Unlike, say, this guy, The Duke of Norfolk is neither nobility nor master of that most rumpiest bit of rUK. Rather, this Duke is the stage name of Adam Howard, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based indie-folk singer-songwriter, with a prolific repertoire of lovely songs with a shade of non-weird Sufjan Stevens or I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning-era Bright Eyes about them to his name.
Howard started releasing his music in the form of regular, independently-released EPs in February 2011 before hooking up with New Jersey’s Mint 400 label for January 2013’s Le Monde Tourne Toujours, and last month he put out his first album-length collection on the label. Birds… Fly South! is based around the seasons of bird migration, and features 11 tracks selected and re-recorded with a wider range of instruments and in Howard’s now-signature lusher style. Witness: “The First Day of Spring”, for which you will find a suitably seasonal video below.
Like just about everybody who emails me at this time of year, Howard is currently hanging out in Austin where tomorrow he will play a show at something called the Bayou Lounge. He still had time for a wee email natter though.
How did you get started playing music and recording?
I really got started playing music in high school. I was the drummer for a little folky jam band and absolutely loved it (drumming for a band again is one of my life goals). Late in high school, I took up the piano, started writing songs, and started dabbling with recording those songs. The recordings were very crude and not very well done, but it gave me a start. Then at University, I worked for my Uni doing sound reinforcement (running live sound for events and such) and tremendously increased my technical knowledge of microphones and audio technology. I started going in at night and using the school’s equipment to try to record. Sometimes I would spend all night recording. Learning and trying new things. I loved that as well.
Eventually I took the university’s two classes on audio technology after which, I worked as the teacher’s assistant and helped to teach those classes. Along the way I picked up the guitar and the banjo and started writing songs with them.
Three words to describe your sound…
This is a bit difficult for me. I don’t very much like describing my music. I’m all for informative exposition, but descriptors are rarely neutral. I don’t like to praise my work because that makes me seem boastful and I don’t like to criticise it because that makes me seem morose.
That said, I’ll still have a go at the question:
hopeful, orchestrated, rhythmic
What influences you?
The things that influence my music and songwriting are vast and many, but if I were to sum it up I would have to simply say stories. Folk music is all about stories. The stories that I write tend to come out a little like a diary entry; a little story and a little reflection on that story. My voice as a writer comes mostly from the things that I’ve read, so it’s heavily influenced by faery stories — both old and new — like The Brothers Grimm and also like Neil Gaiman or John Connolly. I write a lot about travel and my own geographic restlessness is certainly a factor in that (I’m currently writing this on a plane from Dublin to Philadelphia).
I’m really interested by the idea that Birds… Fly South! is made up of rerecorded tracks from your previously-released EPs. Was it difficult selecting the songs for inclusion? If you could do it again, is there anything else you would include?
Yes, it was a bit difficult but maybe not very difficult. There were definitely songs that were for sure on the list (like “The South”) and there were others that had to fight against similar, equally good songs for a place. In the end, because of time restraints, I cut three or four songs that originally made the list (like “A Mortal Ballad”). If I could do it again, mostly the only change I would make is that I would have given myself the time to rerecord those extra songs.
Why The Duke of Norfolk?
So when I decided to choose a name my first thought, for two reasons, was to look for a good royal title. The first reason for this was my family name, Howard — many of the English royalty are Howards —and the second is, because I’ve always loved fairy-tales. I was drawn to that storybook idea that the protagonist (which if we face it, we all count ourselves the protagonist of our own story) despite his humble childhood finds himself a prince or something of that sort.
So after I settled on choosing a royal title, I did a little research on the Howards and found that many of the early dukes of Norfolk were all called Thomas Howard. My middle name is Thomas, so it just seemed a good choice.
What other releases/shows do you have planned at the moment?
Next week I am playing at SXSW, and this spring and summer I’m planning on doing a few solo tours of house shows in support of the Birds album.
I am also going to be working on another release or two. The one that I’m most excited about is going to be an album of covers. It will be a mixture of songs that friends of mine have written and traditional folk songs from England, Ireland, Scotland and America. That should be out, if all goes well, late this year or early next. I also hope to put together another small EP of originals as well, which maybe going to be a split EP with a band from Northern Ireland.
And what are you listening to at the moment?
I’ve been listening to the soundtrack to the movie Inside Llewyn Davis almost obsessively since I saw the film a couple of weeks ago. I’ve also been listening to a fair amount of Liz Lawrence’s music. Her new single “Health & Safety” is fantastic. Then I’m also, as I mentioned, about to work on covering some of my friends’ music, so I’ve gotten back into an EP that my friends The Cellar Door released last year. That EP, Flightlessness, is truly fantastic and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.