Hair and homos

Jenny Owen Youngs doesn't need to sit on the reason for her gay fan flock. Sure, the tomboy get-up is a magnetic lesbian force. But there's a more scientific explanation.
"It's because my hair is really shiny," Youngs laughs.
The school-girl looking alt-folk musician (though the ties are on their way out) has already lured, as she puts it, "the gayest man alive": Perez Hilton. The celeb-juice blogger gushed over Youngs on his web site and met up with the artist in Austin at a musical festival showcase. A plastered Youngs gave Hilton, who wowed her with his bright-colored clothing, a tongue stroke on his cheek.
"I was a little worried when I decided to just take the plunge and lick him, but he actually just tasted like five o' clock shadow," she recalls.
Hilton calls Youngs' burned-in-love first single "Fuck Was I" a classic and one of the best love songs ever. During the chorus, which sweeps over a gentle flow of strings, Youngs considers her messed-up mindset. "Hopefully it's something that a lot of people can relate to. I don't think there's many people – or any people really – who don't regret something, so hopefully there's a common denominator."
Youngs is referring to a relationship – which she's never discussed openly to the press before, she says – that ended several years ago when she was messier and "wreaking havoc – mostly upon myself." It wasn't a romantic knot where she got in too deep. In fact, she barely got in at all.
"What a fucking mess," the sweet-voiced singer insists about crossing the line with a close friend.
Youngs wrote the majority of her debut "Batten The Hatches," a quiltwork with severed stitching, as a cranky college student halfway through college, dealing with a domino effect of messy relationships with men. Maybe it's time to bat for the other team.
"Oh, God, you know honestly at this point anything could happen," she laughs.
The rundown relationships became the muse for an album brimming with toxin use and angsty feelings. But to keep her wounded lyrics inclusive, she avoided gender specific pronouns.
"I wouldn't make the same record today because I'm really happy but hopefully (this one's) not like so overwhelmingly acidic," she admits.
Acidic? Nope. But it doesn't shy away from f-bombs, which causes an itsy-bitsy issue when performing live for holy rollers. On her current tour with Vienna Teng, Youngs will play for fans and God. Well, sort of. She'll be in his house.
"I have certain boundaries, and as soon as I found there was a church I kind of made the executive decision not to swear in it because if I had a place of worship I wouldn't want some scrappy, young thing from New Jersey coming in and getting all up in my business," she says.
The venue was already booked and Youngs likes churches anyways – for their architecture and acoustics. But a couple of days after she was booked for the tour, the promoter e-mailed her agent and got all bajigity, a slang word Youngs relishes in the interview. "(The promoter was) just like, 'Ah, do you really think that the appropriate person to play this show is a girl who is pushing a song called 'Fuck Was I'? She's gonna sing that at a church?"