Based in Durham, North Carolina, Owen Matthew FitzGerald is a songwriter working in the Southern Gothic tradition. An artist as concerned with narrative and setting as he is mood, willing to descend into the smallest details of life and emerge with a picture comical and tragic and often bizarre. A songwriter, that is, who might follow in the footsteps of John Prine and Bill Callahan but owes as much to authors like Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and Harry Crews.
Following on from EP Body Child Light Crime, released last year on Sleepy Cat Records, Owen Matthew FitzGerald is again working with the label to release a brand new full-length, A deep clean you can count on! The record takes on a whole host of topics, ruminating on love, addiction and loss, not to mention the curious sensation of having a body and being alive even when you might not feel quite so animated. “These nine songs are like school pictures,” FitzGerald explains. “They are wallet-sized portraits taken between 2006 and 2016. The songs on A deep clean you can count on! are frightened, sad, confused, bewildered, dislocated, hopeful, and hopeless. They’re emotional snapshots.”
Despite this apparent emotional distance, the songs retain the visceral mood and idiosyncratic details of the present moment. Something FitzGerald discovered all too readily, pulled towards the past through a renewed engagement with it. But the songs’ lesson is not to bury oneself in memories, or hope to escape them entirely. Rather to work through the present with their weight keeping your feet on the ground. “Sometimes I can’t recognize myself in the songs. Other times I’m so swept up that I’m carried back in time by strong, old feelings,” he explains. “I’m hungover and doomed. I’m an unfixable thing that hurts other people. Whenever you find an old picture of yourself in a yearbook or a sock drawer I hope you feel happy to be where you are. More than anything else, that’s how this record makes me feel.”
The album’s first single, ‘Touching the Oven at Work’ is the perfect introduction to this style. A picture of a time where every sign of life was incidental, every possible edge dulled. FitzGerald delivers this in his distinctively earnest style, his vocals plainspoken and often hushed, the edges of his desperation curling with a dark humour as he searches for proof his life is continuing despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
If my heart pumps blood through my veins…
If my eyes turn light into sight…
If it still hurts, touching the oven at work…
Why do I feel dead?