In 1999, fresh from his high school graduation in northern Maine, an eighteen-year-old Howie Day rented studio time in Boston and self-financed the piece-by-piece recording of his debut album, Australia. "It was hard," says Day, "because I didn't have the money or the songs to do it straight through. So I would write some songs and then when go back in the studio when I could afford it and record them."

A year later, when the album was finally complete, he self-released it on "Daze Records" and took his show on the road. Touring tirelessly and playing as many as 300 solo dates a year, Day earned a devoted following, especially on college campuses, appropriately enough, where students traded bootlegs of his shows on the Web, and word-of-mouth spread. Australia has since sold over 24,000 copies. This spring, Day -- now twenty-one -- signed with Epic Records, which will re-release the album June 11th and has already targeted early 2003 for Day's next, as-yet-unwritten release.

"When I pulled into my driveway last night at 4 a.m.," Day says, back home in Maine for the first time since January after wrapping up a West Coast tour, "I was thinking that when I left I wasn't signed, and now I'm back and I have a record deal. It's a lot more pressure, but that's exactly what I want. This is what I want to do."

And it's what he's been doing since he was fifteen, when he played his first solo concerts at tourist traps on the Maine coast. From there, it didn't take long for him to get a gig at the University of Maine, in Orono. "I spent my sixteenth birthday," Day remembers, "at a college bar with drunk college girls all over me."

Not much has changed: Day's looks are as big of a draw as his hooks. The college girls swoon more than ever, and Day's unique one-man live show is still his meal ticket. In concert, underneath his yearning vocals and insistent rhythm guitar, Day layers loops and his own samples: a baseline, by drumming on his guitar and picking its low strings; a melodic embellishment on the higher strings, and sometimes, a nearly rap-like chorus. The result is something exactly halfway between folk music and dance music, Tim Buckley and Fatboy Slim -- it's evolved, sophisticated pop that does not limit or trouble to define itself. "I love the way musical tastes are changing and expanding," Day says. "And samples keep it fresh. The songs on Australia I've been playing live for two and a half years, and loops keep it interesting. I love playing solo, but it's hard when it's just you and a guitar."

Day's relentless itinerary over the past three years has, he admits, cut into his songwriting. But he also grew up fast under the pressure of performing alone night after night. Home for a little more than a month, Day says he's got some of the next album written, but is planning to do as much writing as he can before he heads back out in July on the Jeep Outside tour with Sheryl Crow and Train. "The songs I'm writing now are more mature," he says. "I learned so much about writing and performing from being on the road and playing live. My songs are better."

The Outside tour represents another step up for Day -- who was awed on his most recent tour when fans in Los Angeles knew all his songs, "even the unreleased ones" -- and will expose him to an audience broader than the student-heavy demographic primarily responsible for his rise so far. Day more than welcomes the challenge: "I don't want to be just 'the college guy. I love it that [students] like my music, but it has to be more than that. 'College bands,'" he says, "never last."

AUGUSTIN K. SEDGEWICK
(June 6, 2002)