Photos: TOPANGA CANYON: Foot Ox to Release New Album via Lauren Records
Prairie Song reflects on grief and memory, with recording sessions held at Germaine Dunes and Buck Meek's canyon home.
Foot Ox has announced a new album, TOPANGA CANYON, set for release via Lauren Records, alongside the lead single Prairie Song. The experimental folk band recorded much of the album live at the Topanga Canyon home shared by Germaine Dunes and Buck Meek, incorporating the natural sounds of the canyon into the sessions. The record features members of AJJ, Pigeon Pit, Kisser, iji, and Lake, along with Foot Ox's Oregon lineup.
Photo Credit: Sean Bonnette
'Prairie Song' somehow feels like the ocean. There's country music in it – pedal steel, fiddle, big open sky – but it never quite belongs to any tradition. Teague Cullen and Germaine Dunes, both with unmistakable voices, somehow fit together perfectly.
On paper, the orchestration sounds like it shouldn't work, but it all comes together into something completely honest, familiar, and new, sounding exactly as it should. The song grew from a friend's experience losing a parent, but Cullen wrote it from the parent's perspective, offering reassurance that they are not really gone, but have instead become part of everything around us.
As Cullen puts it: 'I'm not trying to be secretive in my songs, but sometimes abstraction can be a way for people to bring in their own feelings and their own story. It's not a book, it's not a college lecture, it's a song. If I tell you exactly what it's about, I think I'm doing it a disservice. When somebody comes back and says, 'This made me think about something that was really unique to me,' you don't say, 'No, you're wrong.' You say, 'Wow! That's so cool that it contained that too.''
TOPANGA CANYON began when Cullen was invited to spend a week recording at the canyon home Germaine Dunes shares with Buck Meek and their dog, Ringo. With the session already on the calendar, Cullen wrote the album over the course of a single spring, bringing a new collection of songs to California to record mostly live alongside members of Kisser, AJJ, Pigeon Pit, iji, Lake, and Foot Ox's Oregon lineup. Engineered by Dunes and Carly Bond, the sessions unfolded across the house and its front porch, allowing birds, airplanes, wind, conversation, and the natural sound of the canyon to become part of the recordings. What began as a Foot Ox album gradually grew into a deeply collaborative document of a particular place, a particular group of friends, and a brief moment built around trust, intuition, and chance.
Tracklist
Rubber Band
August
Prairie Song
Ringo!
Church (in a box)
Living Room
Hay Francis
Cattle Call
Sagittariat
Denver
Chickenwire
Karma of Our Times
Build Fires
New Age Dolphins in the Canyon
About Foot Ox
Foot Ox is an experimental folk band from Portland, Oregon, originally formed by songwriter Teague Cullen in Tempe, Arizona, in 2007. More than a fixed lineup, Foot Ox has always been a revolving door of friends and collaborators, with each recording taking shape around the people who happen to be in the room. The current incarnation brings together musicians from Kisser, AJJ, Pigeon Pit, iji, Lake, and Meernaa, alongside longtime Foot Ox members, creating a sound that is intimate, adventurous, and quietly psychedelic. Inspired by dreams and old films, the songs drift through love, grief, humor, landscapes, and hope using abstract imagery and subtle, unconventional arrangements. Whether stripped down to intimate folk songs or swelling into a full band, Foot Ox has always embraced contrast, allowing each record to become a document of the friendships that made it possible.
Prairie Song, written by Teague Cullen, addresses grief from the perspective of a parent who has died, with Cullen describing an intention to leave the song open to individual interpretation rather than spelling out its meaning directly.
Photo Credit: Sean Bonnette
