Joshua Hedley<\/a>, his longtime bandmate and onstage foil.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tBut it\u2019s his songwriting that\u2019s 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. \u201cHe knows what rules to follow and what rules to break, and he breaks them in a very interesting way,\u201d Hedley says. \u201cHis melodies are not super off-the-wall; there\u2019s an elegant simplicity. But lyrically, they\u2019re 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\u2019ve all had but that we never talk about.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
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\n\tFritz breaks even more rules on Debbie Downers<\/em>, his first album since the Obama administration. His new songs\u2019 subject matter (black tea, a mid-level store manager at Walgreens, the 2013 Joaquin Phoenix movie Her<\/em>) might be more oddball than anything he\u2019s ever released. He\u2019s already recorded four<\/em> 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. \u201cHe wanted to do a very Music Row version,\u201d says Lehning, \u201cbut you sort of can\u2019t wash out the Jonny Fritz.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\tWhat will follow are three very different versions of the same LP. He\u2019d considered making Nashville, Houston, and Los Angeles versions, but scrapped that premise after his \u201cLos Angeles\u201d recordings with the band Dawes were destroyed when the group\u2019s 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 \u201cteatime on the Titanic.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tFritz is also fronting the cost of the four records himself: $50,000 in total, he estimates. He\u2019s paying for them with money he\u2019s made as a realtor \u2014 he typically sells homes in the high six figures to one million dollar range \u2014 which has provided Fritz with a type of artistic freedom not available to a typical singer-songwriter at his level. \u201cI\u2019ve got to sell homes to survive,\u201d he sings at one point on the album.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n