This Cult Songwriter Wants to Sell You a House

W
hen Jonny Fritz shows up to a six-million-dollar home in Sonoma County, California, for a house showing, the listing agent appears perplexed. “No apologies needed,” Fritz, sporting a black t-shirt, his trademark bushy beard, and a proudly receding hairline, says before entering the 4,000-square-foot home. “I never look like a realtor.”

Fritz, the eccentric country-singer-turned-real-estate-agent, is here to walk me — via FaceTime — through the home. After leaving Nashville for California and quietly quitting the music industry in the mid-2010s to start selling houses as a licensed realtor, the man once known as “Jonny Corndawg” is formally returning to music with Debbie Downers, his first album since 2016. To get a better sense of what Fritz’s life has looked like over the past decade, I asked if he’d let me shadow him on a showing for a prospective buyer. 

What happens instead is, to reference Fritz’s former moniker, Corndawgian in its playful absurdity. His client is sick and drops out, but Fritz still wants to show me around. The only problem is that the house is so expensive that the listing agent of the mansion insists on being there for the viewing. So, Fritz pretends he has a client in New York — a “bitcoin billionaire,” he calls me — who wants to check out the house remotely before flying in. 

For 20 minutes, I watch Fritz enthusiastically respond as the agent shows him the mansion’s deluxe features: a Sub-Zero fridge (“love these!”), an enormous primary bedroom (“This is alright!”), and wooden beams (“That’s like, National Park Redwoods!”). A few times, Fritz wanders away from the agent and gets quiet to show me the house unsupervised. “Here’s a little Harry Potter zone,” he mumbles, pointing his camera at an awkward space underneath the staircase before the agent catches up with him and they begin talking shop.

They get into an extended back and forth about how deep the outdoor pool is and chop it up about historic district zoning regulation, whether or not the basement is permitted to be included in the advertised live-in square footage (it’s not!), and California’s SB 9 legislation, which permits homeowners to add what Fritz and the listing agent call ADU’s (accessory dwelling units, or for us non-realtors: guest houses) to the spacious property. 

“Oh, you could do another ADU back here?” Fritz says as he roams around the backyard excitedly pointing out Sequoia trees on the property. “Okay, now it’s making sense!”

Throughout the 2010s, Jonny Fritz developed a reputation as an oddball genius whose quirky songs (about taking out the trash, converting a Ford driver to Chevy, or romanticizing a seedy Nashville motel) established him as a country-folk “songwriter’s songwriter” and beloved collaborator of everyone from Jim James to Caitlin Rose to Deer Tick’s John McCauley, who included Fritz in his supergroup Middle Brother. He cemented his fun-loving, farcical image through a dizzying array of outfits, guises, and hobbies that, even if they sometimes feel like performance art, are, Fritz insists, merely the product of his own genuine fascination with the world. He’s a former marathon runner, multilingual globe-trotter, merch-selling hustler, leathermaker, airbrushed t-shirt designer, and accumulator of oddities like the oversized novelty golf ball he recently had rescued in the midst of the Altadena fires that rendered his home unlivable.

Fritz, 41, has a magnetism that pulls in just about anyone in his orbit. “Everybody I’ve ever met who’s come into contact with him fucking loves him,” says Joshua Hedley, his longtime bandmate and onstage foil. 

But it’s his songwriting that’s enabled Fritz to develop a cult of true believers, with his childlike tales of chilidog mornings and bikini lines and torture chambers and chihuahua adoptions set to simple country-folk melodies. “He knows what rules to follow and what rules to break, and he breaks them in a very interesting way,” Hedley says. “His melodies are not super off-the-wall; there’s an elegant simplicity. But lyrically, they’re just completely bananas: Who would write a song about your wife getting mad at you because you forgot to take out the trash? His songs are about real experiences we’ve all had but that we never talk about.”

Fritz breaks even more rules on Debbie Downers, his first album since the Obama administration. His new songs’ subject matter (black tea, a mid-level store manager at Walgreens, the 2013 Joaquin Phoenix movie Her) might be more oddball than anything he’s ever released. He’s already recorded four separate versions of the album and will be releasing them, once a quarter, over the next year. The first version, out October 24, will be a country record produced by Nashville wiz Jordan Lehning. “He wanted to do a very Music Row version,” says Lehning, “but you sort of can’t wash out the Jonny Fritz.”

What will follow are three very different versions of the same LP. He’d considered making Nashville, Houston, and Los Angeles versions, but scrapped that premise after his “Los Angeles” recordings with the band Dawes were destroyed when the group’s home studio was damgaed in the Altadena fires. Fritz is keeping the concepts for his three subsequent versions of the album under wraps, but suffice to say, they are wacky. The sonic vision for one of them, he explains, is “teatime on the Titanic.” 

Fritz is also fronting the cost of the four records himself: $50,000 in total, he estimates. He’s paying for them with money he’s made as a realtor — he typically sells homes in the high six figures to one million dollar range — which has provided Fritz with a type of artistic freedom not available to a typical singer-songwriter at his level. “I’ve got to sell homes to survive,” he sings at one point on the album. 

In this sense, Debbie Downers is an experiment — it’s an alternate model of financing art and navigating commerce in an era when record-making for anyone other than the highest tier of stars has never been less sustainable. 

“He picked the worst time to come back,” says Hedley. “But I’m glad he did.”

A few weeks before the house showing, Fritz is speaking about music, money, self-preservation, capitalism, his dignity, and what he sees as the purity of pursuing a livelihood so clearly focused around, well, earning a living. During the conversation, Fritz seems excited to be talking about music again after spending years discussing ADU’s. He is bursting with song, singing snippets, mid-conversation, of everything from Middle Brother’s “Middle Brother” (which he-cowrote) to Larry Gatlin’s “All the Gold in California” to Roger Miller’s “Boeing Boeing 707” to his old song “I Love Leaving” to his new song “Hot Chicken Condos,” a biting send-up of Nashville gentrification (“Hicks on fire and billionaires from Airbnb”). At one point, he spends a full two minutes espousing the genius of the song “Swimming in My Calvins” by singer-songwriter Chris Acker.

So, it doesn’t take long to believe Fritz when he says that, “as cheesy as it sounds, I really do think of music as a life source.” He stopped being a full-time musician when trying to make a living off his art was, at the same time, destroying his relationship to it. 

“If you really want to make music and make money off of it, you will either have to sacrifice so much to get the economics where they make sense, or you’ll just get bitter and your art will suffer,” he says. “I just didn’t want that.”

The income drop in Fritz’s career came suddenly. “We’re all just frogs being slowly boiled,” he says. “Spotify was the biggest spear in the side of the beast. With [2013’s] Dad Country, I was doing pretty well. I knew that if I was going to play a show, I could sell a whole box of CDs. If I had a 30 day tour, I’d bring 30 boxes of CDs, and I’d sell them for ten bucks.” According to Fritz, by the end of the night, he’d pocket his performance guarantee plus $300 more from CD sales, enough to cover hotel rooms and gas.

“Once Sweet Creep came out [in 2016], I felt like I had grown quite a bit in popularity. So, I took those same metrics: ‘One box of CDs every night,’” he continues. “The first show was really well attended, and I sold one CD. The second show, zero. The third show, zero. After four nights I just stopped taking them out of the van, because nobody asked for them. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a big deal.’ This is $300 a day loss of income.”

Instead of trying to make the math work during the boom of mid-2010s streaming, Fritz stopped fighting what the numbers were telling him. He’d written a song called “Happy in Hindsight” about his increasingly fraught relationship with being a professional musician. “Won’t someone come and get me out of here?” he pleads in the chorus. 

“Musicians are always trying to talk about how they’re not doing things for the money,” he says. “Why! You’re going to starve, man! There’s just so much shame around musicians trying to make a living, it’s this bizarre thing. I thought, ‘I’m just going to focus on something that’s absolutely non-creative. Nobody gets into real estate and says, ‘Yeah, I just love spreadsheets! I love other people’s life decisions!’ In a lot of ways, it’s the most honest trade. It’s like, ‘I am in this because there is a lot of money in it.’”

But, he continues, “Real estate agents are full of shit. They talk about loving architecture and stuff, but at the end of the day, there’s very little architecture in real estate. It’s foundations and mold and bickering text threads of dads in Pennsylvania.”

At first, Fritz considered his switch to selling houses as a long-con set-up for his next album. “I had this idea that I’m going to make a real estate record,” Fritz says, belting out the words “In escrow, again” to the tune of the Buck Owens classic “Together Again.” “Then, when everybody heard [it], they’re going to say, ‘This record sucks!’ And I’m going to say, ‘That’s right! That’s what happens when you cash in on your dreams for money: The art suffers!’”

Instead of that very expensive joke, Fritz just lived his life. He had a kid, broke up with the mother of his kid, weathered the anxiety of trying to support a family and make a living during the pandemic, occasionally played gigs, and sold houses. He switched the focus of his penchant for making wacky merch (condoms, nudie playing cards, t-shirts, koozies) away from his singer-songwriter career toward his new career. “I’ve made so much merch for being a real estate agent,” he says. “I’ve made shirts that said, ‘No other realtor has half this much merch’…That was kind of my only creative outlet.”

The reality is that Fritz considered his career change a necessary way to preserve what mattered most. “When I come back with the next record, I just don’t want to have to compromise anything, and I don’t want to do it for the wrong reasons,” he told himself. “I was like, ‘I wish I could build up a bunch of acorns for an economic winter and I’d be back.’ I just didn’t realize it’d take this long.”

Growing up in rural Virginia as the son of a helicopter nurse father and Vietnam War veteran nurse mother, Jonny Fritz was bored. He hung out with gutter punks with names like Rat Piss and, at one point, acquired the nickname Jonny Corndawg, which he adopted as his stage name until changing it back to his given name in 2012 (see his 2011 twisted masterpiece, Down on the Bikini Line, the last album he released as Jonny Corndawg). Everything changed when a friend’s mother gifted him a Kinky Friedman CD when he was in high school. “I was like, ‘Damn, I didn’t know you could do this,’” Fritz says. “I didn’t know you could be smart and dumb at the same time.” 

From an equally early age, Fritz started buying and selling items. His parents told him, at 17, that he’d already owned more cars in his one year of being legally able to drive than both of his parents had, combined, in their lifetimes. “I have always loved a transaction,” he says.

He dropped out of high school, moved to Philadelphia, traveled the country promoting self-released CDs, and eventually found his way to Nashville. All the while, Fritz refined his songwriting style. “Writing a song is like writing a really enthused, caffeinated email to a really good old friend who knows the whole backstory already,” he says. Fritz’s rules for songwriting: leave out most of the details, assume more of your listeners, and strive for finding the profound in the everyday.

“The vast majority of music that people come up with, they just start with the exact same thing somebody has already said: ‘I’m traveling down this lonesome highway.’ Shut up! Stop, stop, stop! You don’t need to say that: It’s been said a million times and has no weight,” he explains. “You can get to so much more emotion if you just talk about the surface. So many songwriters are like, ‘I gotta get deep.’ And it’s like, ‘Man, the deepest shit is on the surface.”

Fritz is something of an anti-troubadour: He rarely, if ever, writes songs to get him through painful periods. “Music, for me, is such a fun release and a tool to communicate with the goofy side of the world, to really kick back,” he says. Fritz says inspiration comes to him often in the middle of everyday life, when he’s killing time outside a Midwestern gas station (as he did when writing his 2011 classic “Chevy Beretta”) or waiting on line at a taco stand or a drug store (one new song, “The Boss,” came to him while observing the workplace dynamics at a Nashville pharmacy). 

But Fritz’s refusal to conform to what’s often expected of a male country-folk singer — that they brand themself as some sort of outlaw, that they write lonesome songs about heartbreak and what Fritz calls “whiskey-soaked highways,” that they present as hard-living vagabonds — is also in part what’s made his touring and recording incompatible with maintaining a full-time career in the music business. Faced with the choice of sacrificing the way he writes songs or forgoing his identity as a full-time musician, Fritz made an easy decision. Debbie Downers is merely his proof that it’s all been worth it. 

“I think artists’ great work comes after failure,” he says, before launching into a recap of a documentary about Paul Simon’s Graceland. “Paul said, ‘I want to go to South Africa,’ and his label was like, ‘Have at it, you total asshole!’ and then he went and made Graceland without anybody paying attention or telling him what to do. That’s kind of what I was going for.”

After the house tour wraps up, Fritz walks to the front yard and starts chatting out of earshot of the listing agent. “Pretty good, right? What do you think?” he asks me.

Truth be told, I’d been a bit unsure of how much of Fritz’s career as “L.A.’s Premiere Used-House Salesman™,” as he calls himself, was an ironic bit, how much was performance art, and how much was his whimsical spin on the dull reality of a middle-aged career change. It made me think of something Fritz’s producer Lehning told me about his music: “The reason it’s so hard to separate comedy from drama in him and his material is because, for Jonny, they’re the same thing.”

Watching Fritz take time out of his day to show a fake “bitcoin billionaire” a multi-million dollar home on FaceTime hadn’t necessarily increased the degree to which his real estate career seemed fully serious, or even real.

But as we talked outside the mansion, it became clear how heartfelt Fritz’s juggling act of his quirky art and his million dollar listings really was. Fritz says that it took years to settle on his house-selling approach: the job is to get out of the way and let the house sell itself. He talks a bit about the madness of selling homes virtually to couples all over the world during the low-interest rush following the pandemic. 

Then he returns to the subject of the fancy house we’d just been shown. “What’s funny about a house like this is this will go for cash,” he says. “If you have six million to spend on a house, it’s not real money, and it’s not going to be your only house, that’s the other fucked-up thing. When you get into this kind of disparity you really are just like, ‘Oh my fucking god.’ It’s pretty upsetting if you really look at it.”

I express to Fritz how strange it must be to have lived so firmly on both sides of the fence, to have spent a decade touring in a passenger van (see his song “Fifteen Passenger Van”) and a decade showing homebuyers ensuite bathrooms. 

“That’s right,” Fritz says, laughing a nervous laugh. “That’s right, that’s right!”

Then he pauses to consider it all. “I’m really flattered to do this because,” he says, pointing at the house, “this is a big part of my life. I think it’s really cool. I do love it. I love stepping into somebody else’s world and being like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ It’s really fun. This funny thing that I’m doing, it funds my records, and it’s going to make it so I can just focus on my art, and it’s beautiful.”