Artists:Antje Duvekot
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Antje Duvekot (Aunt-yah DOO-va-kot) was born in Heidelberg, Germany]; and her biography is a tale of two childhoods. She remembers her German years as carefree, scampy, and filled with song. Every day in school, they sang old folk songs. When camping in the summer, and all her chums went playing in the woods, she stayed behind, enchanted by the sound of adults singing around the campfire. The old melodies drew her, giving such knowable emotion to the words; but more than that was the sound of private feelings being shared. There was power in that, she knew even then, power and something else. Healing. Community. When she was 13, her carefree world shattered. Her mother remarried, and her new home was as filled with strictness and coldness as her old one had been with songs and laughter.
This new family moved to Delaware. She barely spoke English; she knew no one. Music became even more important to her, but for very different reasons.
"I was so confined by my stepdad and my mother that I really didn't have a life," she recalls now. "So I had to kind of exist in an abstract environment, and I just poured my whole existence into music. Because it was the only thing I had access to. Since then, I have always looked at music as a lifeboat; I don't know how I would have gotten through that long period of loneliness without it."
She discovered the subterranean folk world of urban songwriters like Paul, John Gorka, and Ani DiFranco. She made little tapes of them, and listened while she wandered through her strange new world. As she told The Boston Globe in 2005, "The only time I was truly happy as a teenager was walking around the neighborhood, listening to my folk tapes."
"My English wasn't so good yet," she recalls now, "but I just loved the kind of melancholy, solitary aspect of the songs. And I could tell that these people were saying something important. That was profound and meaningful to me, even before I knew just what it was they were saying. It was like these artists were actually talking to me, not just making sounds."
She is uncomfortable talking about these years, but this other childhood is the key to the powerful, even revolutionary, empathy that informs everything she writes. It is the empathy of the exile, the outsider; the quiet one, wide-eyed and wary, staring out at a world that will not see her, will not show her a single place, or even moment, that feels like home. It is the empathy of someone who understands what it means when hurt becomes a way of life.
Listen to it in the furiously truthful "Judas," in which she compares the Biblical villain to the lonely kid at the back of the school bus, teased, bullied, left to smolder until he finally ignites ("Last night, Judas' father threw his son against the wall/ That's how you learn to be invisible") In "Dandelion" hear how deeply she understands the vast, unnavigable chasm between the private world of the wallflower ("Of course, you would pursue me, I was Julia Roberts"), and the outer world, that does not even notice her. And yet, in the undulating "Go Now," she boldly reminds these outcasts that only they can break out of their shells, however hard and necessary they have become.
She refuses to offer the cheap escape of happy endings that come only in bad pop songs and Lindsay Lohan movies. In the starkly gorgeous "Hold On," she warns of waiting too long for those endings: "Now you're waiting for a rescue/ But no snow white horse shows up for you." Quietly, sadly, with wincing and crucial honesty, she urges us to hold on. Not because the happy endings are coming, but because - well, what's the alternative? Duvekot believes that her bicultural upbringing, and her relative newness to English, helped shape her unique way with a song.
"When I came to America," she says, "I wasn't communicating very well to other people, just to myself through my art. And I think that's a different way, not as linear or analytical. I was just kind of making up my own guerilla English, my own way of saying things. I didn't understand the right slang and clichés, so I made up my own. And my brain kind of works in funny ways, anyway."
It gives her a startlingly original poetic palette. We somehow know just what she means when she sings "You're walking in a shoe box, mapping out a dead end." Offering a beatitude for the wallflower in "Dandelion," she lets her say to the boy who doesn't notice her: "You were looking for a tea light/ And I will always be/ A forest fire." Tea light? And yet, it's perfect.
"She gives us these fresh twists on what we take for granted as the obvious," folk performer Ellis Paul says, " and reminds us that we're all partners with the victims, in a sense. She's a bit of a psychologist, but also a sociologist and anthropologist, looking at the big picture through the human minutiae. She can focus on a tiny moment, get deep inside somebody's head, and spell out details we might not think about. I think Dylan did that at times, in songs like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." But I can't think of a songwriter around today who's doing it this well."
Being an immigrant helped shape that vision, too. "I have a bit of an outsider's perspective on wrong and right," Antje says. "I know that there can be different possibilities. A lot of Americans think, 'This is the way it is.' And in Germany, it's more, 'This is the way it is here.' I've seen that things aren't the same everywhere. So in my writing, I challenge the norms of our value system. I want to explore the 'what-if's' about all that." When Antje discovered the substream folk world, where the Ellis Pauls and John Gorkas plied their wares, she was immediately hooked. In the secret cellars, where honest songs were sung, she found kindred spirits, fellow exiles, a society of outcasts.
"I love that it's an underground scene," she says, "because that means it's based on the merit of the songs, not the marketing. It's a very real scene that connects the fans to the artists without a whole lot in between." As she hard-travels from open-mike to bohemian bar, coffeehouse to veggie cafe, singing for anyone who will listen, her songs have become her press agent, as fans and fellow artists spread the word about this remarkable new songwriting voice.
Asked what she hopes people get from her songs, she laughs shyly. "I hope they get softened up inside," she says, "emotionally moved. And happy. Because I think it makes you happy to be moved, even if it's by a sad song. I've never found anything like songs, that can get so many elements of my heart and brain working all at once. They're just a few minutes long, but you can live a whole life in a song.".
Extracted from Antje's bio on her website.
External links
| Antje Duvekot on MySpace |
| Antje Duvekot on Wikipedia |
More information
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This artist lives in Massachusetts. |
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The gender of this artist/group is female. |
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Listener Tags & Comments
Esther is crazy about Antje. Hopefully she'll write about her here.
Okay, okay! I'm finally writing. This has turned into a full-blown musical crush, honestly. Here is the email I sent to Antje on March 23rd, 2006. We've corresponded a bit since, and I do think/hope we'll have her live on Whole Wheat Radio sometime in the future. Woohoo! Esther
Hi Antje -
I've been feeling this urgency to connect with you before you "get too big." What a discovery you have been for me and for our internet radio webcast, Whole Wheat Radio, a quirky interactive independent online music community out of our cabin here in a small Alaskan town called Talkeetna. I've thanked my friend Ann Pence 20 times over for dropping Boys, Flowers, Miles by a few weeks ago, so we could get it on the air.
But it was while I was driving down to Anchorage last week that you hit me. I had to return the CD to Ann, so I thought I'd pop it in during the 2 1/2 hour journey... I liked your music immediately. Then I was grinning at your audio clips, and by the time I was snorting along with you on the pig song, and laughing a big ol' belly laugh, I thought - I have not been quite this immediately enamored by a musician/performer/person/CD in years, and I've heard a HUGE amount of new music in the 4 years of Whole Wheat Radio's existence... I mean - thousands of CDs are squeezing us out of our cabin.... so many that I've become dull to most new music... CDs have kind of lost their magic ( I miss that feeling when I was a teenager and I'd buy a new record and open it oh-so-slowly-reverently)... but yours kind of sparkled it's way into my consciousness like.... ha ha... like a dandelion coming into bloom!
There was a moment after the pig-snorting song, when I realized how much I liked you, for your pretty songs, variety of mood, texture, vocal style, your gutsy, silly live audio clips, etc, and I was starting to compose a letter to you in my head, and it was this gorgeous March-in-Alaska sunny day - snow against the bluest sky, and these huge mountains of snow and shadow ahead, and 2 ravens diving and dancing right in front of my windshield, and I thought - I'm having a good time. I'm really having a good time right now, at this moment, listening to this Antje whatever-her-name-is, with the ravens, mountains, snow, pig-snorting, etc.
So...
Will you please send your first CD, Little Peppermints, to us? And the new one, when you finish it? You can learn more about who/what we are by going to our website... www.wholewheatradio.org .
Would you ever think of coming up to Alaska? We could offer you a house concert/live webcast. And I think you'd have adventurous fun...
Say hi to Ellis Paul for me. He was an instructor (with Vance Gilbert and Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer) the first time I attended the Alaska Songcamp... He might remember me if you mention I was the one who played the mountain dulcimer and flute... but he might not, too... it was a few years back. He had a lot of good stuff to pass on about songwriting, that's for sure! We play some of his stuff on Whole Wheat Radio - only the recordings that are on non-RIAA labels...
Take care, and know your music is finding new appreciators via Whole Wheat Radio!
Warmly,
Esther
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Request a show of songs by Antje Duvekot
| Song | Album | Length | Played | Overall | You | Tags | Single Request |
| Sex Bandaid | Boys, Flowers, Miles | 3:56 | 37 |  35 votes |
You have to login to give your opinion about songs. | Acoustic / Solo vocalist / Acoustic guitar / Angry / Slow / Catetheshiner superfav / Chili / Girl with guitar | Judas | Boys, Flowers, Miles | 4:56 | 38 | 40 votes |
You have to login to give your opinion about songs. | Acoustic / Solo vocalist / Band / Acoustic guitar / Girl with guitar / Bleau's favs / Catetheshiner superfav | Talk 2 | Boys, Flowers, Miles | 1:33 | 4 |  1 votes |
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| Total Time | 10:25 |
The current music queue contains 11 songs that will take 41 mins, 9 secs to play.
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Artist name is|Antje Duvekot Last played| more than 1 month ago ---------------------------------------- Show name| Songs by Antje Duvekot Length| 15 minutes Order by| random Limit| 3 songs ----------------------------------------
Stats
- Spotlighted: Friday, July 28th 2006
- Songs on WWR: 49
- Total plays: 1264
- Total requests: 941
- Total listens: 37376
- CDBaby referrals: 18
- CDBaby sales: Big Dream Boulevard (Sold 7 copies)
Boys, Flowers, Miles (Sold 8 copies)
Little Peppermints (Sold 2 copies)
Snapshots (Sold 1 copies)
Other skins for artist pages
| Default / Simple / Classic / Jimbob / For Playing Around With / 12-stringer / Atuu / Mert / Kelli / Rubenerd / Kazookid |
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