Antje Duvekot has spent more than half of her life enjoying and enduring the generous accoutrements of where her musical destiny has taken her – to recording studios, to outdoor festivals and concert halls and to the necessary grind of touring – but if the truest document of her life as an artist calls for every thin layer to be revealed, it must also include the Hickory Hills neighborhood in Hockessin.

From the time her first CD Little Peppermints was released in 2022, Duvekot has carved out and maintained a solid reputation as a singer-songwriter that has made her a darling of live audiences, where her stage persona combines the innocence of a child on a calliope, the grace of a ballerina and the megaphone immediacy of a town crier coming to share the news of the world. Along the way, Duvekot’s career has intersected in collaborations with some of folk music’s most celebrated icons like Ellis Paul and John Gorka, all while being blessed with a humble deference to her place in the contemporary singer-songwriter roster.

“When I first heard Antje, I knew I was witnessing something very special,” said producer Neil Dorfsman, who has worked with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Sting. “She creates an entire, detailed world in verse, and takes you there with beautiful and understated melody. Her songs are stunning paintings of color and shade and always generate the heat and light that real art should.” 

“Duvekot has gotten hotter, faster than any local songwriter in recent memory,” wrote The Boston Globe. “Her songs feel at once fresh faced and firmly rooted, driven by the whispery sensuality of her voice. She believes in the redemptive power of the shared secret; and is utterly unafraid to mine the darkest corners of her life for songs that turn fear into resilience and isolation into community.”

“The secret of creating is not going in with too much of a preconceived idea, but rather, readjust and play with it and react to it,” Duvekot said from her home in Lincoln, Mass., a short drive from Boston, where she has lived for the past two decades. “It’s like walking through the fog without seeing a hole ahead of time. I love that I have no idea where a song is going yet I love interacting with what I have put on the page.”

Between the ages of 13 and 18, in the Hickory Hills neighborhood – specifically along Erickson Avenue and Cabot Drive and Defoe Road, where she would walk alone for hours – Antje Duvekot began her true journey to create the songs that have become her anthems, her march and in part, her definition.

‘This is what I want to do with my life’

For the first dozen years of her life, Duvekot, who was born and raised in Heidelberg, West Germany on Nov. 15, 1974, lived an almost idyllic childhood. Everywhere she went, music sweetened the air she breathed, from her early classrooms with other students to the parties she would attend with her parents, when there always seemed to be a musical instrument that accompanied choruses of adult voices.

When Duvekot was 13, her natural parents divorced, and suddenly, the teenager found herself transported halfway around the world from West Germany to the United States – to Hockessin, Delaware, specifically -- where she settled with her mother in Hickory Hills. At middle school, she suddenly found herself a refuge, pulled away from the life she knew to suddenly becoming known as the foreign girl who didn’t know the language or the culture or the behaviors or even where to sit on the school bus.

“When I first arrived, I didn’t speak English and no one in school knew German, so I was isolated from the language barrier and the culture was bewildering as well,” she said. “School became overwhelming, and I was trying to make sense of it all. It was all so different from Germany, so I kept my head down.”

Duvekot longed to see her friends back home. She missed her brother, Jens, who was in West Germany with her father. Her only solace was when she listened to her friends, those who sang on her Walkman during her late afternoon walks around the neighborhood: Dar Williams, John Gorka, Ellis Paul and eventually Ani DiFranco, whose righteous babe persona and blistering lyrics ignited Duvekot’s soul with a fierce determination. 

“I don’t even know how I found those CDs but they became something I discovered on my own, so it became my secret genre of music,” she said. “I loved that sound of the acoustic guitar and the voice that sang about something important and personal and raw. I didn’t understand the lyrics very much, but I understood their intent.

“When I began to listen to Ani, she really spoke to me. She was her own person and saying important things,” she said. “It was when I was listening to Ani that I thought ‘This is it. This is what I want to do with my life.’ Ani did so much for my sense of survival as a young person that I wanted to pay it back.”

  

‘It was the only thing that mattered to me’

Following her graduation from A.I. DuPont High School in 1992, Duvekot matriculated at the University of Delaware as a science major but switched her major to history and German literature. Her real major, however, was music. She began writing and recording music on her own on cassette tapes that saw the debut of Waterstains in 1997 made on a borrowed four-track tape machine. At 18, she won the first open mic competition she entered, at the Sam Adams Brewpub in Philadelphia, and in between classes, she played small gigs around Newark.

“I was generally shy, but as I began to write my own songs, they helped me come out of that shell,” Duvekot said. “They became my vessel to become bolder, to take me out of a comfort zone from which I had no other choice.”

Hard against the unrelenting momentum of Duvekot’s aspirations, her mother and stepfather dissuaded her from playing music. 

“Even at that age, I was so determined to make music for a living – to do this thing that Ani DiFranco was doing,” she said. “I had an amazing amount of stubborn resilience. I was going to make music no matter what it cost me. It was the only thing that mattered to me.”

As punishment for Duvekot’s defiance, her mother and her stepfather withdrew funding for her last year of college, and she was suddenly without means.

Distraught and virtually homeless, Duvekot entered the Honors Program at the University of Delaware to sign up for her last year of classes. There, she spoke with department staffer Diana Simmons, who began to look out for Duvekot and eventually invited her to live in the Simmons’ home during her senior year.

After her graduation, Duvekot continued her musical journey, and after scouring the Philadelphia folk music scene, she did a short stint living and playing in New York City.

“I was starting to make my way in the folk scene in Philadelphia playing a lot of open mic shows, but the fact was that a lot of the folkies in that city were older and well established,” she said. “I played at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Connecticut, and there I met festival director Matt Smith, who invited me to play a few shows in Boston in 2005.

“I immediately realized that Boston had a young singer-songwriter folk scene, in part due to Emerson College and [the radio station] WERS, who was playing a lot of my contemporaries’ music,” Duvekot said. “I began to meet a lot of people who were on the same path as I was. It was a thriving and exciting city for music, and I thought, ‘This is the place.’”

She has never left, but occasionally reflects back on the turbulent past that marked her path. On a recent swing through Delaware that included a show at The Kennett Flash in nearby Kennett Square, Duvekot drove through Hickory Hills. 

“I look back at those experiences as a narrative that led me to where I am today,” she said. “It really developed my sensitivity, compassion and empathy for people. For those who have been through trauma, they can go two ways: they can close it off and become fortified or they can use their trauma as a way to unify with others who have also suffered. I like to believe that my compassion muscle was in ways trained by my own climb out of trauma, and it comes through in my songs.”

‘I am a musician in the service of the listener’

For nearly the past two decades, Duvekot has been both a prolific singer-songwriter and a road warrior, splitting her time between her songwriting, the studio and extensive tours of the U.S. and Europe. She has performed at some of the major folk festivals in the world that have included The Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, Mountain Stage in West Virginia, the Philadelphia Folk Festival in Schwenksville, Pa., as well as The Celtic Connections Festival in Scotland and the Tonder Festival in Denmark. 

“I imagine some people come into a music career with an ambitious mindset to become famous and make money, but for me, it was always about ‘meaning’ from one day one,” she said. “I got into the field because it meant something to me, and when I began to get noticed, it became meaningful, not because I was hungry for success, but because I got to play with John Gorka. I got to play with Ellis Paul. I got to meet Dar Williams and perform at a festival with Ani DiFranco.”

In 2023, armed with a new batch of songs, Duvekot traveled to Woodstock, N.Y. to work with her friend and producer Mark Erelli on her latest release, New Wild West, a recording that songwriter Zoe Fitzgerald Carter called “a sonic and lyrical knockout that marks a newly blazed trail in Duvekot’s songwriting career, celebrating the mid-life transition into a greater sense of self.”

“A bunch of people have thought that New Wild West is my best album so far, so that’s the hope, that with each new album, the hope is that it’s as good or better than the previous album,” Duvekot said. “That’s what keeps you going as a creative person – to grow and change and try new things. Other people write from further away places than their own experiences, but my songs have been a barometer of where I am personally. It’s how I came to songwriting, and I still come at it that way – to write about what’s top of mind – turning the inside out and seeing what’s there.”

Duvekot, who will turn 50 this November, said her songwriting has evolved to become a general reflection of where she is in her own life.

“As people evolve, they become bolder, less apologetic and they live with more of an edge and a bite,” she said. “My earlier albums were introspective but also searching, and perhaps now my songs are more about finding than searching. When music is not just a craft but a way of life, you end up processing subjects of emotional salience. It is perilous, but I suppose the advantage is that you can always hide behind the format, where there is no confession needed.  

“It’s part of the contract of being real and open and vulnerable. I am a musician in service of the listener, who presumably has something going on in his or her life that mirrors that which is happening in my songs. My music has become, ‘Someone else needs to hear this,’ and that’s the risk I take. It feels very valuable in this day and age to be someone whose job is to bring authenticity.”

Antje Duvekot will be performing at the Mushroom Festival in Kennett Square on Sept. 7 and at the Listening Booth in Lewes, Del. on Nov. 9. To learn more, visit www.antjeduvekot.com.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].