INTERVIEW: Chicago art-rockers Ovef Ow look back on 10 years in the DIY scene
From left to right: Ovef Ow is Nick Barnett, Marites Velasquez, Kyla Denham and Sarah Braunstein. Photo by Hannah Sellers.
Ovef Ow. Photo by Hannah Sellers.
It’s been 10 years since Chicago-based art-rock band Ovef Ow (pronounced “Whoa, Jeff, Wow”) first came together to deliver their B-52’s-influenced brand of rock ‘n’ roll to the scene. Mustard Magazine sat down with three-fourths of the band—Marites Velasquez (vocals/bass), Sarah Braunstein (vocals/drums), and Nick Barnett (guitar)—to reflect on a decade of collaboration, creative evolution, and performing in one of the country’s most vibrant indie scenes. (Keyboardist Kyla Denham was sick at the time of this interview.)
Speaking on the heels of their ten-year anniversary—Ovef Ow’s first show was in April 2015—the musicians walk Mustard through the group’s origin story, Chicago’s DIY scene, and what fuels their continued experimentation (Hint: it’s the chaotic but necessary songwriting process they’ve dubbed the “Ovef Machine.” More on that later.)
From puppet shows and art experiments to lyrical anxiety and friendship, Ovef Ow continues to bring their electric, playful brand of art rock to the table, a decade in the making. The band plays The Hideout with locals 8-Bit Creeps (celebrating their album release show) and Chicken Happen on Friday, June 13.
Mustard Magazine: As members, you’re from all over the country. Sarah is from Michigan, Kyla is from Missouri, Marites is from Las Vegas, and Nick is from Chicago, but lived in LA for close to a decade. How did everyone meet?
Sarah: Marites, Kyla and I were in a band prior to Ovef Ow called Me Jane. So the three of us had already been playing together with another guitarist. Marites and I met at a house party in 2010 and then I met Nick through my now-husband. Nick lived in LA at the time and had just moved back as our guitarist for Me Jane quit. We were like, “I think we still want to be a band,” and he subbed for us and did a little recording session, and we were like, “Let’s do this.”
Ovef Ow at Thalia Hall. Photo by Fleurette Farley Estes.
MM: Why change the name instead of continuing under Me Jane?
Marites: With Me Jane, the guitarist who left, Katie [Gallegos], sang lead a lot and was the primary songwriter for a lot of songs. So when she left, it just felt like a different thing. We tried still playing Me Jane songs, but it just felt like a different project. So we were like, okay, we should just rebrand ourselves.
MM: I’m interested in your thoughts on Chicago’s music scene since you’ve all had experience playing in other cities and have 10 years under your belts here.
Nick: I spent seven years in LA struggling with many different projects and bands, and finally got a country band to do sort of the most minimal amount of gigs. But when I came back to Chicago, I was in three bands, and I'm still in two of those bands 10 years later. In the Midwest, people just want to play. In LA, they want to be getting somewhere. I remember my first week back in Chicago, I saw three shows—one of them at the Empty Bottle—and it blew my mind sort of more than I had in the last three or four years in LA. I love the music scene here.
Ovef Ow by Hannah Sellers.
Marites: Chicago is a deep well of talent in the music scene. There's just so many bands and there's shows every night. You can find just hundreds of local bands playing everywhere at all times, you don't have to go very far. And then it's just interesting how there's, like, a ballooning of younger talent that's coming up right now.
Sarah: It’s like a new generation.
Marites: Yeah.
Nick: Was Me Jane doing the DIY scene completely? It seems like we [Ovef Ow] dug into the DIY scene right away.
Sarah: We were. I think we really enjoyed DIY shows because the crowd was always so engaged and kind and welcoming, and you actually got paid at DIY shows. I think some venues in Chicago are changing their ways a little bit, but we've played a lot of shows [in venues] where you don't get paid at all, and that's been a series of learnings of how we choose shows. Obviously, we're not in it to support ourselves or anything, but it also sucks to get paid zero dollars when you've worked pretty hard and practice and do all the things. So I think the talent [in the city] is amazing, and a lot of the venues are stepping up to meet the talent and treat them right.
MM: When you say DIY scene, I'm assuming you mean house shows and other gigs that are put together outside of your traditional music venue or bar. Having lived in other places, do you feel like that's something that exists as strongly outside of Chicago?
Nick: It’s a beautiful scene. I mean, with VCR and places like that, you can't get nicer people. You can't get people that just want to do good—and with excellent sound. That's one thing that I think has changed over the last 10 years: people want good sound even in the basement or even in the weird alley. It's just been super. And yes, it exists a lot more in Chicago than in other places. And the Midwest for sure. We did a Midwest tour, and places like Cincinnati and St. Louis, they’ve all got really good vibes within the DIY scene.
Marites: Even our last show in DeKalb was awesome. That was like kind of a DIY show. You know, it's a little further out of Chicago, so it was like playing a different market. But we had a ton of fun.
Nick: Now it almost seems like we're picking shows that are very strange and weird.
MM: Strange and weird, how?
Sarah: Like tonight's a puppet show.
Nick: We do not know what to expect.
Sarah: That’s why we're doing this. [laughs]
Nick: The more we play, the more we just see these weirder shows that come in and we're like, “Yeah!” If we’re going to play, let’s make it worth it.
MM: I feel like that's very in tandem with your ethos and vibe, being a bit avant garde and experimental. What’s driving Ovef Ow right now?
Nick: Making art — and making a lot of it. We need a lot of it right now. That is one thing we are all certain on.
Ovef Ow by Jeremy Farmer.
MM: You wrote your last album, Vs. The Worm, when Trump was president, and, unfortunately, he's president again now. I'm curious to know what your mindset was then, versus where it is today—and how applicable those songs are now that things are even worse than they were when you first wrote them.
Marites: Half of the album, we had written over the course of the first Trump administration. Our output is maybe like two or three new songs a year. I don’t know. There was a funny point after Biden got elected, where we were playing these songs, and I was like, “Are these still relevant?” But they are. It doesn't change. It's kind of overwhelming now. It's kind of hard to sit down and just write something. There's a lot to respond to, but it changes so much.
Nick: The lyrics are always the last to go on [a track] and are the icing on the cake. We definitely say things that we're interested in, but the sound and where we're going comes from the music—and lately we've been just really writing some very strange music. That’s what I mean by like, we sort of mold it and it goes through the “Ovef Machine,” and at the end of it, we put on lyrics that we figure go well with it. It's not very easy to explain [laughs]. You know, on the outside you have a chorus that you could sing over and over again, but really, the weird synths, the weird sounds that you hear, the weird structure of the song, that's what we're feeling at the time.
Summoning the Ovef Machine. Photo by Hannah Sellers.
Sarah: We call it the Ovef Machine.
MM: What is that?
Sarah: We’ll write something and we're like, “Nah, that's too straightforward,” or “it's not there yet,” and we're like, it just has to go through the Ovef Machine more, we all have to dwell in it a little bit and figure out a way to make it not so straightforward. It's got to marinate.
Nick: We let it tell us what to do.
Sarah: I feel like Kyla is a great part of the Ovef Machine. She lives in Wisconsin, so a lot of times we will work on something and have ideas that we're sending [to her] and she is often the last musical part, and the part that makes something like, “Oh, that's totally different.” Like, that changes the entire tone, and then we start to riff on that. Her more synthetic sound helps propel that.
MM: Do you feel like the music has inherently angry or politically charged undertones?
Nick: Well, when you’re mad you want to dance.
MM: You guys are making commentary on what’s going on in the world. “Fauxtography” touches on social media and how we’re perceived through our internet identities—and you wrote it before AI became a huge buzzword. What’s informing your music now that you’re writing new songs?
Sarah: Sometimes it's kind of a little bit word salady, like Gertrude Stein poetry weirdness, where those words just fit like a puzzle. Can they take on meaning? Yes. Our new song is about living with anxiety [laughs].
Nick: We want people to take what they want from it.
MM: You guys get compared to the B-52s a lot. I know artists can get frustrated if they get pigeonholed into one type of genre. How do you feel about that comparison and who else inspires you?
Marites: It’s an honor to be compared to the B-52’s. I wish we were that good. I hope we are in our 70s rocking that. But they're definitely not our only influence.
Nick: We all listen to crazy different stuff all over the gambit and constantly send each other music to get into. There’s not much of the day that we're not listening to music.
Sarah: Finom, who are local. I saw them last year and it was the best show I saw all year. Their harmonies are amazing and I love everything about them.
Sarah: I really like the new Mamalarky album. They’re from LA I think. I just saw them at Schuba’s a couple weeks ago and it was such a great show.
Nick: I just bought tickets to Blood Incantation, they’re playing Bohemian Cemetery, they had Tangerine Dream on their last album, they’re the best band in the world for me right now.
Ovef Ow at Thalia Hall. Photo by Fleurette Farley Estes.
MM: What’s next for Ovef Ow?
Nick: An EP?
Marites: Yeah, I don’t know, I’m thinking we should record again soon [once we] line up a couple more songs. It’s hard for us to do a full album, I realize, otherwise it’ll take another five years.
Sarah: I like EPs, they’re snack sized.
Marites: Yeah. We like releasing snacks.
Nick. And playing cool, weird shows. The weirder the better.
