Photograph by Chad Kelco

Owl Be Damned: “A lot of our songs are short and sweet gut punches.”

Owl Be Damned took its time getting out of the nest. In the late ‘10s, singer Douglas Thompson (Low and Be Told, The Marsupials) pitched drummer Ben Johnson (The Long and Short of It, Hostile Comb-Over) on the idea of playing together. At the time, Johnson was immersed in completing his first film, Fanboy, and informed Thompson that he was “not going to join any band with anybody until I finish this damn movie.”

“Then I finished the movie,” Johnson recalls, “and I was kind of waiting around and Doug was like, ‘Hey, are you ready? I found this guy.’ He was talking about [guitarist] Joshua Boggs, who had just moved here from Ohio. He really liked what this guy played. I was supposed to meet with somebody else to play bass, and then that didn’t work out. Doug was like, ‘Tom [Lord, of Ohcult and Bosswitch], who I work with, is chomping at the bit to play if this other guy doesn’t work out.’ I was like, ‘Well, if somebody is chomping at the bit and the other person isn’t available, let’s just get the guy who is chomping at the bit.’ That’s how it all came together.”

Drummer Johnson says they landed on Owl Be Damned after going through “400,000 band names. Narcissistic Fibrosis was my frontrunner. That didn’t get past the censors.” Boggs cites Drive Like Jehu, Brainiac and The Melvins as inspirations for the band, and Johnson feels they would have been right at home on a mid-level, late-’90s independent label such as Amphetamine Reptile, Touch and Go, or Sympathy for the Record Industry.

Johnson estimates that they currently have enough material for about a 40-minute set. “A lot of our songs are short and sweet gut punches,” he says. “I think when we first played, it was 22 minutes or something like that. Then we added a couple more, so it became like 25/26 minutes. Now I think we would have between 35 and 40 minutes. The last three songs, the ones we are finishing up right now, they are kind of epics — at three minutes.”

They’ve been playing together for only a year, but they’ve already gathered an impressive array of feathers in their relatively new caps. They were 2024 San Diego Music Awards Best New Artist nominees and have opened for local stars Rocket from the Crypt. Regarding the latter: winning over the RFTC fans in a live setting was no issue. “They were like fish in a barrel,” says Johnson. “Just kidding.”

Now all they have to do is release some music: Owl Be Damned has zero recorded offerings available on the usual digital outlets. “We are on the down-low,” Johnson says with a laugh. “We don’t have anything. We have been a little slow with recording for one reason or another, but we are about to record, and it’s gonna be great.” He says an album will be out by the end of the year, and that there might be a video single before then.

Johnson also has another film in the works. “I was kind of working on a book and wasn’t even gonna do a movie, and then two things happened: my daughter asked me, ‘Dad, if you do another movie, can I have a speaking role?’ And then a bunch of other people started saying, ‘Hey, I can help you with this, I can help you with that.’ So, the book’s like two-thirds done, and I put it on the backburner and typed up my screenplay and started casting the movie and getting people who could film it and things like that. The new movie is called Find Them, and it’s about a mid-level rocker about to maybe be a star. She turns up dead, and it looks like a suicide, and the cops don’t want to investigate it. But her friend and fan doesn’t believe it, because of a conversation they had — the way she said, ‘If it ever looks like I committed suicide, find my killer.’ So that’s what the fan sets out to do.”

He hopes to begin production by early summer. “We’ve put the band together and made the requisite four songs. I came up with the lyrics and the general idea, and then I fleshed it out with the other people in the band.”