A 25-year-old singer-songwriter, Johnny Flynn makes music that seems to draw equally from William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan: He has the ear of a poet and the mind of a storyteller. But the precocious, prolific, South African-born Brit is humble, too: "I guess I started writing poetry and stuff, and then decided to set it to music," he says. Flynn has just made his American debut with A Larum.

Until recently, Flynn was acting in an all-male Shakespearean troupe called Propeller. He came with the group to New York last year for a run in Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew. Characters from Shakespeare's plays, such as Feste and Hamlet, have affected his songwriting. "There's always those kind of luminary figures that seem to speak the truth," he says. "The whole play seems to be around them in a way."

The name of Flynn's album even comes from Shakespeare's stage directions. He says that the word would appear every now and again as "alarum off," meaning that some commotion was happening just offstage. "I quite liked the idea that the noise happening offstage was this album," Flynn says.