The Tubs’ Owen Williams on the Lyrics That Changed His Life
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.”
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. His Substack is filled with self-deprecating tour diaries, cheeky meditations on the aesthetics of contemporary political writing, and more audacious and historically informed rock criticism than most pros can muster, 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” 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.
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