By: Doug March
Bob Augustine and Harry Kappen make music from different places, in different styles, and with different ideas about how a song should move. Augustine draws on the directness of country and roots music. Kappen, a Dutch musician now living in Mexico, follows rock and pop wherever a melody or an unexpected turn takes him. Put their recent work side by side, though, and a shared interest comes into focus. Both artists are asking what lasts when the excitement of the moment fades.
Augustine’s “Four Leaf Clover (Remix)” starts with an image anyone can understand. A four-leaf clover is a small piece of luck, the kind of discovery that can make an ordinary day feel briefly charmed. The song’s appeal lies in that scale. Rather than reaching for a grand statement, Augustine works with the everyday language of hope and chance. The remix gives him another opportunity to present the song, suggesting a career built on returning to an idea until it finds its audience.
Kappen’s “Good Samaritans” looks outward. Its subject is the person who helps without expecting applause: the neighbor, stranger, or friend whose generosity might never become a headline. On After the Crossing, an album of ten songs he performed and produced himself, Kappen has room to approach such ideas through shifting sounds and arrangements. Where Augustine’s title invites listeners to imagine luck arriving, Kappen asks them to notice the people who make someone else’s luck possible.
That difference reflects their musical instincts. Augustine’s country-leaning material depends on a clear connection between singer and listener. Its strength comes from making a familiar feeling sound personal. Kappen draws from a wider stylistic vocabulary. He has cited David Bowie, the Lennon and McCartney partnership, Thom Yorke, Neil Young, Beck and Prince among his influences. Those names point less to one fixed sound than to an appetite for reinvention. His songs can change shape while keeping an emotional idea at their center.
Their careers have also taken distinct routes. Augustine brought his music to the Edinburgh Fringe in August, placing his work in a setting where performers meet audiences face to face and must earn their attention in real time. “Four Leaf Clover (Remix)” was later named a Maverick Country Top Pick and featured as a chartbreaker on WNHE’s New Music Monday. Those moments speak to the gradual work of building recognition: a performance here, a radio introduction there, one new listener at a time.
Kappen’s path crosses borders as well as genres. His move from the Netherlands to Mexico gives his career an international dimension, while his self-performed recordings show how much of the work he is willing to carry himself. Recognition has followed. His honors include Elite Songwriter of the Year in 2024, Independent Music Network Favorite Impact Artist in 2025, and Elite Musician of the Year in 2026. He also received a 2026 ISSA Silver Album of the Year award for Four. The awards mark a sustained creative output, but they do not fully explain the curiosity that drives it.
There is a contrast in how the two artists seem to approach familiarity. Augustine can begin with a recognizable country image and ask listeners to hear their own experience in it. Kappen can begin with a recognizable moral idea and search for a new musical frame around it. One trusts the warmth of a shared phrase. The other trusts the surprise of where a song might go next. Both approaches require conviction. A simple image must feel lived in, and an adventurous arrangement still has to give the listener something to hold onto.
Their recent songs also suggest two ways of thinking about good fortune. A clover is found. A helping hand is offered. Chance plays a role in any artist’s career, whether it appears as the right stage, a radio supporter, or a listener passing along a song. Augustine and Kappen have each had such moments of visibility. Yet their work keeps returning to the human choices beneath them, the decision to show up, to pay attention, to try again and to make something worth sharing.
There is no need to force these musicians into the same genre to hear that connection. Augustine’s grounded storytelling and Kappen’s restless musicianship make for a more interesting pairing precisely because they differ. Their songs leave listeners with related questions. What do we do when luck finds us? And what might change if we become the person who brings a little of it to someone else?
