Northern Country is the name of his album but if the truth be known, Adrian Crowley crawled from the south. He was born in Sliema, a northwestern seaside suburb of Valletta, at the tail end of the ’60s, weeks after his eight-months pregnant mother splashed into the Maltese Mediterranean and hauled out a drowning swimmer.

Up until school age, to be exact.

“So I was too young when I left to have any visual memories— but I’ve discovered that I do have memories, from my sense of smell. It’s really weird. It’s like that theory, is it Marcel Proust? Remembrance of Things Past. He said that he discovered a flow of memories from tasting a little cake he’d last tasted as a kid.”