Glide Magazine

Hoody Review by Lee Zimmerman

 

With twenty — yes, twenty! — releases to his credit thus far, Dan Bern somehow remains an undiscovered talent, a singer/songwriter whose music is so honest and evocative, it guarantees an immediate positive impression. His music is frequently compared to Dylan, Springsteen and Elvis Costello, but those comparisons somehow fall short, not because he’s unworthy of being mentioned in such esteemed company, but rather because his singular narratives are so based on individual realities that there’s no way anyone could possibly mistake them for anything but his own. “I guess Bob Dylan was sort of the Dan Bern of the ’60′s,” he once joked to an interviewer and while the humor is apparent, so too is Bern’s confidence and clarity of purpose. It may be borne from the fact that he’s taken various tangents in his career — after all, twenty recordings offers some indication of a restless desire — but they’ve also helped him polish his craft to the point where he can take pride in his singular style. It’s a reputation he can easily hang his hat on.

Likewise, Bern’s prolific prowess has given him a broad palette, one that broadened when he wrote his first novel, “Quitting Science,” under the pen name Cunliffe Merriwether in 2002. This is also the same person who put out a disc entitled The Swastika EP and once billed himself as “Dan Bern & the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy.” Mostly though, he mines the role of tireless troubadour, a mission he refers to in what’s become his signature song, “Talkin’ Woody, Bob, Bruce, and Dan Blues,” from his seminal album Smartie Mine. On his new album, Hoody, he returns to that theme, first in the jangly autobiographical offering “Merle, Hank & Johnny,” in which he recounts the early days of his career and cites the precious influences he name checks in the title, and later in the talking Dylan-esque rambles “Waffle House” and “One Piece at a Time.” Clearly, Bern’s original influences haven’t strayed very far from the surface. Neither has his sense of humor, making his blend of wit and reflection one of his most expressive and effective traits. It’s little wonder that he’s showed off his skills by writing music for film, an area where his narrative abilities have been used to great advantage.

Of course, a back story means little in light of present circumstances if the momentum falters along the way. That’s certainly not the case here, and if anything, Hoody ranks as one of Bern’s best efforts to day. From the gentle echoes of “Sky” and the jaunty tones of “Late Show” to the earnest devotion of “Turn on a Dime” and the richly detailed road song “Terre Haute” (“I really love the smell of gasoline, makes me think of places I’ve seen”), Bern’s music resonates with a clarity and confidence that elevates him to the top tiers of today’s singing storytellers. In short, Hoody offers all the attributes one would hope for in a gifted singer/songwriter — intelligence, savvy and choruses one can hang a hook on. Bern is brilliant indeed.

Absolute Punk

Dan Bern Hoody

Hoody Review by Gregory Robson

Dan Bern emerged on the New York City folk scene in 1998, with the song “Tiger Woods,” a song about, well, his male anatomy. That sense of irreverence and comedy has followed Bern though much of his two decade career. Though he has made a name for himself with his jocular ditties, he’s not afraid to mine songs with weightier themes (see 2002’s The Swastika EP). That innate ability to vacillate so deftly between material is why Bern has and continues to be one of folk music’s finest songwriters.

Hoody theaters to plateau on the next two offerings. The first of which is “Lifeline,” a duet with vocalist Eric Kufs that frolics along with a carefree breeziness while spinning a yarn about an open-arms approach to embracing life. The album’s first ballad comes in the form of “Turn on a Dime,” a woozy valentine replete with harmonica and an unadorned simplicity that lingers long after the final seconds. Not content to muddle in mediocrity, Bern returns with force on “Terre Haute, “ the final song in the life-on-the-road trilogy. Playful and circular, the song borrows the same wooziness from “Turn on a Dime” while also possessing the same enveloping and inviting nature of the title track. Bolstered by twinkling piano and a catchy chorus, this flawless yarn about spending Thanksgiving away from those you love is as strong as anything Bern has released to date.

Bern is an admitted fan of pop music and knows his way around a hook as well as anybody in the folk genre. The finest example of that on Hoody is the cheery “Late Show,” a banjo-fueled ditty about trying not to be late for a public television appearance. Clocking in at 2:16, it could be argued the song is filler but giving it that moniker would probably be a disservice to Bern and the album as a whole. That sense of brevity and cleverness is revisited in “Waffle House,” a 90-second nugget that is a fantastically hilarious take on political persuasion that needs to be heard to be realized.

One of Hoody’s definitive apex moments is the tender ballad “World,” an ethereal and slow-moving rumination about living in the moment that is equal parts supple, simple and utterly sensational. Buttressed by the line “Maybe there’s some posture I should be in when I pray,” the song is ostensibly the finest example of how Bern is never afraid to shy away from heavier themes. If one needs more convincing, his cover of Clarence Wayne Kemp’s “One Piece at a Time” should absolutely do the trick. Relating the story of a blue-collar worker in middle America, the song is a rustic, knee-slapper that is a hip-shaking, beer-swilling good time.

Hoody concludes with “Sky,” the album’s final ballad and in many ways an epilogue to “World.” Utilizing just his weathered vocals and a weary banjo, the spartan “Sky” is a life-affirming and hopeful look at finding peace, joy and comfort despite a muddled and chaotic world. And it is in those quiet and sublime moments in “Sky,” that Bern makes the eighth and final argument of why he continues to be one of folk music’s most important artists. Now 20 years and 11 albums into his career, one hope he has 20 years and 11 more albums still left in him. He truly is a national treasure.

Huffington Post

Dan Bern – Transitions

By James Campion

New Record Hoody and Tour Marks Uncharted Territory for Singer-Songwriter

It was winter and it was late and Dan Bern was on the phone, calling from somewhere south of El Paso, Texas in his van heading to another gig. This one would be about 400 miles away. He had a few boxes of his new CD, Hoody bounding around in the back and a new Bluetooth unit installed in the old girl, and I am sure there was some coffee involved. He was in the mood to talk.

These late-night chats are nothing new for us. Sometimes they come earlier. Sometimes we’re actually in the same vicinity, the same city, and even amazingly in the same room, but it’s the late-night ones from the road where he gets contemplative and digs deep into his songwriting and his plans and shares tales from these never-ending tours, blessedly separated by occasional spurts at home with the family.
We talked about the new record and his upcoming shows this spring – one of which will take place in NYC on April 23 at the Highline Ballroom.

Here’s part of it…

jc: Hoody features a mature, established style of writing. The vocals are really polished and it seems like a new step for you. I know that you don’t necessarily write for a record, you pick the songs you like the best. But was there a specific idea of what kind of songs you felt worked best with this collection?

Dan Bern: Well they were just kind of the new batch and because of that it felt pretty much of a piece. The previous one took such a long time, Drifter, and I felt when I made it or when I released it, it almost felt, and this has happened before, like I’m already kind of past it. It’s the byproduct of time, like the stars where you see the light later, you know? By the time it’s out I’m already on to something else. With this one, because we were all able to get in there and basically play at the same time, it still took a long time to finish it, with people going away and people disbursing, trying to get this guy or that guy to complete something, but it was the current crop and it felt like there was some excitement with these songs and with this group of people playing it.

jc: Did you record it live? .

DB: Yes, there’s this little studio here where we all live in Echo Park called Pehrspace. It’s nothing special at all. They do punk shows there after hours; a very cement kind of building, sort of industrial, which I like. I’ve always liked places like that. It was big enough that we could all set up and play at the same time, so I think every vocal of mine was cut live with the band. I may have tried a couple again, but I was like, “I am not going too better ones than those.” I was singing while we were all playing, just kind of locked in.

jc: Have you ever done it like that before?

DB: Yeah, I’ve probably done that before. I remember when I was doing the Breathe record, it was the same thing. I was very confident that there was no way that I was going to beat those vocals that I had sung when the thing was being played and I never really could. Anyway, on this one it all pretty much tumbled out. I think Greg Prestopino did a great job, taking what we did and mixing it, putting a touch here and there. I have known Greg forever but we never really worked together and it was a very interesting collaboration. I think we got it as good we were going to get it.

jc: Who are the musicians on Hoody?

DB: The core of it was Common Rotation, but it’s changed a lot since we did Drifter, for one thing Adam Busch was always like the utility man. He played a little of this, a little that kind of thing. For a lot of this stuff he moved over to the drums, which he had never done with us. I’ve been doing these shows with just me and him and that seemed to work with these songs. Jon Flaugher is a phenomenal bass player. We had two other drummers that were there on different days, Tripp Beam and George Sluppick, who are both top notch drummers.

jc: Do I hear lap steel and that kind of stuff going on in this record? I also hear banjo and I assumed that was Jordan Katz.

Dan: Yeah, and that’s Eric Kufs that you hear on steel guitar. The real great electric guitar playing is Eben Grace, who has been playing with me since way back in the IJBC days. He’s always been my favorite guitar player.

jc: Let’s get back to the actual structure and the writing of the record. When you completed Drifter you said that you felt as though you were putting a lid on the early Dan Bern character, so would you say that this is the first record where, if there’s such a thing as the Dan Bern character from the first eight, nine albums, he’s absent? And if so, did you approach the writing to put that part of your career to bed?

DB: It kind of feels like a further progression from where we were at Drifter, the logical next step. We’re better as a band. I am trying to become better as a performer and more aware of the audience and connecting better. I mean, just musically my thing has always been tied to old folk and blues, tied to country and British invasion rock n’ roll. Those are my things. I always had a foot in some of that, but after this record it feels like it’s really pretty synthesized, it’s all kind of come together.

jc: Can you expound on your feelings about your professional and personal transitions that you have gone through and how they’ve informed your work over the years? For instance, can you specifically listen to a record like New American Language or the first record or Drifter and say, “I know where my head space was at then” and how each have been signposts for your career?

DB: For sure, it’s going to be different for somebody else than how it is for me. It’s my diary, really. For anybody else it’s what they make of it. For me, yeah, they’re little sign posts. It’s funny, I’ve been playing these songs for some time now and now that the record’s out it’s already shifted for me a little bit. This stuff is now not the stuff I’m working on to try to complete, it’s like for better or worse, whatever anybody might think about it, it sort of has a string around it right now. Now I’m trying to synthesize some of these songs into a bigger batch of songs that can rub against other things.

jc: The songs on Hoody are almost all less than three minutes. There are no sweeping ten-verse epics on here, or anything deeply political. A lot of the songs are so meticulously structured you can almost say they are pop-style songs. Was that something that you specifically paid attention to, were you like, “Okay, I am going to try to write songs in quick two verses and get to the point?”

DB: It wasn’t intentional, but it was intentional in a way when I wrote them, I suppose. I was working a lot with a bunch of people and we were always trying to trim the fat – you don’t need a second verse, jump straight to the bridge – that kind of thing; just stream line. So that probably also spilled into the stuff I was writing.


jc: What is the main difference between singular and collaborative songwriting for you?

Well, it’s like the difference between doubles and singles in tennis; it sort of opens things up. There’s times when I’m paired with a real melodic guy…or girl, and they know chords I’ve never even heard. In that case, I might be the lyrics guy. And other times there’s somebody who’s a wordsmith and I become the music guy. And then sometimes you’re working line by line together, going chord for chord. It’s really fluid and different every time. You learn to be patient, wait for someone to come up with something that would be better than what I could have thought of. You’re using different muscles than you would by writing by yourself. It’s difficult to write by yourself all the time; nobody to run things by; but if there’s more than one other person involved, things could get derailed sometimes too.

jc: Does almost anything inspire you to write a song?

DB: Last night I played this brand new theater in Cortez and I was supposed to go on at eight and it was seven-thirty and it suddenly dawned on me this is a nice occasion to have a new song and I should write one about the experience. So, instead of lamenting that I should have had a song prepared, I thought, well I have some time, so I wrote a song about it. I opened the set with it and it killed, it just set the tone. Then I recorded it for the local radio station. It’s nice when it works like that.

jc: Okay, so take me through the process; you’re sitting there you have a half hour to go before you’re going to do a show and then you decide you want to write this song. Do you start with a title or do you write about the theater, do you write about the experience, where do you go?

DB: It’s all those things. They’re sort of bouncing around. The theater was called the Sunflower and I was the first one to play there and I just made a little joke, a reference to the sunflower being like a girl. And I started singing this thing, “I’m not yours, there will be others, that’s true, but sunflower, I was your first, that’s true too.” So I was like, “Okay, I like that, let’s start with that.” I wrote a quick verse about just what the sky looked like coming into town, which worked with me being her first. Basically I’m popping her cherry. (laughs) But, it’s all sweet, you know?

jc: I really dug how you just whipped off a verse or two about my novel when I saw you at Mexicali Blues a few months back. I know you’re always reading something or commenting on pop culture, making references to TV and news and sports figures. In that case, are you always formulating songs?

DB: I guess I am; it could be a lot of different things, like you can reference the book or the work or you can reference a character or a place or a thing that’s in the book that sparks something. You can use a character for a model in your own verse. You can take one word and trip off that word and like twenty minutes later you have this whole other thing and then go back to the book again. I suppose people write haiku, short little poems or any sort of musical, literary forms, and you can make a quick sketch too, and you can also really work on a song or a piece of music, but at the same time this stuff is really mercurial. It’s like catching lightening in a bottle; the electrical impulses in our brain, you know? There’s electricity, they move at the speed of light, they move really fast and you can’t always know where these things come from. It’s like when you meet a lot of people in a short amount of time and you’re moving around too and then you’re trying to remember who said something. Maybe you’re at a convention or something and you just met a hundred people and then you try and remember a conversation you had, who it was with and what was said or what the context was. Who knows? But at that point, you’re going to use it for something.

jc: So it ends up in your subconscious and you rummage through that when writing a song?

DB: Yeah, yeah, and you have the most control, more than anybody else, about what your feeding yourself; what your reading, what you’re watching, who you’re hanging out with, how much you stare at your phone versus looking at a tree.

jc: And of course over the past few years since having your daughter, Lulu, you have written and released a ton of children’s songs and you recently wrote the theme song for an animated series, Stinky & Dirty. So I assume having something that profound happen to you has influenced your writing greatly.

DB: It’s true. Recently I’ve begun to realize how insufficient this road thing, driving five, six hundred miles a day to a gig. And I feel like I have all these things – the baseball record and the Everett Ruess album, the kid’s stuff, Theme Park (monthly online show on stageit.com in which Bern plays themed song cycles) and my song workshops – so to drive all this way to play “Black Tornado”, “Hoody” and “Marilyn Monroe” and that’s it I feel like I’m leaving a lot on the table. So I was thinking maybe I could work something out with a local promoter or a theater and come and stay in a town for a long weekend and bring some band mates and Fridays stop at the school and play for the kids and Friday nights for the first half do the Everett Ruess show, then intermission, then do the baseball songs. Then on Saturday do another kid’s show and that evening do the big blowout, rock and roll show. On Sundays I could do a live Theme Park at a small venue and then a workshop. I can hit people on a lot of different levels.

jc: Like “Weekends with Bernstein”!

DB: Yeah, you know, you could bring the kids like a carnival or a circus stop. I kind of feel like I’m short-changing my audience by being one-dimensional when I have all these other things to offer, you know? Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of driving around and that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Covermesongs.com

Under the Radar: Dan Bern

By Jordan Becker

Dan Bern should not be under anyone’s radar. Not only is he an incredibly prolific songwriter — only a small fraction of the thousand or so that he has acknowledged writing have been officially released — he is also an artist, a poet, a novelist, a children’s book author, and a filmmaker. His stage banter and lyrics are funny enough that he could definitely do standup. He has written songs for movies and television, and is a pioneer in online performing. He tours constantly, and what with all of those songs, he probably never plays the same set twice.

Bern’s parents were refugees from the Nazis. His father, a concert pianist, fled to Palestine in 1939 and later met and married his mother, a singer and poet. In the 1950s they moved to Iowa where Bern, the rare Jew in his small town, focused his attention on music and baseball. Apparently recognizing that success for people of his faith is more likely in music than sports, Bern moved to Los Angeles, where he became a fixture on the folk scene in the 1990s.

Bern has the ability to be profoundly silly and seriously profound, sometimes in the same song. While he writes about a wide variety of topics, a significant number of his songs are about love and sex, celebrity, religion, art, politics, and sports (mostly baseball and tennis, but not exclusively). So his music hits a number of cultural hot buttons and never stops making you think, even if its message is sometimes camouflaged by humor.

And now, the elephant in the room. Dan Bern sounds like Bob Dylan, his fellow Great Plains-born Jewish singer-songwriter. Bern can’t avoid the obvious comparison, and he has embraced it, once wisecracking, “I guess Bob Dylan was sort of the Dan Bern of the ’60s.” Even more, he released a song “Talkin’ Woody, Bob, Bruce, and Dan Blues,” a hysterical homage to Dylan’s “Song to Woody,” in which Bern allegedly tries to recreate Dylan’s visit to Woody Guthrie by breaking into Bruce Springsteen’s house and confusing the Boss by insisting that he is on his deathbed, thus inserting himself as the direct heir to Guthrie, Dylan, and Springsteen. Not that there is anything wrong with that; as we will see below, Bern honors these and other influences through the covers that he has played live and occasionally recorded.

MP3: Dan Bern – I Ain’t Got No Home (Woody Guthrie cover)
Dylan’s “Song to Woody” was apparently one of the first songs he ever wrote, and he played it for Guthrie when he visited him in the hospital. Dylan’s visit to the dying Guthrie has attained the mythical status of the torch being passed to the voice of a new generation. When Dylan first emerged, he was often compared to his idol, having adopted many of Guthrie’s mannerisms, much as Bern is often compared to Dylan. But Bern is certainly aware of his direct debt to Guthrie, and has performed a number of times at the Guthrie Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, located in the former Trinity Church, once the home of Alice Brock, who, as you might be aware, owned a certain restaurant and hosted a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. Not surprisingly, these gigs often included Woody Guthrie songs, including this classic lament. And, as is so often true in folk music, Guthrie based his song on older material – in this case, a gospel tune. This version, by the Carter Family, has all of the sadness of the Guthrie version, but none of the politics.

MP3: Dan Bern – Visions of Johanna (Bob Dylan cover)
Of course, Bern does a mean Dylan cover. In this live performance, also from Great Barrington at the defunct Club Helsinki, Bern performs a powerful, faithful version of “Visions of Johanna.” Considered by critics to be one of Dylan’s greatest songs, this enigmatic classic was reportedly written at the legendary Chelsea Hotel, itself the subject of what seems to be hundreds of songs, including one by Bern.

MP3: Dan Bern – Thunder Road (Bruce Springsteen cover)
Coincidentally, it would appear, the original working title of “Visions of Johanna” was “Freeze Out,” and Bruce Springsteen has always maintained that he has no idea what the title of his song about the creation of the E Street Band, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” means. Unfortunately, I can’t find a version of Bern covering that song; instead, here’s a cover of its fellow Born to Run track, “Thunder Road.” Bern performs this in a solo acoustic style, and the audience joins in at the end, adding some of the instrumental flourishes that can’t be created by a single guitar.

MP3: Dan Bern – Sylvia’s Mother (Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show/Shel Silverstein cover)
Like Bern, Shel Silverstein was a man of many talents — in addition to writing songs, he was an artist, cartoonist, poet, and playwright, and like Bern, he could be both poignant and funny. “Sylvia’s Mother,” which was a hit for both Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show (on the singles charts) and for Bobby Bare (on the country charts), tends toward the sad side of Silverstein’s work. Bern performs the song with backup from his occasional collaborators Common Rotation, with guest violin from multi-instrumentalist Jason Crosby, probably best known as a non-blood relative member of Robert Randolph’s Family Band. The violin adds a degree of mournfulness to the song’s already-sad lyrics, and is a fitting nod to another of Bern’s influences.

MP3: Dan Bern – Mind Games (John Lennon cover)
When asked “How did John influence you as a songwriter?” Bern responded, “The bravery, the openness, the melody. I was a Beatles fan before anything else and I always liked John the most.” That’s not surprising, when you consider John Lennon’s wit, concern for the downtrodden, obvious songwriting talent, and multiple artistic endeavors. Again, when playing tribute to his influences in song, Bern plays it pretty straightforward. When it comes to the Beatles, though, he is sometimes willing to have some fun, as you can see in this medley of a few of their songs, or hysterically, in this non-cover, “The Fifth Beatle,” in which he tells about his dream of the Beatles not breaking up. Instead, Yoko becomes the Fifth Beatle, and as time goes on, other rock luminaries join and leave the band. Bern hilariously sings some of the imaginary co-written songs (like a great Cobain/McCartney collaboration), which the audience at the annual John Lennon Tribute seems to appreciate.

Bonus MP3: Phil Moreau – Le messie (Dan Bern cover)
If you had to pick a signature song for Bern, the one that his fans expect to hear when he performs, it probably is “Jerusalem,” a song that hits a number of his standard themes, and is both touching and funny. You can read more about it here. This cover, by the Quebecois musician Phil Moreau, is in French, a language that I don’t speak, so you have to take his word for the fact that it actually is a translation of the original. Bern liked it enough that he linked to it from his own website. To me, this cover raises the question: is Quebec French so different from France French that it makes what is usually a beautiful language sound unpleasant, or is it just Moreau’s delivery?

NPR, All Things Considered

Your Favorite Musicians, Straight From Their Laptop To Yours

by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

(To listen to this story, visit this NPR link)

At midnight on a Wednesday night, the young Irish singer Janet Devlin kicks off an acoustic show. She’s in London, but her audience is all over: from Norway to South Africa to the U.S. A few hundred fans have paid $8 to watch online, and some have been chatting with each other for hours — and even leaving tips of $10 and $25 before Devlin sang a note.

The concert is on a website called . The technology for streaming live events has been around for years, but Stageit and another startup, , have made it easy to play online shows — and make money doing it. This is good news for musicians hit hard by the plunge in royalties and CD sales, says singer-songwriter Christine Lavin.

“I’m intrigued with the idea that the Internet, that has really hurt a lot of us financially, has now opened up a new avenue for ways we can make some of that money back by connecting us to audience members who are not in the same town where we are,” Lavin says.

For artists, online concerts can help fill the gaps between regular gigs. Folk-rock songwriter plays Stageit shows on his laptop when he’s at home in Los Angeles or has down time on the road.

“I’ve been touring for so long, and I run myself ragged sometimes going from place to place. And suddenly here’s a venue where in a sense, everybody comes to me, or I suppose I come to them too, but without having to put any gas in the car or jump on a plane,” he says.

The appeal is the same for fans. Sheri Kennedy often travels a long way from home in Ohio to see Bern and appreciates the chance to catch him more regularly online.

“I love that I don’t have to get ready and I can just cuddle up on my couch with my dog and watch the show with whoever I want to watch it with,” Kennedy says.

A laptop concert is a different sort of experience than being at a regular venue. The performer can’t see or hear the audience but can read their chat and questions. There’s a lag time, sometimes up to 15 seconds, that makes it tough to have anything like a normal conversation. Yet it feels very intimate.

One of the keys to Stageit and Concert Window is that shows are not recorded. Evan Lowenstein, the founder of Stageit, is clear that he is not in the record business.

“What we like to say at Stageit is that we are a company in the music space that doesn’t sell music, we sell time,” Lowenstein says, “and the mere fact that fans know that time is money, they’re willing to pay.”

In fact, fans seem willing to pay significantly more when it’s their own choice. Concert Window used to have a $5 set price for tickets. As soon as the site gave the option to pay what you want, people started paying almost twice as much per ticket.

“This is how the music industry is going to grow again: It’s through flipping that equation and asking people, ‘How much is music worth to you and how much do you want to support it?’ ” says Dan Gurney, a Celtic accordion player and co-founder of Concert Window.

It’s free to play a show on Concert Window or Stageit, and performers range from little-known acts to big names like or Jimmy Buffett. The sites take about a third of the proceeds from tickets and tips. Stageit makes tipping a bit like a game show. Top tippers win prizes like signed posters or Skype sessions with artists, and superfans often tip hundreds of dollars or more, Lowenstein says.

“The larger artists, we’ve seen people make over $50,000 in 30 minutes just from a laptop. In fact, our biggest show to date is about $66,000. I think that number really started to turn heads in the industry,” Lowenstein says.

At this point, it’s hard to say how the emergence of online concerts will affect offline performing. Lavin is one artist who believes they can be complementary.

“I don’t think that this would ever replace live performing,” he says. “I just think this is just a whole new way to connect us up with people. And my feeling is, if people like what they see at these live shows that are on your screen, that if we come to your town, they will come out and see us live. I hope.”

As for the Irish singer Janet Devlin, she’s using the money from online concerts to help finance taking her band out on the road.

Huffington Post

A Songwriter’s Cyber Showcase

By James Campion

Welcome One and All to Dan Bern’s Theme Park

If you put me in a box, make sure it’s a big box. — Dan Bern “Jerusalem”

“If I were to stage a theme show of my songs, say, around girl’s names, what would you put in there?” Dan Bern asked over Indian buffet near lower Lexington Avenue last September. He had been staying in New York for longer than usual and we made haphazard plans to get together and chat on and off the record, take in a film, walk the streets, smoke cigars, and, as Dan likes to say, throw a few back. I did not hesitate to make suggestions from his vast catalog of material: Of course, “Marylyn” from the first record, Fleeting Days’ “Jane,” “Monica,” (about Seles, not Lewinsky) “Sister” — not really a girl’s name, but a beautiful one about his only sibling from 1998’s Fifty Eggs, the stirring, “Estelle,” and suddenly we were off and running.

“Exactly,” he smiled.

Later, as a collection of unreleased tunes for a planned album filled out the street sounds penetrating his modest suite at a downtown hotel that was framed by crudely beautiful renderings on the walls painted by his 4-year-old daughter, Lulu, Bern began to build on the idea. “I could see maybe renting out space off of Broadway and putting on shows based on song themes; a different one every night.”

There was no arguing that he, more than anyone this side of Randy Newman, could pull it off. For over 20 years now, Dan Bern has been writing songs (along with books, poems and kid’s stories) with a reckless abandon — some of them even composed on demand for fans to help defray the costs to get this bulging phalanx of tunes out to the public; and still others for the films Walk Hard, Get Him To The Greek and friend Jonathan Demme’s Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains. Pressed to count them all, Bern will first insist he cannot, but will eventually acquiesce with a sighing, “Okay, over a thousand.”

Yup, Bern writes songs like most of us read the paper or peruse the Internet. It is almost a daily routine. He breathes, plays tennis, enjoys a bike ride, loves his family and writes songs. Since 1997, this prolificacy has resulted in 14 studio albums; two live; five EPs; a collaborative song-cycle adapted from the letters, essays and poems of the Western folk legend Everett Ruessand; and a collection of children’s songs — the second volume is already done and is brilliant — and another country-flavored record is poised.

Suddenly, here was Bern imagining, even scheming a place for this disparate group of melodic brothers and sisters, heroes and despots, celebrations and protestations to go — one place, as if, well, as if a theme park.

Bern brought the theme idea up again a few weeks before leaving for the West Coast in early December, citing several reoccurring slices-of-life to his canon: pop culture, politics, history, literature, family, tennis, baseball, travel, etc., along with the obvious subjects available to any songwriter; love, loss, protest and inner revelation.

Once back in LA, he was inspired by an online concert his friend and sometime collaborator, Mike Viola had hosted on the website wherein artists such as
Bonnie Raitt, Indigo Girls, Plain White T’s, Jason Mraz, Jimmy Buffet, Sara Barreilles, Better Than Ezra and Ingrid Michaelson, among many others, create backstage, in-house podcasts to interact directly with fans. It seemed the site Stage-It was the perfect vehicle for the theme idea, and it did not take Bern long to begin fashioning a one-man show around not only his moving, hilarious and poignantly striking music, but sprinkled with his razor-sharp wit, and officially call it a “theme park.”

“All of my song subjects are so far afield, and with my songbooks here, I can pretty much pull from everything I’ve ever written and come up with setlists,” Bern said from his LA abode over the phone in mid-February after he had a couple of theme park shows under his belt — the first theme, football — broadcast the week before the Super Bowl — included such luminary musical numbers as “Namath, Mantle & Me,” (written when he shared a similar knee injury to the ailing stars), “Who Gets Serena?” (an imagined double date between the Manning brothers and the Williams sisters) and “O.J. Simpson” (you know). The second, Love, for Valentine’s Day, featuring his unique sentimentalities displayed in “Love Makes All the Other Worlds Go Round,” “My Love is Not For Sale” and “I Need You” among others.

“I’m doing stuff I wrote this fall mixed with stuff I wrote 20 years ago, mixed with stuff people know from the records, and its focused and it feels like a new thing.” Bern says, as he excitedly previewed a third one coming up for President’s Day.

So without much prompting, I had to tune-in — or more to the point, log-in — to see it.

I became a member of Stage-It the day of the show, which was simple using PayPal, and since Bern mentioned more than twice I could “set the price, and in my case, it’s a dime,” I did, but went for broke at an outlandish $2.50. He informed me of the opportunity to “tip” the performer, as if he were playing in a downtown subway. “I started offering these little perks for top tipper,” said Bern. “For the Super Bowl one I signed a football jersey, and for the Valentine’s one I gave away Henry Miller’s Wisdom of the Heart, and for the Presidents Day show, I painted three presidents, (Lincoln, Nixon and LBJ) and in honor of the Winter Olympics, I’ll give them to the top three.”

At 9:00 p.m. Eastern, there was Bern, captured by his Mac camera, nattily attired in a suit and tie (very presidential) and welcoming his audience with a very theme-y “Theme Park” theme song. Then he immediately launched into a toe-tapping ditty called “Weird Little Thing,” which playfully recites the bizarre coincidences between Lincoln and Kennedy’s time in office (not the least of which both were initially elected 100 years apart, to which Bern lyrically warns whoever is elected in 2060 better keep on his toes).

The humble USB mic did the trick, as the intimacy and immediacy of the performance was striking. I have seen Dan and hundreds of musicians ply their trade in every possible venue, from cramped clubs to upstairs lofts, garages to Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall (including Bern), but this is far different; personal and interactive. As Bern played, viewers started messaging, the comments floating up on a stream to his right. Interspersing pithy comments, one spot-on imprecision of LBJ, and displaying his original paintings auctioned off to the “top tipper,” Bern was in his element and the fans loved it.

It was during a brief introduction to the next song as having been written as something of a dare that I realized my own request would make the show. As is my tradition, when invited to such ad hoc events, and knowing Bern’s ambitions run deep, I emailed him earlier that day to pen a song about William Henry Harrison, who infamously died 32 days into office from pneumonia thanks to his refusing to wear a coat on a bitterly cold and rainy Inauguration Day. “That kind of story is ripe for a folk song,” I wrote, unsure if even he could pull it off.

Sure enough, he did.

“Hey, a challenge is a challenge,” Bern said when I called to thank him the next morning. “My first thought was, ‘That fucking Campion! That’s not in the rules!’ Then I thought,’Eh, I’ll do it.'”

Bern rounded out the 50 minute set (it was only scheduled for a half hour) with nine more songs, his haunting introspection of Lee Harvey Oswald in “Marine and Me,” a couple of verses of Tom Waits’ “On The Nickel” (“…even Thomas Jefferson is on the nickel over there”), and his 2004 call for candidacy in “President” were the highlights.

Then, just as quickly as he popped up, he was gone.

It’s weird for me, because when I do this show online, although I’m home and not in a club, I still feel that post-show glaze. It could really grow into a bi-weekly thing for me, but it’s really the gravy, because if I finish touring and then come home and go a week or two without a show, it’s like arrrrrrrr. And to have something like this to focus me — getting the set together for that show’s theme and then doing the thing, and it’s only seven o’clock and you’re done — its kinda great.

The experience, which began percolating in New York a few months back as a kind of local cabaret act, became a reality on the other side of the continent and has suddenly gone global. Some members of the audience were from Greece and all points abroad.

The theme idea along with wanting to stay focused for 50 minutes of playing has allowed me to get 11 to 15 songs into each show, and by getting my paintings in there and being able to play more often to a larger audience beyond touring, it’s just a cool way to do all the things I like to do, and never leave my house.

But one wonders when Bern does go back on the road, which he will this spring with dates already set to begin here on the East Coast in March and crisscross back to Los Angeles, before heading to Holland in April and returning for another week of gigs around New York in May, will Theme Park live on?

“Oh, I’m gonna keep doing ’em,” Bern insists. “I can do a Theme Show anywhere, the hotel room or I’ll come out to your place and we’ll do it.”

Aquarian Weekly

By James Campion

WELCOME ONE & ALL TO DAN BERN’S THEME PARK
A Songwriter’s Cyber Showcase

If you put me in a box, make sure it’s a big box.
– Dan Bern “Jerusalem”

“If I was to stage a theme show of my songs, say, around girl’s names; what would you put in there?” Dan Bern asked over Indian buffet near lower Lexington Avenue last September. He had been staying in New York for longer than usual and we made haphazard plans to get together and chat on-and-off the record, take in a film, walk the streets, smoke cigars, and, as Dan likes to say, throw a few back. I did not hesitate to make suggestions from his vast catalogue of material: Of course, “Marylyn” from the first record, Fleeting Days’ “Jane”, “Monica” (about Seles, not Lewinsky), “Sister” – not really a girls’ name, but a beautiful one about his only sibling from 1998’s Fifty Eggs, the stirring, “Estelle”, and suddenly we were off and running.

“Exactly,” he smiled.

Later, as a collection of unreleased tunes for a planned album filled out the street sounds penetrating his modest suite at a downtown hotel that was framed by crudely beautiful renderings on the walls painted by his four year-old daughter, Lulu, Bern began to build on the idea. “I could see maybe renting out space off-off-Broadway and putting on shows based on song themes; a different one every night.”

There was no arguing that he, more than anyone this side of Randy Newman, could pull it off. For over 20 years now, Dan Bern has been writing songs (along with books, poems, and kid’s stories) with a reckless abandon – some of them even composed on demand for fans to help defray the costs to get this bulging phalanx of tunes out to the public and still others for the films Walk Hard, Get Him To The Greek and friend, Jonathan Demme’s Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains. Pressed to count them all, Bern will first insist he cannot, but will eventually acquiesce with a sighing, “Okay, over a thousand.”

Yup, Bern writes songs like most of us read the paper or peruse the Internet. It is almost a daily routine. He breathes, plays tennis, enjoys a bike ride, loves his family, and writes songs. Since 1997, this prolificacy has resulted in 14 studio albums, two live, five EP’s, a collaborative song-cycle adapted from the letters, essays and poems of the Western folk legend Everett Ruess, and a collection of children’s songs; the second volume is already done and is brilliant and another country-flavored record is poised.

Suddenly, here was Bern imagining, even scheming a place for this disparate group of melodic brothers and sisters, heroes and despots, celebrations and protestations to go – one place, as if, well, as if a Theme Park.

Bern brought the “theme” idea up again a few weeks before leaving for the West Coast in early December, citing several reoccurring slices-of-life to his canon; pop culture, politics, history, literature, family, tennis, baseball, travel, etc., along with the obvious subjects available to any songwriter; love, loss, protest, and inner revelation.

Once back in L.A., he was inspired by an online concert his friend and sometime collaborator, Mike Viola had hosted on the web site, stageit.com, wherein artists such as Bonnie Raitt, Indigo Girls, Plain White T’s, Jason Mraz, Jimmy Buffet, Sara Barreilles Better Than Ezra, and Ingrid Michaelson, among many others create backstage, in-house podcasts to interact directly with fans. It seemed Stage-It was the perfect vehicle for the “theme” idea, and it did not take Bern long to begin fashioning a one-man show around not only his moving, hilarious and poignantly striking music, but sprinkled with his razor-sharp wit, and officially call it “Theme Park”.

“All of my song subjects are so far afield, and with my songbooks here, I can pretty much pull from everything I’ve ever written and come up with set-lists,” Bern said from his L.A. abode over the phone in mid-February after he had a couple of Theme Park shows under his belt – the first theme, Football, broadcast the week before the Super Bowl included such luminary musical numbers as “Namath, Mantle & Me” (written when he shared a similar knee injury to the ailing stars), “Who Gets Serena?” (an imagined double-date between the Manning brothers and the Williams sisters) and “O.J. Simpson” (you know) and the second, Love, for Valentine’s Day featuring his unique sentimentalities displayed in “Love Makes All the Other Worlds Go Round”, “My Love is Not For Sale” and “I Need You” among others.

“I’m doin’ stuff I wrote this fall mixed with stuff I wrote 20 years ago mixed with stuff people know from the records, and its focused and it feels like a new thing.” Bern says, as he excitedly previewed a third one coming up for President’s Day.

So without much prompting, I had to “tune in” or more to the point, login to see it. I became a member of Stage-It the day of the show, which was simple using Paypal, and since Bern mentioned more than twice I could “set the price, and in my case, it’s a dime”, I did, but went for broke at an outlandish $2.50. He informed me of the opportunity to “tip” the performer, as if he were playing in a downtown subway. “I started offering these little perks for top tipper,” said Bern. “For the Super Bowl one I signed a football jersey, and for the Valentine’s one I gave away Henry Miller’s Wisdom of the Heart, and for the Presidents Day show, I painted three presidents, (Lincoln, Nixon, and LBJ) and in honor of the Winter Olympics, I’ll give them to the top three.”

At 9:00 PM Eastern, there was Bern, captured by his MAC camera, nattily attired in a suit and tie (very presidential) and welcoming his audience with a very theme-y Theme Park theme song. Then he immediately launched into a toe-tapping ditty called “Weird Little Thing”, which playfully recites the bizarre coincidences between Lincoln and Kennedy’s time in office (not the least of which both were initially elected 100 years apart, to which Bern lyrically warns whoever is elected in 2060 better keep on his toes).

The humble USB mic did the trick, as the intimacy and immediacy of the performance was striking. I have seen Dan and hundreds of musicians ply their trade in every possible venue, from cramped clubs to upstairs lofts, garages to Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall (including Bern), but this is far different; personal and interactive. As Bern played, viewers started messaging, the comments floating up on a stream to his right. Interspersing pithy comments, one spot-on imprecision of LBJ, and displaying his original paintings auctioned off to the “top tipper”, Bern was in his element and the fans loved it.

It was during a brief introduction to the next song as having been written as something of a dare that I realized my own request would make the show. As is my tradition, when invited to such ad hoc events, and knowing Bern’s ambitions run deep, I emailed him earlier that day to pen a song about William Henry Harrison, who infamously died 32 days into office from pneumonia thanks to his refusing to wear a coat on a bitterly cold and rainy Inauguration Day. “That kind of story is ripe for a folk song,” I wrote, unsure if even he could pull it off.

Sure enough, he did.

“Hey, a challenge is a challenge,” Bern said when I called to thank him the next morning. “My first thought was, ‘That fucking Campion! That’s not in the rules!’ Then I thought,’ Eh, I’ll do it.’”

Bern rounded out the 50 minute set (it was only scheduled for a half hour) with nine more songs, his haunting introspection of Lee Harvey Oswald in “Marine and Me”, a couple of verses of Tom Waits, “On The Nickel” (“…even Thomas Jefferson is on the nickel over there”), and his 2004 call for candidacy in “President” were the highlights.

Then, just as quickly as he popped up, he was gone.

“It’s weird for me, because when I do this show online, although I’m home and not in a club, I still feel that post-show glaze,” says Bern. “It could really grow into a bi-weekly thing for me, but it’s really the gravy, because if I finish touring and then come home and go a week or two without a show, it’s like arrrrrrrr. And to have something like this to focus me – getting the set together for that show’s theme and then doing the thing, and it’s only seven o’clock and your done – its kinda great.”

The experience, which began percolating in New York a few months back as a kind of local cabaret act, became a reality on the other side of the continent and has suddenly gone global. Some members of the audience were from Greece and all points abroad.
“The theme idea along with wanting to stay focused for 50 minutes of playing has allowed me to get 11 to 15 songs into each show, and by getting my paintings in there and being able to play more often to a larger audience beyond touring, it’s just a cool way to do all the things I like to do, and never leave my house.”

But one wonders when Bern does go back on the road, which he will this spring with dates already set to begin here on the East Coast in March and crisscross back to Los Angeles, before heading to Holland in April and returning for another week of gigs around New York in May, will Theme Park live on?

“Oh, I’m gonna keep doin’ ‘em,” Bern insists. “I can do a Theme Show anywhere, the hotel room or I’ll come out to your place and we’ll do it.”

ft.Myers Magazine

Bit o’ Bern
a few questions for singer/songwriter Dan Bern

an interview by Andrew Elias

HE IS AN ACCLAIMED SONGWRITER, a singer, a novelist, a children’s book author, a storyteller, a painter. Dan Bern is one creative guy, with a lot to say. He’s released more than 20 albums; contributed songs for several films, including Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Get Him to the Greek; written a few books; and tours relentlessly, both solo and with a band.

Dan will be participating in the songwriting panel, with Craig Finn and Johnny Temple, at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Sanibel Island Writers Conference, November 8. Bern will perform that evening.

I asked Dan a few questions about his work.

How did you get involved with Florida Gulf Coast University’s Sanibel Island Writers Conference?

Dan: This will be my fourth time there. I’ll be leading songwriting workshops, doing a reading from a new book, and playing a set of music on the Friday. I’ve done songwriting workshops now in many different locales. Canada, Alaska, New York, Calif, Iowa, Ohio. I really enjoy it. Kind of a way of giving back.

Your songs are successful because there’s a nice balance between a reverence for your influences (most notably Bob Dylan) and a satirical take of their mythical sound, between serious subjects and humorous attitudes towards them, between being a teacher of sorts and a wise-guy, and between being an artist and an entertainer. Do you see yourself more as an artist or as an entertainer?

There is no distinction, no dividing line. The artist entertains. The entertainer must have something to say.

Many of your songs are topical, even overtly political, which can sometimes be a problem. Have you ever received any blowback from fans or audiences about your political views?

Part of the job. I’m not here simply to soothe. Once you sing it, or write it, it’s out of your hands. Some writers approach the craft systematically, writing regularly or having a certain routine, while others, such as Keith Richards, talk about being lucky to be in the room when the song ‘arrives.’

What is your creative process when songwriting or writing prose?

Songs can come anytime, anywhere. They kind of float in the air and you gotta catch ‘em. Other kinds of writing you need to sit down and pound it out. One of your most popular songs is ‘Estelle.’

Can you tell me about writing that song?

I was making my first record. It just poured out. The recorded version is the first time I ever played it.

You wrote some of the songs John C. Reilly sings in the hilarious film, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. You’ve also written songs for other films, including Get Him to the Greek. How is writing for films different than writing for your own albums?

It’s very refreshing and freeing to do that. Like getting to be 16 again and writing songs from the beginning. You use yourself, but you also have to get out of the way.

Your recent album, Doubleheader is a compilation of songs about baseball. How did that album come about?

I’ve written baseball songs for a long time, since I lived in Chicago and went to Wrigley Field. It just sort of happened. I got a good bunch of guys together and we made the record. We played the whole set of songs last summer at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

On another recent album, Drifter, you sing ‘Swing Set,’ a duet with the legendary Emmylou Harris. How did that come about and what was that experience like?

She’s obviously an icon and a fantastic singer. I wrote the song for Jonathan Demme. He was directing a play in New York City a couple years ago. He was the one who thought of Emmylou for the female part. [Bern wrote the title song for Demme’s documentary film, Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains, and is working with Demme on a documentary based on the writings of Everett Ruess.]

In addition to songwriting and performing you have also written two books – Quitting Science, under the pseudonym Cunliffe Merriweather, and a children’s book, Cleaver the Gronk under your real name, which you also illustrated. Why did you choose to write Quitting Science under a pseudonym?

There’s actually been a bunch of books – 7 or 8 now. Quitting Science was about a scientist who goes around giving lectures and demonstrations. So it was Cunliffe’s book.

Any advice to writers?

Don’t worry about the business or getting a million hits on YouTube. Don’t worry about formulas and all that. Song is a big playing field. Have fun with it. Find your voice. Sing a lot. Sing what you want to say.

The New Yorker

Critic’s Notebook

Bern Rate

Dan Bern first made a splash in the late nineties with biographical tracks such as “Marilyn” (in which he speculated about what Marilyn Monroe’s life would have been like had she married Henry Miller instead of Arthur Miller) and “Tiger Woods” (in which he hilariously critiqued the American obsession with sports heroism and celebrity). Last year, the prolific folk performer released three albums: “Drifter,” a loosely thematic travel record that covers everything from politics to personal therapy; “Doubleheader,” a fully thematic eighteen-song suite about Bern’s lifelong love affair with baseball; and “Wilderness Song,” a manifesto about going off the grid that sounds autobiographical but isn’t, since it’s the soundtrack for a new documentary about Everett Ruess, an artist and naturalist who disappeared in Utah in the nineteen-thirties. Bern’s songs are prolix, spiky, and sometimes sentimental, and he’s a natural in concert. When he comes to City Winery on Aug. 25, expect his way with words to extend into spontaneous, witty onstage banter.

—Ben Greenman

Washington Post

Finding himself in the ‘Wilderness’

By Geoffrey Himes

On his new album, “Wilderness Song,” Dan Bern sings of dropping out of society to live in the Utah desert. In the song “Flapjacks,” for example, he exults in the pleasure of camping alone in a canyon where there’s “no music but the sound of rushing water that breaks on painted rocks below.” On “Budget,” Bern sings, “Here’s my budget: rent — nothing, telephone — nothing, electricity — nothing.” And on the title track: “I have loved the twisted trees, red sand a blowin’ ’neath the turquoise skies / I have felt the rain a-driftin’ and slept behind the waterfall.”

Bern, however, is not singing about himself. He’s singing in the voice of writer and artist Everett Ruess, who, in 1934 at age 20, left society to wander alone through the Utah canyon country and then disappeared. Bern used to love hiking near his former home in New Mexico, but now he’s too busy, living in Los Angeles and writing music for film, television and his own albums.

One of three albums Bern, 47, released this year, “Wilderness Song” is the soundtrack for a new documentary produced by Jonathan Demme and directed by Lindsay Jaeger. “Everett Ruess: Wilderness Song” tells Ruess’s story and is just now starting the rounds of film festivals. For the soundtrack’s 15 songs, Bern drew as much as possible from Ruess’s own words.

“It was like we were co-writing in the same room,” Bern says, “and I was the guy with the guitar while he was the guy with the notebook and ideas. In listening to these, I feel like it’s very much me; other people have said that, too. But at the same time I tried to stay true to his character as if I were an actor. He was a guy I would have liked to hang out with and travel around with. Who knows? Maybe if he had lived he would have written songs himself.”

The album is as stripped down and spare as Ruess’s one-man treks into the wilderness. Bern limits himself to his voice, harmonica and acoustic guitar. “I have felt the rain a driftin’,” Bern sings over the title track’s jaunty lope, “and slept behind the waterfall and Aspen glades that whisper wild sorrows / In cool sweet grasses I have lain and I have heard the ghostly murmur of regret.”

“I identified with his sense of the beauty that he was seeing everywhere,” Bern says of Ruess, “of his feeling of relying on himself. He’s not explicit about it, but his writing has a spiritual sense that comes from being outdoors. Anybody who’s been in any big natural setting will feel some of that.”

This wasn’t Bern’s first venture into writing for the screen. He’s best known for the funniest songs in the 2007 comedy “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” starring John C. Reilly as a country singer much like Johnny Cash who evolves into a folk singer not unlike Bob Dylan.

“I was one of the people they asked to write some songs for Dewey,” Bern says, “and I so fell in love with the idea that I put everything else on hold and I wrote 100-some Dewey songs. I had pretty free rein; they were instances when they hadn’t asked for a song, and I said, ‘He needs a song here,’ and they used some of those. . . . After a while, though, it was hard to know where Dewey stopped and I started.”

Bern also wrote for Jake Kasdan’s first movie, “Zero Effect,” and Demme’s 2007 documentary, “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains.” When Demme directed the off-Broadway play “Family Week” in 2010, he commissioned Bern to write two songs. One of those, “Swing Set,” a duet with Emmylou Harris, is on another of Bern’s new albums, “Drifter.”

That album, unlike “Wilderness Song,” isn’t organized around a theme; it’s just a collection of his best recent songs. And terrific songs they are — from his duet with Harris to his post-apocalyptic dystopian fantasy, “Mexican Vacation,” and his post-recession utopian fantasy, “Rainin’ in Madrid.” Best of all is the first track, “Luke the Drifter,” a talking-blues fantasia that references Bob Dylan, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Muhammad Ali and Hank Williams to conclude: “Life ain’t tragic mostly / Life is magic somely.”

“I have certain songs that are kind of rambling and take their own shape, more like a person talking. . . . A long time ago, I dispensed with the feeling that I had to understand everything that was going on in my own songs,” Bern says. “When you do anything long enough, whether it’s writing songs or building chairs, you can’t always explain what’s going on, but if it feels right you go with it.”

When he does just go with it, the songs don’t sound like Dewey Cox or Everett Ruess. They sound like Dan Bern.