In Her Owen Mind
Talking depression, diversity and Spinal Tap with the Welsh folkie
By Linda Laban

Judith Owen sings backup in a heavy metal band. Yes, Judith Owen, the folk-jazz-pop singer and pianist who’s causing a critical stir with her seventh, and very un-metal, album “Happy This Way.” She sings in a metal band!

But it’s not just any old heavy metal band or even a real one. Owen does duty “singing the high parts,” as she puts it, in her husband Harry Shearer’s band, spoof rockers Spinal Tap.

Welsh-born, London-raised Owen met Shearer, also known for “The Simpsons” voiceovers and films such as “A Mighty Wind,” when he was reviving his role as Tap bassist Derek Smalls at the Royal Albert Hall in London in the early ’90s.

“I was young, broke and depressed, and I was playing crappy covers in a hotel lobby,” she recalls, her English accent still strong even after 13 years of living in the U.S. “I finished playing one song, and there was this rapturous applause. I turned around, and there was Harry, Chris Guest and one of the Stonehenge dwarfs [sic] standing behind me.” It’s a romantic, if twisted, comic scene straight out of one of Guest’s hilarious mockumentaries. But that was the moment Owen met the man who would help rid her of her “millstone,” as she refers to the crippling depression she feels she
inherited from her mother.

Her father was a singer at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, but her mother found his passion for music — which Owen also inherited — difficult to bear. Owen remembers a “darkness” in the family house. Music was the light. “The things that influenced me most were classical music, jazz, and melancholy Welsh folk music, and those are the things that come up in my music,” she says from her and Shearer’s home in Santa Monica, Calif. “They are always there.”

She doesn’t quite understand why critics expect her music to be genre-specific when she isn’t. “I love all music, even music I don’t do,” she says. She reels off various names, from the Sex Pistols to Stevie Wonder. “I don’t want to hear the same person singing the same crap over and over again. I don’t want to sing the same crap over and over again. I’m in shuffle mode.”