“Word of mouth seems to be the biggest driver”: Ovven discusses latest album success
The upcoming Nashville artist spoke to us about his recent record release, the songwriting process and working with renowned producer Alex Farrar.
Photo: Ovven
Ovven’s debut album, Gnawing At The Cord, is a collection of songs that are driving, forceful and captivating. Listening to it is exciting. At its core, it’s an Americana album, but it isn’t afraid to rock. However, it’s a record that came out of nowhere. It seemed like it fell from the sky by total surprise in late February of this year.
Not a lot is known about Owen Burton or where his project, where he goes by the name of Ovven, came from. There was little to no promotion beyond his own social media marketing campaign, and it has, so far, relied on a highly successful word-of-mouth campaign alone.
One of the reasons that people took notice of Gnawing At The Cord upon release was that it was produced by the highly regarded producer, Alex Farrar. Farrar has worked with countless indie and alt-country bands over the past few years, including Hotline TNT, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman. Whilst the participation of Farrar might have got people listening to the album in the first place, the music itself is what’s got people passing this record on and listening to it on repeat. The songs are urgent and invigorating, and are as exciting as they are memorable.
We were lucky enough to be able to catch up with Burton recently to talk about all of these things, alongside his views on people’s comparisons of him with MJ Lenderman, how the project came together and what his next steps might be.
For your debut album, Gnawing At The Cord really feels like it’s arrived out of nowhere. What’s the origin of the record? What was it that brought this project together?
This project certainly came out of nowhere, but I’ve been making music a long time. I’ve played in bands continuously since I was thirteen, and my day job is playing guitar and bass as a sideman for other Nashville acts (in addition to sometimes being a handyman). Gnawing… is the first thing I’ve done as a solo artist, but I’ve been a part of several other records both as a band member and as a hired gun in the studio. The Ovven project was born out of wanting to make some loud guitar music, which is more true to my roots than the Americana and country world I’ve mostly worked in the last five years.
You’ve really dived into trying to promote this record on social media. You seem like a one-man marketing team at the moment. How exactly have you managed to get the word out for this album?
I do try hard on social media, but I’m not sure how effective it really is at getting the word out. My whole ethos with Ovven is to just take big swings and not be too precious, both musically and in the marketing. On social media, I make a lot of super-specific memes about the genre and try to place my album in the canon. That might seem kind of pompous considering I’m a new artist, but it’s the best way I’ve found to give new people context to understand the music when you have, at best, seven seconds of their attention. Word of mouth seems to be the biggest driver, though. It’s been so cool to have people reaching out to me the last few weeks, telling me how they randomly got into the record and have been sending it to their friends.
You worked with renowned producer Alex Farrar on this record. What was it like to work with him? Did he bring anything in particular to your songs that surprised you?
Alex is the man. We actually met for the first time on the first day of tracking. It can be weird to jump into a big creative endeavour with someone you just met, but he’s so chill and has so many good ideas that it was easy. I came in with fully fleshed-out demos, so nothing really needed additional songwriting attention before recording, but he just kind of punched everything up in a way that elevated it all across the board - doubling the length of a guitar solo, changing a chord, exactly how many guitars to stack up in a specific section, things like that.
Farrar is behind a lot of the big alt country records recently and has worked with the likes of Wednesday, MJ Lenderman and Fust. Your songwriting takes some cues from MJ Lenderman in places on this record. Is that a conscious sound that you are trying to replicate, or is it just a style of music that you are naturally drawn to?
One of my favourite things about American traditional styles of all kinds - old time, bluegrass, country, folk - is how mixed up it all gets. There’s a long history of taking snippets from old songs, contemporaries referencing each other’s songs, etc. It’s one of my favourite things about Jake’s writing. He lifts lyrics and melodies from all over the place, and they’re like these fun little Easter eggs for listeners steeped in the style. He and Wednesday played a big part in popularising that in the modern current scene. Wednesday’s The Way Love Goes is basically Merle’s That’s the Way Love Goes (which is my favourite Merle song), and I love what they did to it.
Anyway, they were both a big inspiration in that I feel like it gave me permission to not be scared of being referential in my own writing. That first line of my song Abbreviated is Jake-inspired. Dishes is kind of a piggyback off of Everything is Free by Gillian Welch. Adam Up There is like Bowie’s A Space Oddity. But for the 21st century, Crows was pretty heavily inspired by a Laura Marling song —Song For Our Daughter — these things are all over the place in Gnawing At The Cord.
In terms of style, I think we have similar influences. I know Jake grew up on Drive-By. I grew up on the ‘90s Midwest alt-country bands: Wilco, Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo, The Replacements. My dad is a big Neil Young fan, so that was always on growing up, too.
What is your songwriting process? How does a song evolve from an idea in your head to a piece of music and then to a final recording?
So many of my songs start as funny things that I or my friends say in real life. The first line of Embarrassing was something my friend Danica once said to me. Abbreviated originated from this thing I always say about if I go bald: “I’ll just shave my head, grow a beard, get fucking ripped, and become a completely different genre of guy.” Other songs are born from a riff. In those songs, I usually repeat the riff and just start singing nonsense and then go back to decode it into actual words. Thermal Fuse, Feeling the Pull and the title track are all examples of that.
Thermal Fuse is one of the most instantly exciting songs I’ve heard this year so far. How did the song come about?
That one started with the riff. Madison Cunningham is one of my favourite guitar players, and I know she often plays with flatwound strings and tunes all the way down to C standard. I finally set up one of my guitars that way just to try it out, and once I had that sound, the Thermal Fuse riff came out of nowhere. I wrote the whole thing in like 20 minutes. The lyrics are a big metaphor about fixing dryers (something I was doing a lot of at that time), collapsing empires, and our completely fucked political climate.
The record is getting lots of attention and seems to be really taking off. Any plans for the next steps? A tour? Do you have more songs ready to go?
I was mostly expecting this album to come out and for no one to hear or care about it. I’m so thankful and shocked that that hasn’t been the case, but that’s all to say. I did not book out a release tour or anything. But playing shows is what I really know how to do, so I’m working on putting some shorter runs together for later in the year. Until then, I am working on new music. I’ll release a few alternate versions of select songs from Gnawing, and I have about five or six new songs demoed out for what will probably shape into the next record.
What sort of songwriting style or sonic direction are you interested in exploring next? Are you the sort of artist who plans these things out meticulously, or are you happy to see what direction the songs take you in?
I feel like in creative endeavours, you have to start by forcefully telling the thing you’re making what it is, but at some point, it will start telling you what it is. I have an idea of the direction for the next album, and at this point I’d say I am succeeding in going that direction, but at any point it could start taking me somewhere else entirely, and to me that’s all part of the fun.
Finally, just a few quickfire questions to finish up. If you had to choose only one song to listen to for the rest of your life, what song would you choose and why?
What If I by Cuddle Magic. That’s one of the most beautiful songs ever in my book. It’s so simple and easy on the ears, but it also has so much depth and so many different layers to listen to.
What song on Gnawing At The Cord do you think best sums up what you were trying to achieve on the record?
The title track. It’s kind of three songs in one, but I think every mood of the record is contained within it.
Is there anyone you would love to tour with over the next couple of years?
Wild Pink is one of my favourite bands in the game right now. John Ross, who fronts that project, is a friend, and we’ve talked about trying to get some shows together this year. That would be a ton of fun.
Finally, and most importantly, what is it that you love most about music?
One of the biggest concepts our tiny brains can comprehend is the concept of time itself. That’s kind of the broad concept of the entire album: time keeps gnawing at the cord. Music is how we decorate time. At its best, it allows us to engage with time in a bigger, more meaningful way than we do in our everyday lives.
Gnawing At The Cord is out now.
