Road Warrior Antje Duvekot Talks Touring

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By Steve Miller

"I'm always on the road," said singer/songwriter Antje Duvekot, as she sipped her iced coffee on a particularly sunny day in Davis Square. "It's perpetual."

Duvekot sat down with Boston Music News the day after arriving home from a four week stint in support of her latest album, The Near Demise of the Highwire Dancer. After logging 5,500 miles criss-crossing from Tennessee to Illinois opening for Richard Shindell and then Ellis Paul, Duvekot's piercing eyes looked tired but alive.

With years of relentless touring in both Europe and the United States under her belt, there isn't much Duvekot hasn't done. She's played house shows in Colorado, old-time radio revues in Tennessee and folk festivals in Denmark and Ireland. But for the Somerville based songstress, the cafes and basement venues beneath the brownstones of Boston will always be her home.

"Whenever I'm out in the world and I'm asked about Boston, I'm a little snobby about it," she said. "It's like the place to be for folk music, I think. I've traveled a lot and I've played a lot of places and many cities just don't have the kind of excitement about folk music that Boston does."

Before staking claim to the Beantown folk world, Duvekot fostered her brand of contemplative melodiousness in the major metropolitans of Philadelphia and New York City. Although the Big Apple and the City of Brotherly Love house vibrant communities of musicians, Duvekot found them to be too exclusive, too competitive. "In Boston people are just a bunch of friends who like to play music."

For Duvekot, it's all about that bond, that communal nature of music, the therapeutic value of a shared experience in song. She said knowing the story behind a song can be comforting, because you often find that you may be dealing with many of the same issues as the songwriter.

"You don't feel alone when you hear those sorts of things," she said "I want to know who they are, and why they wrote the song. But maybe that's voyeuristic. Sometimes you feel kind of vulnerable when everybody knows you, but you don't know them."

But putting her life on display is nothing alien to Duvekot. She is a firm disciple to the lone-soul-and-a-guitar formula for music. The solitude and intimacy that is allowed by such sparse instrumentation lends harrowing honesty to her work.

Though such minimalism comes perhaps more from necessity than principle. "I spend most of the time on the road playing by myself," she said, which greatly influences her songwriting process. "If it's the kind of song that needs other instruments, I typically throw it out...I can't take it on the road, because I can't afford a band."

Not one to sit still for any period of time, Duvekot will be putting some more pavement under her tires starting in April, playing occasional dates all the way through November. The guitar-toting road warrior hasn't booked her schedule quite so solid this time, choosing rather to give herself a well deserved brake from the highway. "I think I'm slowing down a little bit. At least for the foreseeable future."