Lowen and Navarro’s music is a-crock.

At least Dan Navarro, one half of the acoustic folk duo, says it is.

“The nonserious way to describe our music is acoustic rock, shortened to a-crock,” Navarro says. “The serious way to describe it is folk-based pop music with lyrics relating to what people experience.”

The duo will be performing at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the M-Shop.

The Midwest tour they are currently on began only a week ago in Chicago. After conquering the Midwest, the pair will be heading toward both coasts.

“I love being on the road,” Navarro says.

“It is really hard to be away from home and families, and it is grueling to deal with an all day job, which touring is. At the same time, I like the feeling of getting familiar with people of other towns.”

Getting familiar with people around them is a lot of what Lowen and Navarro do. Most of their songs are not only based on their personal experiences but relate to their audience as well.

“Crossing Over,” the last song on their third album, “Pendulum,” is about Navarro’s mother’s death and helped an audience member deal with their own family member’s death, he says.

“I actually wrote the chorus about three or four months before she died, not knowing what it was,” he says. “It didn’t mean anything then but about a month after her death we sat down to write the song.”

The song tells the story about how she was ill, Navarro’s own fears about it and how they talked about her being ready to die.

“Before she died, we were talking about how she was sick and her death,” he says. “She told me she just wanted to look at me.”

When writing the lyrics, Lowen and Navarro played a pingpong game by passing ideas back and forth. The phrase “Let me memorize your eyes” came up and both of them came unglued.

“Writing music, getting it out and onto paper, into something, definitely helps deal with problems,” Navarro says.

An audience member spent the length of the song with his hands up in the air and his head down.

After the show, he thanked the men for helping him deal with a death in his family.

“When we write from our own experiences, it comes out the strongest and the best,” Navarro says.

Navarro attributes his most intense enduring influence as Bob Dylan, both lyrically and musically.

“He has a way to sling a phrase and create a melodic line that would stick,” he says. “Of the broad range of influences I have, he is definitely the strongest.”

The songs are a collaboration between Lowen and Navarro and have become tighter over the years they have worked together.

“One song we wrote in literally 10 minutes,” Navarro says. “Sometimes they come out really organically, and sometimes it takes awhile.”

All in all, Navarro is pretty happy about his position in life.

“We are doing what we want to,” he says.

“We could have had a giant career for a short time, but instead we have had a modest career for a long time. I cannot complain.”

The show is $7 for the public and $5 for students.