Ox releases “Aerostar” from the new album, KTEL
For Mark Browning, the driving force behind Canadian roots rock band Ox, the new album KTEL has been a long time in the making. Work began on it not long after Ox’s fifth album, Tuco, in 2011, but life took over and demos were shelved and forgotten for a decade. By 2010, Browning had been bouncing around the road and studios for 12 years—doing all the promoting, tour booking, radio tracking, essentially the stuff an agent and manager would be doing for a band—by himself. He was dog tired from the workload as well as the road-burn, and feeling a bit like he wasn’t getting anywhere.
That wasn’t true of course. Ox had accomplished a lot by then, enough for Browning to make a down payment on a house in his hometown of Sudbury, Ontario, along with earning some awards and a whole lot of traveling. But with each record, it all began feeling repetitive for Browning, and all the non-music-making parts of the job were wearing him down. And when you’re just not feeling it anymore, it’s often best to check out and step off the treadmill.
Browning eventually settled down, acquiring more real estate in Sudbury, which he turned into a record store, got married to the love of his life with whom he now shares two beautiful kids, and generally experienced a kind of joy he hadn’t before.
“I barely touched a guitar for five years,” Browning admits, “and when I did I’d play stuff my kids would dig like Donovan’s ‘I Love My Shirt’ and ‘Froggie Went A-’Courtin.’ I opened a taco restaurant across the street—and named it Tuco’s after the album—so I could get tacos whenever I felt like it, and then a coffee shop next door for the same reason. I’d started living a new kind of dream. With all that, I didn’t miss making music at all. I certainly didn’t miss sleeping in our old Ford Aerostar, or the floors and couches of the road.”
However, as years went by, Browning’s creativity began stirring again. The demos for what is now KTEL were on a CD that bounced around in the family car. His kids would listen to it sometimes, and eventually, he started thinking there was an album that deserved to be finished. Beginning in the Spring of 2021, Browning re-did the songs, added new ones, and completed KTEL over the course of a year. On the surface, the album is a time capsule illustrating the life of an indie band, encapsulated in feelings of starry-eyed weariness and a longing for home. But it also has a taste of the joys of leaving all that for the simple things that home life brings.
Browning says,
“I enjoyed the tracking for it more than other albums I’ve done, in particular rediscovering my love of playing the drums, which was my first instrument as a teenager. This is the first Ox album on which I did the drumming myself and on some tracks I did upwards of 40 takes just because I was enjoying myself.”
A number of songs—“Cosmic Dave” (named after Browning’s record shop), “Continental” and “Silverstar”—were written in that period of burnout, while others like “Ktel Records” capture the wonder of discovering new music. “Kung Fu” was inspired by Browning’s obsession with late-night B-movies, with “STARSHIP” specifically about his addiction to the TV show Ancient Aliens. Browning’s good friend and collaborator on the Ox album Dust Bowl Revival, Nathan Lawr, invigorated Browning’s love of playing hockey, resulting in the song “Stanley Cup Final,” along with a broken big toe that continues to hamper Browning’s soccer game.
“The rest are solitary-type stories, like a lot of my songs,” he says. “But there’s a sense of autobiography to all of it that feels a little strange to expose to the light. I hope people enjoy KTEL as much as I did getting it all to fruition.”