Imagine yourself rolling along a dusty orange highway, arm slung carelessly along the sill of an open window, the wind whipping your hair about your face in great, steady gusts. Through the portal of the window, low, arid landscape blows past, mile after desolate mile.
Imagine yourself - pack slung across your back, crunching softly through a frozen, moonlit landscape, the light reflecting gently off the paper-thin sheet of ice, just solidified, like new skin, atop the glittering snow.
Now imagine yourself on a knotty pine porch. The sky above you clear and bright, the trees dotting the area just in front of the low cabin a collage of greens and browns, peppered in places with burnt orange and pale yellow, painted thickly here, there, by an American elm, sprouting like a broccoli floret grown to mammoth proportions, a Black ash, it's nubby ridges a veiny grid work of flecks of crumbly bark, seemingly begging to be peeled from its trunk by idle hands.
Here, amongst the elms and the ash's, amongst the dense deciduous framework, in the cool, clear lakes, in the rolling wheels of a West Coast-bound car, in the moist leather of that cold nighttime field, and on that very porch, Austin Plaine finds inspiration.
And here, Plaine writes.
***
Homegrown is a word often associated with talent. Down-to-earth a term more often uttered in respect to a person's demeanor, their approach to other people and the world around them.
Songwriter Austin Plaine is both.
"It's the only thing I've ever really known. I've lived in Minnesota basically my whole life," Plaine told HNGN recently. "I'm a huge outdoors guy. I love nature. I love the lake. I love the woods, going up to the cabin. I grew up playing outside all the time and in the winter we were playing hockey outdoors and everything, so yeah I think that's a huge influence on my writing just in the fact that a lot of my songs are very organic and down-to-earth and I think that comes with being involved in nature and the outdoors."
Plaine spent his childhood among the elms and ashes, spent his summers in the lake, his winters on it. It's an experience he believes gives an undeniably unique quality to his songwriting, his lyrics, that speaks to the everyday nature of life, that speaks to something, something small, something perhaps unknowable, uncomplicated and yet vital, in all of us.
"I'm a big fan of simplicity. I think that just comes from living in Minnesota - the simple life, really down-to-earth people."
And it's reflected in Plaine's music - the instrumentation, most often an acoustic guitar, sometimes accompanied by banjo or a harmonica and sparse percussion, is clear, crisp, clean - simple in a way that allows the lyrics - the most important aspect of any song for Plaine - to take their position at center stage.
"You don't always need the glitz and glamor to make a good song and I appreciate the lyrics and I think the lyrics should be the No. 1 thing in a song. The instrumentation should be supporting the lyrics rather than the lyrics supporting the music."
That lyric-forward approach is something Plaine has always employed. As a younger artist - he estimates that he began playing music around 13 or 14, was, only a short time thereafter, writing his own songs - Plaine's lyrics unsurprisingly centered on issues specific to that age - the opposite sex, heartbreak, the sickly sweet feeling singular to the experience of being a young person struggling with, toward an identity.
Now 23 and with a handful of commercially successful songs already under his belt, Plaine's lyrics have taken on a different bent - that little inkling, that vital aspect we all share and that Plaine hopes, by infusing into his music, he can use to create something accessible to a broader spectrum of people.
"It's kind of just starting with a clean slate and just finding something that's catchy and just building off of that. Something that just hits you in the feels and then you just kind of go with it and see where it takes you. That's kind of how I write."
But really, what Plaine wants more than anything, is to be known as a songwriter. Like his approachable, straightforward songs, he wants to develop a professional persona based on his work ethic and his love for the world beyond the computer screen, beyond the phone. He's already been compared to the likes of Bob Dylan, Ryan Adams, even Arcade Fire. But as much as Plaine appreciates having his name even mentioned in the same breath as those songwriting superstars, what he wants is to find his own voice, create his own niche.
"It's nice to hear that...I think just getting pushed in that realm, it's good to have people saying that stuff, but definitely trying to find your own voice in all the madness is a key in part in being an artist."
Fortunately for Plaine, his earnest, deeply emotional songs have already done well to cut through that barricade of noisome turmoil and made their way into people's homes and ear buds through a variety of means. A fairly innocuous trip to Nashville a few short years ago resulted in Plaine's soulful songs being featured in advertisements and on television shows. "Your Love" was featured on a Mastercard commercial. "Wait" was featured on the show "Hart of Dixie." And "Beautiful" was even used as the introduction to an episode of Season 16 of "The Biggest Loser."
Those placements made Plaine's self-titled album - his first studio effort - released by Washington Square on Sept. 11, possible.
In the world of music, Plaine's story of success - finding backing for a studio album without having toured extensively - certainly depicts the road less traveled. But it's a road that's being trod much more often as the industry itself evolves.
"Little indie artists, we have to find so many ways to get our music out there with Spotify, Soundcloud that now TV licensing, TV placements are really crucial for a guy like me to get the word out about my songs. So I just see it as a vital tool for my career just in exposure even. It's cool, it's cool to get those placements, and it's just a super important tool in music these days."
But Plaine's musical journey, a journey that's brought him from the cozy confines of that cabin in the Minnesota woods to the Music City and back again, almost never was. An avid hockey fan and player growing up, Plaine played collegiately at St. John's University in Minnesota and pursued a pre-law degree at the University of Minnesota before that trip to Nashville changed, well, everything.
"I went down to Nashville the first time a couple of years ago when I was recording this record. It was kind of, what you could say, was the turning point of how I perceived music and I saw that more as a career now. It was like, 'OK, these are the people I want to surround myself with.' It was just a huge eye-opener in what I needed to do to make this a career."
While in Nashville, Plaine had the opportunity to work with Jordan Schmidt, a well-known producer in the bursting-at-the-seams music scene in Tennessee's capital who had honed his skills previously through work with acts like Florida Georgia Line, Patent Pending and Ingrid Andress. And it was through Schmidt, who Plaine now refers to as one of his best friends, that Plaine's songs found their way into the world of advertisements and reality television.
But while Plaine's songs possess a certain easily accessible quality and carry a kind of solid reliability, the kind of reliability that makes them perfect for nationally televised shows and ad spots, that doesn't mean his approach to composition is a rote exercise.
"It's really different you know. I just wanted to be creative and free in how I approach a song. Sometimes it starts with lyrics or I'll have a hook that I already thought of and I'll bring music to it, but other times just fiddling around on the guitar and lyrics kind of pop up with a melody that I'm humming."
That fiddling and that humming produced that debut, self-titled album that, with Schmidt's help, Plaine now says turned out about as well as he could have ever expected.
"It was really my first time going into the studio so I was really relying on him to kind of be the guiding force on the songs and helping him create the songs the way that we wanted to do it. It was a great experience."
***
Back home in Minnesota, on that porch amongst the elms and the ash's, Plaine is biding his time. His schedule is full in the coming months - he's got shows booked throughout the month of December - as he looks to get out on the road and give support to his recently released studio offering.
But for now, he waits. And he seeks inspiration. And he writes.
"I'm writing constantly. When I'm home I'm writing every day, so I'm working on the next record, but I don't know when that will be."
For a young musician who cut his teeth, so to speak, from the confines of the studio and the porch of that cabin, a full-fledged tour will be a new adventure. But it's one for which Plaine feels the rush of excitement, the thrill of, as he puts it in "Never Come Back Again" - seeing the world, sailing the ocean and discovering "what it feels like to never come back again."
But when the tour is over, when the next album moves to the fore and he's forced to return to the home that nurtured him, cradled him, swaddled him in its evergreen bosom and turned him into the soulful crooner that he's become, he'll be ready.
"It's usually when I come back home and I have time to reflect on the past that I can just sit down and relax and start writing again."
