Folk. It’s been done since there were instruments, yet, when done well, it never get’s old. There are great folk albums, really bad ones, and everything in between. They’ve given us peeks into our favorite artists’ psyches during certain times in their lives, and they’re often an audible record of an artist’s growth. Enter Austin Miller.

The Orlando native barely has two decades under his belt, but he’s already managed to make a name for himself within the metropolis’ thriving music scene. He’s done it on the strength of countless gigs (including a Southeastern U.S. tour), but now the 21-year-old who started writing songs out of boredom and insomnia has some hardware to give away at all of his shows.

Not counting random, lo-fi bedroom recordings, The Morning Birds officially serves as Miller’s official handshake to his listeners’ collective ears – and the six-song set is most definitely memorable. The 24-minute volume of songs finds him mostly sticking to the usual singer-songwriter fare, but the thing that separates Miller from his peers is his willingness to seemingly accept who he is on record. He rarely gets into philosopher mode, and the deepest he really gets is saying “every king and queen will someday lose their thrones/and every shining stare will fade to the unknown.” (“No One Really Knows”).

Instead, Miller sticks to vividly describing the world he observes through his own two eyes. “Nothing More” finds him strumming quiet chords and recollecting on a “house on the dirt road that’s been there for as long as I know” where a “warm damp air/floats through my hair.” A quiet piano chimes in here are there, and the track finds Miller using multi-tracking to his advantage as he lays down harmonies that aren’t perfect by any means, but pleasingly earnest all the same. In fact, the song is kind of a microcosm of the record. There are a couple flawed patches (“Within Reach” seems to have been mixed at a lower volume than the rest of the tracks), but The Morning Birds’ imperfections are charming, and Miller will surely hone his gift into a great LP someday.

Album opener “If You Don’t” begins with him singing, “I’ve seen the smoke for quite sometime, but I’ve yet to see the fire,” and that pretty much sums everything up: While all you may know of Miller might be the measly smoke signal you see from afar, rest assured that the fire is burning bright somewhere in the distance.