, and ambivalent, and quite generous. I find his forays into that stuff quite baffling. **It seems to me that even when he’s on as a lyricist, his egocentrism and self-regard are still informing it. His sense of himself as the doomed romantic hero of every situation can lead him to some really beautiful places, but it also feels like it’s a tragic flaw that leads him to really dumb places as well.** Yeah, that’s fair. He’s always sort of dogmatic in a way. Which is why he’s funny. Because a lot of his stances that are implicit in the song are always a bit ridiculous. The qualities are so entwined that they can be maddening, or they can be great. --- ## Antenna: “[Antenna State](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOSmb--RHJw&ref=hearingthings.co)” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/09/a2899063742_10-1.jpg) Shogun, the singer, used to be in the band Royal Headache, who were an Australian garagey, punk-influenced band in the 2010s. He’s a really proper—soulful and unique—kind of singer. There’s a more melancholy edge to the guitar playing than there was in Royal Headache. The music’s got a bit more of an emo influence. And it fits with his new lyrics for this band, which are very painful and honest. He writes a lot about aging and being a guy in his 40s playing in bands. And he manages to talk about the indignities of that in a way that, ironically, makes the art way better. I think most people have a tendency to play down their age. Back in the day, if you were in your 40s, you were either a bit washed up, and you were popular when you were younger, or you were just a bit too old to be in an indie band. But now, everybody’s got this extended adolescence that will go on forever and you’re seeing millennials in cool bands in their 30s and 40s. It’s an interesting phenomenon. He writes about this kind of stuff in a very funny and weirdly dignified way. --- ## Hank Williams, Jr.: “[All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct8V4nF9oOI&ref=hearingthings.co)” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/09/715187772724.png) I like a drinking song, and this is a really good twist on the drinking song. It’s quite funny and relatable to have a song about how everyone else seems to be settling down and taking it easy. I first heard it through [the Choir Boy version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCB6MTww6vA&ref=hearingthings.co), which I thought did a really good job of bringing out some of the song’s melancholy, but I really like the original too. **In the first chorus, when he sings, “I think I know what my father meant** [**when he sang about the Lost Highway**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dezZCxer&ref=hearingthings.co)**,” that kind of self-referentiality is such a cool choice.** I also like that he names the other big country stars. It’s funny but it’s also sad in a strange way, especially that line in the chorus. I like songwriting that has an in-joke kind of quality and mentions real people. And I’ve taken some influence from that, maybe just by roasting some of my friends in a song, having some fun on that level. In the time that I wrote these songs, the band became a lot more active. We tour a lot more. And so life just ends up involving other members of the Tubs all the time. So it’s kind of hard not to roast them occasionally. **There’s a thread through a few of your selections where a version of the real-life singer exists as a character in the song. And on your new record, there’s that great moment when you’re like, “I won’t play in the Tubs anymore if you don’t love me,” which struck me as playing in a similar manner with the material of real life.** It’s a fun thing to do. In my songs, and in these songs we’re talking about, you’re playing yourself, but an exaggerated version of yourself. And so it’s fun to exaggerate yourself and turn yourself into a character but also ground it in the specificity of your life, because it really confuses the hell out of people, which is always fun. I really like that idea of just mentioning someone in a song which will literally only make five of my friends laugh, but will be completely lost on the listener. --- ## Tracy Chapman: “[Fast Car](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOAlaACuv4&ref=hearingthings.co)” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/09/075596077460.jpg) **I’ve heard this song so many times in my life, and have even listened closely to it, but when I was going through your choices, it really hit me in a new way. I was like, “This is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard.”** It’s such an insanely popular song and you can go through your life just vaguely knowing it. I had a similar moment to what you’re talking about when I properly listened to it. It’s kind of like a Raymond Carver short story or something. It’s so perfect, even though it’s kind of cliché; it’s a bit Springsteen, with all the tropes, like the drinking father. But that chorus, where it goes from the general, big-scale, lifetime-phases kind of writing, and then she’s just writing to that one moment of being in the car—that’s insanely good songwriting, in my opinion. **Everything before the first chorus is looking into the future and the possibility of leaving: “Maybe together we can get somewhere*.*”And then you get to the chorus and she’s like, “I *remember* driving in your car,” and suddenly you’re looking back on this moment that you were just looking forward to with anticipation. It reminds me of something like “**[**Tangled Up in Blue**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcNyMBw818&ref=hearingthings.co)**,” where you’re looking at a scene from different angles at the same time.** And the fact that the whole arc of the song is a failed relationship, but that one moment is really beautiful—that’s what a lot of short stories try to do, that’s kind of the model. But it’s so economical and well done. I even like the [ridiculous pop-country version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr7oYjnt3bM&ref=hearingthings.co) that was big in the States, by Luke Combs. Obviously, it adds a bit of the Peter Gabriel “Book of Love” vibe to it. But the song is so good, it’s like anyone can do it and it sounds amazing, and it’s already got kind of a country element to the storytelling. I don’t know if you had it in America, but there was kind of a [clubby techno version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbylJ3Ai7-M&ref=hearingthings.co) of it that got really popular in the UK, and *that* was genuinely preposterous. **How does your interest in literature interact with your songwriting?** I try to keep it kind of separate, because when you’re writing—especially the kinds of songs I write, which are kind of in the pop-song tradition—it’s very different instincts from writing prose or fiction, because you’re sort of intentionally using clichés. Like saying “baby” all the time, which I’d never say in real life. I think some songwriters tend to write bad songs because they’re trying to be too literary. There’s a weird trend of that in indie music, where they write, like, *tone poems*, I guess, instead of songs with hooks and stuff. The things I’ve taken from writing fiction are kind of like what I was talking about earlier, with creating characters or exaggerated versions of yourself, finding funny ways to do a hatchet job on yourself. I sharpened some of that stuff with the prose writing. And it just made me care more about the lyrics. A lot of musicians don’t care about lyrics, and that’s kind of fair enough a lot of the time. You can get away with writing crap lyrics, and if the song is amazing, we don’t care. But my songwriting definitely improved once I started paying attention. In my old band, Joanna Gruesome, the lyrics literally didn’t make any sense at all. They were all whatever syllables suited the melody best, we just picked those and turned the vocals really low anyway so you couldn’t even understand. It’s like the My Bloody Valentine approach. --- ## Trust Fund: “[One Calendar Year](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxb8oUAE%5FFE&ref=hearingthings.co)” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/72/f7/72f77b03-9993-4be5-b648-4115e28d0ad0/content/images/2026/09/4015698326703.jpg) **This song really blew me away, and I would be remiss not to begin by pointing out that you yourself seem to be a character in the song. The chorus goes, “There were nights it felt like everyone was there/Looking back was it really only me, you, Owen, and sometimes Claire?”** It’s great, isn’t it? \[Songwriter Ellis Jones\] is a friend of mine, and I’ve been watching him play and listening to his albums for the last 10 years, I think. I’ve been influenced by him really directly, and I always feel like he’s a bit underrated. But he’s also one of those guys where as soon as he’s getting any success, he just quits music. He’s got a slightly self-sabotaging way of doing things. He also does the referencing-of-friends thing. It’s a lovely song, but I thought it would be funny to pick a song where I’m mentioned in passing. I asked him about that. I was like, “So you mentioned me in a song. Who’s Claire?” And he was like, “I don’t really know.” I was like “Is it this person?” He’s like “It could be. It just sounded good so I sang it that way.” So I don’t know—I also might just be there for purely melodic reasons.