Just how do we know which artist really is under the radar and deserving of a profile boost in this thread? The search facility on this website is an obvious starting point so, as is the case with Antje Duvekot, when such a search reveals no matches, then we must be on the right track. Duvekot gets a mention here only as a backing vocalist on Lizanne Knott and Martyn Joseph albums and, bizarrely, as the animator on a Dar Williams video in 2021.
If these are slim pickings then what it does do is highlight into what territory we are stepping here. As well as Knott and Williams, Duvekot has worked with the likes of Richard Shindell, John Gorka, Lucy Kaplanksy and Kris Delmhorst. Shindell it was who, as well as producing, played and sung on 2009’s ‘The Near Demise of the High Wire Dancer’ and the 2012 follow-up ‘New Siberia.’
Originally born in Germany and transplanted to the US as a young teen, Antje Duvekot began to hone her observational skills through a lens of biculturalism when she picked up a guitar during that move. Some years later, the confessional folk of Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco gave her license to share her observations, no matter how personal, in her first emerging songs. Of that period Duvekot says “My older songs sought to disarm trauma by bluntly acknowledging its destabilizing nature and creating a space in which to exist with that sensation, both for myself and my audiences.”
Neil Dorfsman, sound engineer and producer of the likes of Dylan, Springsteen, Knopfler and Sting has critiqued Duvekot to perfection. “She creates an entire, detailed world in verse, and takes you there with beautiful and understated melody. Her songs are stunning paintings of colour and shade and always generate the heat and light that real art should. In an unpoetic and ‘in your face’ world, she is lyrical and subtle.”
Duvekot is, indeed, a lyricist extraordinaire and her albums are full of shining examples, perhaps never more so than ‘Ballad of Fred Noonan’ from the ‘New Siberia’ album. Here she puts her own spin on the infamous last flight of Amelia Earhart in 1937. Earhart’s disappearance was a huge deal at the time and the fact that another soul was lost on that flight, her navigator Fred Noonan, was, in the main, overlooked. Duvekot here imagines Noonan’s take on that flight as a doomed and unrequited love for the aviator “Your eyes were shimmering Amelia and I mistook it for love, when you asked me to go as your celestial navigator.” The denouement sees the fog clearing from the poor man’s eyes “The more I think about it now, It was only up above the clouds that our love was ever real……I did it for love, you did it for glory…….Oh Amelia, don’t I feel like a clown, oh you went down in history well me, I just went down.”
Although Antje Duvekot has been making music for over twenty years she has never been particularly prolific when it comes to album releases; her most recent release, 2023’s ‘New Wild West’ coming after a seven-year gap. This can probably be attributed in part to the fact that, in addition to music, it turns out that the Dar Williams video wasn’t a one off. Antje also works as an animator and has created music videos for Toad The Wet Sprocket, Eliza Gilkyson, Martyn Joseph, Eliot Bronson and Lori McKenna.
Antje Duvekot seems to be, sadly, yet another of those artists, whose public appeal falls short of the esteem with which they are held within their profession. A truism that seems to be far too common within our beloved Americana genre. For those of us still trading in the physical, hard copies of Duvekot’s older albums can be tricky to track down but this under the radar talent warrants the effort.
Nice to read this piece. When I first heard ‘The Near Demise of the High Wire Dancer’ I thought she was a major new talent and was going to breakthrough but a combination of caprice and the relative infrequency of new music seems to have stymied this.