A standout alt-country album from Nashville appliance repairman Ovven

Nashville’s Ovven financed his fantastic new album, “Gnawing at the Cord,” one broken dryer at a time.

With money from his work as an appliance repairman, he hired an in-demand producer and made a guitar-laden alt-country record that dads around the country will hear and say, “Hell yeah.” 

The guitars are fuzzed out, the hooks are big, the pedal steel is tasteful. Lyrically, Owen Burton is observational: singing about fantasy football. Nostalgic: remembering guys who got into memorable scrapes on his block. And he finds himself settling into an embrace of classic rock. 

The album’s opener, “Thermal Fuse,” comes out of the gate with a guitar riff stutter step and an ode to his handiwork.

Ovven “Gnawing at the Cord”

“I replaced so many dang thermal fuses on so many different dryers in run down apartment buildings,” says Burton, who performs as Ovven.

For better or worse, he says, he knows how to fix stuff. That’s useful in a city like Nashville, where music work is on-and-off and appliances are always breaking down. 

The repair money helped finance producer Alex Farrar. He’s responsible for all your favorite albums. Ovven’s fits squarely in with the indie alt-country cannon along with Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Hotline TNT and Angel Olsen — all records that show Farrar’s specialty of infusing indie music with southern and classic rock. 

Ovven will deliver his take on it Saturday night at his show at Drkmttr.

‘The dads were right’

A big part of Burton’s journey on this record is accepting and embracing his identity.

As a white guy in his late 20s, but with old-man tendencies, it means embracing classic rock. That’s something that clicked for him in an instant while he was watching Led Zeppelin in his friend’s basement.

He’d watched the band’s “Mothership” performance all the time when he used to be younger than the performers on stage. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were 22 at the time of the performance. But it clicked in a different way when Burton watched for the first time as someone who was older than them. It was a humbling moment of genuine appreciation for a band that seemingly every dad has talked about ad nausea. “All the dads were right. Led Zeppelin is the greatest band of all time,” he says, laughing. “And, actually, talking about them for the last 60 hasn’t been enough time yet.” 

That moment is chronicled in the song, “Feeling the Pull,” in which he spends the first 2 minutes moping and feeling bad for himself, metaphorically his early 20s. And then the rhythm section stops and in the clear he sings, “everybody someday feels the pull of rock and roll.” Then everything clicks and the hook comes in.  

Accepting his inner dad came after years of resisting. “You think you’re special. But there’s like three options,” he jokes with me. “Having kids, being in jail, or doing wherever it is that I’m doing.” 

‘The tree by the lake’

Burton went to DePaul School of Music and then lived in Senegal, working for the Peace Corps. On a whim, he moved to Nashville with a buddy. For six years, he’s sat in on friends gigs and played here and there. He hasn’t done any cowrites (“no one has ever asked me”). And he’s played in an Americana band. 

A lot of the writing on his album is observational. He grabs hyper-specific moments that prove to be relatable, like “I found the tree by the lake where we used to practice swearing.” That’s a sacred space for a kid — a dedicated spot, outdoors and free from the surveillance of adults. It’s a coming-of-age memory. 

Nostalgia is a theme on the album, and remembering things from the past, particularly his upbringing in Chicago. In “Abbreviated” he drives down his old street, pointing out and recalling institutional lore.

“Who was that who lived in the Grey house down on Drexel Lane? / Didn’t he go to jail or prison or something like that?”

The song writing style recalls the Southern Gothic style of “Quarry” by Asheville, North Carolina band Wednesday: “The rain rotted-house on the dead end of Baytree, old bitter lady.”

Burton is a sports guy, often including them in song. “Fantasy football league / In too deep,” Burton sadly sings over a limping note of a horn. “I sure could use the money” he ends the thought, dejected, in “Feeling the Pull.”  It’s reminiscent of MJ Lenderman’s sports tragedy songs like “TLC Cagematch,” a sad song about seeing professional wrestlers getting folded off a top rope and caring about their feelings. 

Ovven’s album is also funny. In “Abbreviated,” over the twang of a pedal steel, he wonders aloud as if you are killing time on a porch together. “My parents almost called me OJ,” he notes, as if between sips of a Miller Lite. But when his mom was pregnant, the OJ Simpson chase happened and they named him Owen instead.

“Imagine what my vibe would be,” he sings. “A completely different genre of guy.” 

It’s blue collar alt-country dad rock. The riffs are big and fuzzy. The lyrics have a sense of humor and depth.

It’s a patio record, best served with an ice cold beer.

It was a blast learning the backstories of Ovven’s songs. Here are a few more of the tales.

“Dishes” 

Dishes is a song he promised he’d never write. 

“ I have a few songwriting pet peeves. I think they are fueled by living in Nashville.” He said one of his pet peeves is that it feels like everyone writes a song about writer’s block. He says it’s unbecoming to show how the sausage is made and the songs end up being a guy looking around a room and writing about the room around them. 

And then he did it. “ It’s exactly that thing I told myself I would never write.” His version of writer’s block is procrastination by productivity. The song’s chorus ends with “I’ll kill time till the clock begs for mercy.” 

Midway through the song it slows down to half time, which is a story of its own.  

“I never get stoned alone at home.” But in the midst of writer’s block, he thought it would knock the dust out. But it didn’t exactly work. He realized that it didn’t free his mind at all. “It was actually all the same, I was just thinking slower.” So in the song, he does the exact same thing, just slower.  

“Abbreviated” 

A lot of the songwriting in this album goes back to Chicago. The song Abbreviated was inspired by driving down a street where he grew up and remembering some things. 

The memory in Abbreviated is a dark one. Burton’s high school had a radio station, WLTL that was staffed by some adults. One day there was an FBI raid on one of the staff members. He had been found with child pornography. It was a huge scandal at the school. Burton’s friends were all interviewed by the FBI. 

Years later he was back in La Grange, driving down the street where that guy used to live and pointed out a house. “I feel like it’s a universal thing. Being like, ‘Didn’t so-and-so used to live there?’ And then the follow up being, ‘Aren’t they in jail?’”

“Shining Ear to Ear“ 

Shining Ear To Ear is about a time where he got roasted by a drunk girl on the Chicago river. 

He went to DePaul School of Music. He lived with a couple friends up Lincoln Avenue, a main drag for night life. “ but we were all poor and kind of losers, like we were all studying classical music and like basically every night.” They’d practice at the school of music until the building closed at midnight and they’d get kicked out. Then they would take their instruments and walk the three blocks up Lincoln Ave. “In those three blocks you pass probably 80 bars” back to the apartment. One warm Saturday night they were walking back after midnight. It was the mid oughts. His buddy had an upright bass. Burton had a guitar case. They had a fiddle player in tow. As they walked past a bar a drunk girl smoking a cig outside went “Oh my god, it’s the Lumineers!” 

“She cooked us. Just a shot across the bow. So clean.”