Dan Bern: Drifter and Doubleheader

You’ve gotta hand it to Dan Bern. The guy has stuck to his guns on a lot of things, including writing unembellished folk songs that range in subject matter from reckless sex in a post-AIDS world to metaphorical tornados to the size of Tiger Woods’, um, golf balls. And it’s turned out in various ways: sometimes excellent (1998’s Fifty Eggs), often unexpectedly poignant (“God Said No”) and frequently political (“Bush Must Be Defeated”). But let’s be honest, it’s sometimes downright goofy, too, like on “Rollerblades,” where he happily sings “I’ll tell you about the night I decided to buy some rollerblades,” and does. Hint: it involves a girl who turned him on to Massive Attack, a hotel on 25th and Third in Manhattan and a poet from Bristol.

So somehow it makes sense that not only did Bern decide to release an entire 18-song record (called Doubleheader) devoted to his boyhood obsession, baseball, but he chose to put it out at the same time as another entire full-length that’s as meta-Bern as you can get, with folk songs balancing sweetness, weirdness and “huh?” moments. The latter, titled Drifter, takes its name from a character made up by Hank Williams, who would sometimes adopt the nom de plume of Luke the Drifter and preach religion as a good gospel-loving boy while the other Hank Sr. would lose himself in drink. In fact, the album starts with a song titled “Luke The Drifter,” which seems to speak directly to Bern himself. “And I found myself writing long poetic lines with awesome rhymes,” he sings, “and maybe you’re thinking Dylan, but to me its just that shit Alexander Pope.”

Bern’s been long compared to Bob Dylan, and he’s even spoofed the man in a song “Talkin’ Woody, Bob, Bruce, And Dan Blues,” where he pokes fun at his most direct influences. They’re certainly evident on Drifter, as he partners with the Los Angeles collective Common Rotation to create a fuller sound, often accented with banjo, dobro and trumpet. And sure, if you want to be hyper-literary about it, there are shades of Alexander Pope, too, in the sense that Bern’s always written borderline satire that, at the same time, begs to be taken seriously as creative work once you’ve moved past the spoofiness.

There’s some pretty standard Bern-isms on Drifter, with political talk, references to sports figures and plenty of signature Bern chord progressions, too, that bleed songs into others on this record and ones past. For that reason, there’s a good bit of extraneous material like “Rainin In Madrid,” which rips a melody from his own tune, “Cure For Aids,” and shout-outs Raphael Nadal. But in the thick of it, there are tender glimpses, namely a duet with Emmylou Harris called “Swing Set,” that shows the man in a new light; and there are moments of quirk that work, like “Holy House,” a swinging take on spirituality.

The piece that links both Drifter and Doubleheader is a tribute to Dodgers sportscaster Vin Scully called “The Golden Voice Of Vin Scully.” It’s song number two on both records, and, quite unsurprisingly, more at home on Doubleheader. But not for the reasons you’d think. Though yes, a concept album about baseball is certainly kitsch, it works much more in Bern’s favor to get the theme out of the way before the songs even start. You’re able to listen to Doubleheader in a different context than Drifter – it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb when Bern starts rattling off the names of athletes or teams because it’s expected, and the songs can be heard for the songs’ sake. Which, as it turns out, are far stronger than anything on Drifter. They’re riskier and sonically more fun: “Five-Nothing Lead” is about the Giants losing the World Series as interpreted into a solemn country tune (with lyrics like “Dusty, oh Dusty, Why’d you pull Ortiz?”) and “Love, War And A Baseball Game,” an upbeat Bayou-romp.

Growing up as lone Jewish kid in a small Iowa town, Bern escaped into the dreams and promises of the great American pastime every time he heard the crackle of a bat, and, later, the strum of a guitar. He may not be Dylan – or that shit Alexander Pope – and Drifter and Doubleheader are no home run. But they’re a damn good swing at a heroic couplet.

Dan Bern with Common Rotation, Doubleheader (iTunes): This veteran singer/ songwriter has made a name for himself as Judd Apatow’s go-to guy for music, composing the witty parody songs in the faux biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Take Me to the Greek. A major label outcast, Bern just released a pair of new albums on his own, the first in six years, including Drifter, featuring “Swing Set,” a duet with Emmylou Harris, and this collection of 18 songs (for a twin bill’s worth of innings) inspired by baseball and his lifelong love of the Giants, which came from reading a biography of Willie Mays. Bern is a story-teller in the Dylan/Woody Guthrie mode, and Doubleheader is in that vein, fleshed out by N.Y.-to-L.A. group (and frequent collaborators) Common Rotation. Having written songs based on sports stars as diverse as Tiger Woods and tennis player Jack Kramer, Bern proves an avid fan, with songs that range from a tale of sneaking into Wrigley Field one night (“Ballpark,” with its references to Ferguson Jenkins, Ryne Sandberg and Harry Caray), a lament to the Giants’ 2002 World Series come-from-ahead loss to the Angels (“5-0 Lead”), a tribute to “The Golden Voice of Vin Scully” (with Jordan Katz’s mellifluous trumpet solo emulating his dulcet tones) and a song that merely states “Year-by-Year Home Run Totals of Barry Bonds.” Bern is also a keen student of the game’s gaffes, with songs recounting Giant Fred Merkle’s famed “bonehead play” in the 1908 World Series against the Cubs when he somehow forgot to touch second base on a potential game-winning hit, as well as “Joyce and Gallarraga,” which tells the story of umpire Jim Joyce’s faulty call on what should have been the last out in the ninth, costing Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Gallarraga not only a perfect game, but a no-hitter. Aside from the album’s lyrical conceit, though, it’s the music that ties it all together, whether it’s the Dylan-esque drawl of “Gamblin’ with My Love,” a recount of then-baseball Commissioner Bart (father of Paul) Giamatti’s suspension of Pete Rose over his alleged gambling on baseball games or “42,” the country/bluegrass paean to Jackie Robinson and his uniform number. By the time he gets to “The Sun Shines on McCovey Cove,” a celebration of his beloved Giants’ 2010 World Series victory, their first ever since moving to San Francisco, you begin to understand the sheer joy of a fan whose team has finally won it all after years of might-have-beens. For this beleaguered Mets fan—who has experienced that exultation in 1969 and 1986—Doubleheader turned out to be a welcome distraction from suffering through yet another dispiriting summer.

A Singer Collects Stories From the Stadium
By KEN PLUTNICKI

The contemporary folk musician Dan Bern had written so many songs about baseball over the years that they finally reached a critical mass. With a gig approaching at the Baseball Hall of Fame earlier this month and the availability of willing musicians and a studio, it finally made sense, he said, to record a bunch of them and bring the songs in from the road.

“I was pretty stringent about it,” Bern said recently in a phone interview. “I didn’t want to have songs that just had some oblique baseball reference. I wanted each one to be a baseball song, not a song with Jackie Robinson showing up in it for a second.”

The result is “Doubleheader,” recorded with the band Common Rotation and released July 4 on the heels of “Drifter,” his first studio album in almost six years. “Doubleheader” provides a home to 18 of his baseball songs, some of which had already been anthologized in Jeff Campbell’s “Diamond Cuts” series.

“It’s the languid pace of the game, I suppose,” Bern said, explaining baseball storytelling’s place in film, literature and music, including his, over the decades. “When you’re watching it, your mind has time to take little flights. All these stories we’ve heard since we were kids about Merkle and Ruth, they just kind of take hold.”

In his version of “Merkle” Bern, who is 46, imagines a different world had the Giants rookie Fred Merkle not committed his infamous baserunning gaffe against the Chicago Cubs in 1908. In “Joyce and Galarraga,” Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga’s near-perfect game is again ruined with two outs in the ninth inning by Jim Joyce’s safe call at first. Bern captures the abrupt ending (“Perfect game — no!”) and also Galarraga’s oh-well attitude afterward: “It’s just my one and only perfect game.”

“Come Back Andy Pettitte” is sung as a gentle plea for the Yankees pitcher to come out of retirement. Happily outdated, it became newly apropos when Pettitte fractured his left ankle on June 27. Songs about Bonds, Gehrig, Buckner and Zambrano (Carlos, not Victor) also appear.

(Time out for a related story: when Bern played the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., on July 4, he did not play two of the 18 songs on the album: one was not memorized and one was about Pete Rose. “They banned Pete Rose, you know,” Bern said. “So they banned my Pete Rose song, too.”)

Bern’s baseball allegiances have shifted over the years. He is from Iowa, once lived near Wrigley Field and now lives a three-minute bicycle ride from Dodger Stadium. But “if they had to bury me in one uniform it would probably be a Giants uniform,” he said.

“Doubleheader” hits its stride with “The Golden Voice of Vin Scully,” a version of which is also on “Drifter.” The song consists of three vignettes, each focused on a person feeling disconnected to the world. What the three have in common is their aloneness, and the solace that later that evening they will be able to settle in with Scully, a radio and the Dodgers game, and feel connected again.

“That one resonates with me,” said John Huber, chairman of the political science department at Columbia University and a longtime friend of Bern’s. “I’ve never listened to Vin Scully, I’ve never lived on the West Coast, but for me it was Jack Buck.”

Huber recalled how he became a Cardinals fan in 1967. During the World Series that year his father began picking him up at kindergarten and taking him home to watch the games. He would pitch a Wiffle ball to him between innings and tell him about Bob Gibson and Lou Brock. Huber went on to play college baseball in the 1980s, but he tore cartilage in a knee.

In “This Side of the White Lines” Bern sings:

If his knees hadn’t got sick
He’d have made the big leagues, just like his hero, the Mick
He wore No. 7 on his back, like the Mick
But his knees got sick
So he had to quit.

Huber has told only a few people close to him that Bern once wrote a song about him. “I wasn’t nearly as good as I was in the song,” he said. But he is being modest: he was an academic all-American at Division III Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.

If his Dad hadn’t got sick
They’d have argued nights over their World Series picks
Who’s better than the Yanks?
Who’s better than the Mick?
He was tough as a brick
But he still got sick.

“Dan was around when my dad was dying and he wrote that song very soon after it happened,” said Huber, who was 23 when his father, also named John, learned he had kidney cancer. His father received the diagnosis in February 1986, around spring training, and died in October. “It just means a lot when a close friend recognizes a personal experience you’re going through in such a beautiful way.”

A student of the game might say the song explores the complexities of life; highlights the bonds baseball can create between fathers and sons; contrasts how a baseball game can go on forever but how life is short.

“It’s just sort of the difference between the perfect world on the field and the more difficult, often sadder world on the outside,” Bern said.

There’s no shortage of storytelling in baseball.

Drifter
By James Campion

Prolific Songwriter’s Ode to Perpetual Motion

I first heard a selection of the songs that ended up on Dan Bern’s brilliant new record, Drifter in November of last year in the lobby of a refurbished theater in Beacon, New York and then the next day during a promotional live web cast for a magazine in downtown Manhattan. He played a few more at Joe’s Pub in Greenwich Village that night and in late-December at Mexicali’s Blues Café in Teaneck, New Jersey. Separated from the eventual collected work, which both musically and lyrically segues in and out of each song as if psychic travelogue — a yearning to discover, hide, escape and return to a home that is at once geographical and spiritual — it was as if Bern were symbolically ushering the songs through a rigorous performance trial, first solo and then with his new collaborators, the creatively versatile Common Rotation.

Later in the winter, as is his wont, Bern sent me a rough mix of the material he wanted to put on the eventual release. For weeks I played it in my office, in the car, and in the background during gatherings of the local tribes, but it wasn’t until late one night that it hit me; this is as close to a running commentary on the American folk ethic as could be laid down in one place — a literal ode to perpetual motion, Jay Gatsby’s ride through the valley of ashes to his unreachable green light at the end of the dock.

Drifter is a statement — Bern’s, a generation’s, a genre’s — the effects of traveling on the traveler for good or ill. It is survival. It is change. It is acceptance. Serpentine movement as philosophical, ethereal, political, nostalgic, narcotic, and introspective on tracks like “Luke the Drifter,” “Raining in Madrid,” and “Haarlem,” “Carried Away,” “Home,” and “Mexican Vacation,” “I’m Not From Around Here,” and “Love Makes The Other World Go Round,” which is the type of denouement that eases seamlessly into the epilogue of “These Living Dreams.” Many, if not all the songs deal with a transitory experience — aging, evolving, moving along through life observationally — it is also replete with an imagining of a better “place” through vivid dreams and visions of hope.

A concept record? Nah. Bern was quick to dismiss that on a late-night phone call in March, after I sent him a manically cobbled deconstruction of the record under the influence of my sudden epiphany. Hell, who isn’t swept up in the lure of the road? And what writer (and Bern is nothing if not one) has not tackled its seduction from Homer to Joyce, Horace Greeley to Woody Guthrie, Kerouac to yours truly.

“I think subconsciously you choose what you choose to tell your stories about, but it’s not a conscious effort on my part,” Bern explained when a proper interview commenced in early June. “I’m not clever enough to make up something and realize its metaphoric significance, though I do think it’s a beautiful thing when the listener acts as my interpreter and takes the ride to that degree. That’s all I ever want from any song. It’s what any songwriter can ask — that the listener wrestles with it and lets the ideas reveal themselves. For me, it’s all the stuff of my mundane little life lifted by the power of song and maybe, subconsciously, you’ll tap into these things because similar experiences come up in all of our lives.”

Bern’s protestations to the contrary, these songs are not disparate ballads or ravers, wise-guy sing-a-longs or political harangues, the likes of which he has mastered over 16 years spanning 18 albums. “Maybe this is my swansong for that character,” Bern says. “But then again, maybe it never goes away.” Or as he sings in “Luke the Drifter” (the title a reference to country legend Hank Williams’ non-deplume), “Go or stay, one or the other.”

Drifter is a singular vision of a journey, the infinite search through snapshots and notations of every can-kicking crossroad conundrum. “Ooh, I do my share I knock about/Is anything gonna work out”? he sings in the hauntingly beautiful “The Golden Voice of Vin Scully,” as the interior echoes of the radio wave acts as a north star in a desert-scape Californian hymn worthy of Georgia O’Keefe’s pallet.

“Ultimately this stuff is therapy, isn’t it?” Bern muses. “Any literature is interpretation, the only difference being that most of the time you’re not talking to the writer.”

Drifter’s topographical references are vast. We visit the Milky Way, the moon, Madrid, Hollywood, New York City, Capetown, Johannesburg, North of Seattle to the Mexico line, San Bernardino, Haarlem, the black hills of Ohio/Wisconsin to the Indiana mud, the Canadian border, Philadelphia, West Virginia, and the solar system. Then there is time travel as in “Mexican Vacation,” where a train moves the narrator through the anarchic landscape of a pre-historic American construct overrun with slave-traders as he professes his love for the “runaway slave girl.”

A sense of travel even appears when we’re stuck in the obligatory isolation chamber of the traveling musician, the hotel room, which is wistfully depicted in “Party by Myself.” Bern’s bittersweet sampling of embraceable loneliness and mind-altering inertia is not unlike being suspended in outer space or in a capsule, which appears, as in the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey to be still but is actually moving. Most interesting is Bern’s use of the two-dimensional image of Captain Kirk flickering on the tube, another iconic character set adrift “boldly going where no man has gone before.”

Kirk appears, as do all of Bern’s pop culture/historical figure references, brimming with symbolism, not the least of which is his nod to Jonathan Swift, who penned the immortal Gulliver’s Travels and for whom the poet W.P. Yeats once described in his epitaph as the “world-besotted traveler.”

“I suppose the interesting thing is that these songs were written at different times, instead of a concentrated period,” says Bern when pressed again about this coincidental subconscious spate of songs with the central theme of the passerby. “I started to write songs like ‘Raining in Madrid’ and ‘Haarlem’ in those places, while ‘Capetown’ is sort of a flight of the mind. And then, you know, LuLu came (his two-year old daughter), I moved out here (from New Mexico to Los Angeles) and, yeah, I think that kind of sparked the whole thing.”

I count Dan Bern as one of my closest colleagues and in many ways a brother in arms. We have tracked the bloody grounds of political and social battles and acted as sounding boards for each other’s work for close to a decade. Both of us have fathered daughters within a few years of each other and watched our generation begin to take charge of all that we railed against in our youth — the destruction of the earth, the systemic killing of innocents, the segmental repression of society, the global economic power-play — and we even managed to elect our own leader of the free world, and yet watch in horror as the madness continues unabated.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Bern chuckles, as he usually does when confronted by larger issues before whittling it down to his own corner of the world. “But also what’s true at the same time is we’re getting older and we have a feeling of our own mortality; we’re not young bucks anymore.” And then he makes sure I know that he doesn’t feel particularly in charge of anything.”I’m not even in charge of my house!” he laughs.

This may well be why Drifter is filled with the temporary escape provided by chemicals and booze, which pop up as playful landmarks along the way. Senses dulled just enough to continue the search for anything; — integrity, friendship, love, comfort? “Will I see you in the street tonight?” Bern sings in “Raining in Madrid,” as if drifting into random social interaction. But in “Home” his search flirts with futility, “Like a vagabond out on the lawn, I was almost gone,” but then suddenly he sings, “Find out who will stick it through thick and thin, lose or win, it’s how you get some place.”

The passion of the search has certainly inspired Bern’s singing. He has never sounded better or more controlled, completely at ease with these wonderfully crafted pieces, each one fastidiously pored over with absorbing precision. Here Common Rotation’s honeyed harmonies and weathered accompaniment on trumpet and banjo (Jordan Katz), harmonica and saxophone (Adam Busch) and guitar and dobro (Eric Kufs) lend the songs a weight they crave, a deserving ensemble for their poetic resonance.

“The truth is I worked on this record three-times longer than anything I’ve ever done,” Bern sighs when confronted with the events of the past three and a half years. “It becomes this thing that every little change that occurs in your sphere you apply it.”

The story of the making of Drifter could well have found its way into the work, as Bern and his ensemble, absent the umbrella of a record company this time around, sold songs, studio time, played private gigs and even composed personal jingles for outgoing phone messages for a host of donors all over the country, the time, expanse, and constant dissection of the project adding to its charm.

“The biggest thing is I didn’t have a wad of record company dough to go in and just do it,” Bern explains. “This record was done on everybody’s good graces and time. Money talks. It gets things done. It books studio time, it pays for musicians, it moves things along. And in a place like L.A. there’s all the people you want, but everybody’s doing a trillion things.”

Some of those people, like film songwriting partner, Mike Viola and a stirring guest appearance by the incomparable Emmy Lou Harris on the moving, “Swing Set,” serve the travel aesthetic well. We stop off into different voices and pass through musical styles, providing a station-to-station, truck stop ambiance of the rootless existence.

“There’s a line through this record, for sure,” admits Bern. “And that’s why I worked so hard to get to a sequence that works. It’s like you wouldn’t routinely skip over a scene in a movie to get to the next one. Even though there are fifteen songs here, they all play a role. Basically if something’s on there, it’s because it wouldn’t allow itself to be thrown off. It forced its way in and wouldn’t let go.”

Bern says the sequence of the songs became “like an accordion” for months upon months, jumping the total from 15 songs down to 12 and in some cases just eight and then back up again. “I finally went to Chuck Plotkin (famed producer of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, as well as Bern’s 2002 masterwork, New American Language) and sat with he and his wife for two full afternoons,” recounts Bern. “Turns out, I had the bulk of the run down, but he made a couple of important switches, which tied everything up. For me, if Chuck says it’s okay, then it’s okay.”

Once given the thumbs up from his musical sherpa, Bern quickly shifted gears and recorded 18 of his baseball songs with Common Rotation. Culled from nearly thirty years of work, which spans a century of the game’s most compelling characters and stories from The Babe to Barry Bonds, Doubleheader, aptly titled due to the 18 song list — a song an inning — was released on the heels of Drifter on July 4 when Bern played the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. “We just finished it six weeks ago,” he says excitedly, as if relieved to be free from the looming stranglehold of the Drifter marathon. “We just went in and did it all at once, boom; now all these songs I’ve been carrying around are under one roof.”

Beyond wrapping up Drifter and banging out Doubleheader, Bern hints that a third record of country songs, which he whispers may be the best of the three, is ready to go. “Probably for a good ten, fifteen years I was writing on average a song every ten days, like eighty songs a year, but now that seems paltry,” laughs Bern. “I pat myself on the back now if I can get through a tour without writing a song, allowing myself to stay present, because what writing does, as much as it’s this amazing thing that freezes moments, what you’re doing is freezing a rapidly approaching past moment. So while you’re scribbling and drawing your brain cells for a rhyme, maybe you miss that next passing cloud.”

And so here is Dan Bern, putting a ribbon on his troubadour life and turning his attention to the pastoral lore of the grand old game, which James Earl Jones so poignantly performed in Field of Dreams, a film more about the passage of time and the evolution of spirit than baseball. He could well have been reciting from Drifter: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”

Or as Bern sings in the refrain of “Luke the Drifter,” “Life is tragic, somely/Life is magic, mostly.”

“I can’t tell you how much of my energy, attention, DNA is in Drifter,” concludes Bern. “But I am so personally relieved to not have to think about it anymore on a daily basis. It’s a happy, guilty, candy pleasure to talk about baseball. I guess it’s just easier to talk about baseball than myself.”

Drifting … drifting … drifting along.

Dan Bern Sings Across America

By MORDECAI SPECKTOR

I met God on the edge of town / Where the wind meets the stillness

Where the darkness meets the light / Where the ocean meets the sky

Where the desert meets the rain / Where the earth meets the heavens

On the edge of town I met God

— From “God Said No,” by Dan Bern

Dan Bern is a troubadour of the road warrior variety. He comes through the Twin Cities on a regular basis, playing at the 400 Club and the Cedar Cultural Center.

During a conversation with the Jewish World from his home in Los Angeles last week, Bern talked about songwriting for movies and TV, a possible collaboration with St. Louis Park native Peter Himmelman, and an upcoming gig at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

The Jewish native of Mount Vernon, Iowa (his late father taught piano at Cornell College), will bring his guitar and harmonica to the Dakota Jazz Club on May 10. This will be his first date at the renowned Minneapolis jazz joint.

Asked about his repertoire for the Dakota show, Bern replies, “I don’t know, man, I’ve got so many songs. I just don’t know what it’s going be from night to night. I’ve been delving into a lot of old country songs lately, just for myself — and some of those come out when I play.”

Perhaps he will perform one of the songs he wrote for the movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

The faux biopic from 2007, written by Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan, and directed by Kasdan, spins the tale of a troubled singer, Cox (played by John C. Reilly), whose personal life and musical career get slightly jostled on a roller coaster ride of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Cox is haunted by memories of an untoward childhood incident: he accidentally chopped his beloved older brother, Nate, in half with a machete.

Anyway, Bern, who previously wrote a song for Kasdan’s first film, Zero Effect, wrote or co-wrote (with Mike Viola) 16 songs for Walk Hard. Kasdan also tapped Bern to write tunes for the zany comedy Get Him to the Greek, which also concerns a mercurial, drug-addled pop musician.

“I don’t know what it was… I kind of dropped everything for a couple of years and just wrote Dewey Cox songs,” Bern says, regarding his channeling the fictive musical legend for Walk Hard. “And then Greek came on the heels of that one.”

Walk Hard follows Dewey Cox through varied musical incarnations — Buddy Holly-like rock ’n’ roll, Roy Orbison-type ballads, psychedelic sounds, and surrealistic mid-1960s Dylan. In this latter genre, Bern contributed “Royal Jelly” and “Farmer Glickstein,” brilliantly twisted parodies of tunes by the famous Bard of Hibbing.

A scene from Walk Hard plays on the protagonist’s chameleon-like musical identity, as a reporter at a press conference challenges Dewey Cox: “People are saying that your new music sounds a lot like Bob Dylan.” Dewey Cox, his hair in a teased-out mid-Dylan hairdo, shoots back: “Well, maybe Bob Dylan sounds a lot like me. You know, how come nobody ever asks Bob Dylan, ‘Why do you sound so much like Dewey Cox?’”

Actually, Cox, at times, sounds exactly like Dan Bern’s renditions of Dylan’s music and lyrics in a sort of musical funhouse mirror. And adding a further layer of puzzlement, music writers frequently note that Bern himself sounds a lot like Dylan.

Last year, Bern got to write some songs for a TV series called Hellcats. (I missed that one, too.) The tunesmith explains that Hellcats “is a cheerleading show, but one of the characters’ dad is a songwriter.”

Thinking about Jewish songwriters in Los Angeles, I ask Bern if he knows Peter Himmelman, and he says, “Yeah, sure.” It turns out that Bern has appeared on Himmelman’s Furious World webcast.

“I’m going to get together with [Himmelman] next week,” remarks Bern. “He writes kids albums and we talked about writing one together.” (Himmelman will play the Dakota Jazz Club on May 24.)

Bern came out with an album of children’s songs, Two Feet Tall, in 2009.

In addition to his 18 albums, Bern, who is 46 years old, has published several books of short stories and a novel, Quitting Science. And he paints.

Despite all of these accomplishments, Bern is somewhat reticent and self-deprecating during the interview with the AJW. In the background of our conversation, the Los Angeles birds chirp, and Bern’s young daughter continually beseeches him in her darling voice. She has some questions about the new grass that has been seeded, he explains.

The singer does become more animated when I ask if he likes baseball, which is a theme running through his songs and stories.

It turns out that Bern just completed recording an album comprised of 18 baseball songs, which, he says, “go deep into the lore of the game.” He will perform some of the songs “at Cooperstown [New York] this July 4, I’m playing at the Hall of Fame there.”

By the way, Bern was a Giants fan from his youth, although he lived for a few years near Wrigley Field in Chicago — “I could hear [Cubs announcer] Harry [Caray] doing the seventh inning stretch out my window.”

“I kind of went with the Cubs for a while,” Bern explains. “Now I live about three minutes from Dodger Stadium. So when I go to the game, it’s to see the Dodgers. At this point, I’m mostly a fan of the game.”

Another recent Bern project seeing the light of day, or the darkness of movie theaters, is his soundtrack for a documentary about Everett Ruess, who Bern says was “a kid who wandered through the rough lands of Utah and Arizona and New Mexico by himself, with a burro,” in the 1930s. “He wrote amazing letters and essays, and occasionally poems, about the land and his relationship to it.”

Ruess mysteriously disappeared in 1934, at the age of 20. Filmmaker Lindsay Jaeger’s documentary is titled Everett Ruess Wilderness Song.

Although he is not a household name in the Twin Cities, Bern is a distinctive voice in the crowded singer-songwriter field. His Jewishness comes to the fore on songs like “God Said No,” a story about his plea that God send him back in time: to Seattle, where he could save rock icon Kurt Cobain, who killed himself in 1994; to Berlin, so he could kill Hitler; and to Jerusalem, to pry Jesus off the cross. As the song title indicates, “God said no.”

And Bern’s song “Breathe,” refers back to an earlier song he wrote, “Jerusalem,” in which the singer proclaimed that he was the messiah. “Breathe,” from the 2007 album of the same name, catalogues many of our so-called civilization’s discontents and advises, “Stop what you’re doing and breathe.”

As in his songs for Walk Hard, Bern mixes in a large spoonful of humor, so his upcoming show at the Dakota should veer sharply from the staid and predictable. After all, this is the guy who recorded under the name of Dan Bern and the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy.

Live in New York

By Matt Melis

Live in New York finds Dan Bern once again taking his delightfully offbeat bag of songs and comical cultural commentary to the stage in a fitting follow-up to 2010’s extraordinary Live in Los Angeles. This time, however, friends and tourmates Common Rotation assume the role of full-time backing band, lending richer, fuller folk textures to Bern’s songs. It’s a change that distinguishes this record from its live predecessor but also leaves the listener yearning a bit for those rougher, more abrasive moments usually interspersed in Bern’s performances.

A mellowed “Black Tornado” opens the proceedings and quickly demonstrates Common Rotation’s appeal, as they perfectly accent Bern’s acoustic strumming and add delicate layers to the vocal parts, particularly on the song’s uplifting later choruses. Bern’s nasally pining on Fleeting Days standout “I Need You” mingles beautifully with Paul Kuhn’s cellocaster. “I’m Not the Guy” and “Baby Bye Bye” come across well enough but lack some of their natural instrumental and vocal bite due to their softer, expanded treatments here.

As always, Bern uses the stage to air newer material and a brand of esoteric topical song that is unlikely to land on a proper album (see: “Joyce & Galarraga”). “Economy”, a previously unreleased song and the record’s finest track, envisions a more Spain-like America with champs like Rafael Nadal, poets like Federico García Lorca, and Hollywood movies that the whole world can love. Bern’s country-tinged wail of “It’s raining in Madrid tonight/ It’s snowing in my head” is one of the prettiest vocals he’s ever recorded. “Talkin’ Tea Party Blues” finds the leftist Bern accidentally attending a Tea Party meeting, where, among other farcical incidents, “Some guy stood up and shouted, ‘Health care is a mortal sin’/His tracheotomy tube fell out/He stuck a cigarette in, and I lit it for him.” The a capella “Isner & Mahut”, inspired by last year’s historical marathon Wimbledon tennis match, lands some laughs with classic Bern lines like “Isner and Mahut on the Wimbledon lawn/Played until the day was gone/Played ‘til the chimes of old Big Ben/‘Til Christ returned and left again.”

Bern pulls on the heartstrings near the record’s end, dedicating “Oh Sister” to Nicole (presumably his sister), a song in which a grown kid brother—once equal parts sweet, annoying, and even a little perverted—looks back and pays tribute to his older sister, everything tied together by the boyish, inquisitive chorus of “And where would Willie Mays have been without Jackie Robinson?/And who can say what I’d been without you to lead the way.” Bern and Common Rotation end Live in New York with spirited Americana/folk-tinged renditions of Liz Anderson’s “The Fugitive” and Woody Guthrie’s “Deportees”, but neither are particularly memorable and feel underwhelming after the stirring “Oh Sister”.

Bern deserves credit for doing more than simply repackaging the successful formula of Live in Los Angeles. He repeats no songs from last year’s live release and gives fans a chance to hear older and newer songs alike in a slightly different style than he is accustomed to embracing onstage. The simple fact is that Bern is probably just a little better as a lone gunslinger than as a member of a posse.

Recently, I was flipping through the channels and happen to stop on this video. Not MTV or VH1 but ironically, on “Good Morning America”. The video (which aired on Saturday, December 29) featured viewers who sent in clips with 3-word messages; written down, each in its own unique way. Some spoke of overcoming struggle; ‘I’m Still Here’, ‘I Miss You’ wrote another. The video was a message of hope and optimism for the upcoming year and the soundtrack to this message was Dan Bern’s hit song “Baby Bye Bye”. Referring to the song’s use, Bern says, ‘I think of songs as, you know, like chairs that you make. And you want to see ‘em used. It’s not like the song’s being used to sell trucks.’

It is that philosophy that Bern takes into every aspect of this work. He’s an artist in every sense; musician, writer, painter and even comedian. I know the last one may not fit with the others, but when you lay down practically half the soundtrack for the hit comedy of 2007-2008, “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” starring John C. Reilly, you have to have some sort of versatility. An even better example is with Bern’s release, “Breathe”. Bern’s take: ‘There’s something mystical about it I think. It’s the only record I’ve made that I didn’t go completely nuts at some point.’ Luckily for us, Bern is rereleasing his past albums as well which will once again involve me needing more space on my hard drive (iTunes, why do you tempt me so!).

When you find yourself filling your iPod with the Bern collection, song after song, running through your head, into your days and permanently placing a smile on your face, you’ll feel realived. Relieved in the fact that once again, true artists are in this world, alive and kicking. Bern says his influence comes from all corners, ‘I don’t always have control over it. It can be in a car, a bar, anyplace.’ Remember this when you find yourself “out of control” as you let Bern’s message overcome your new year. Check out his XXQs to find out more.

XXQs: Dan Bern

Pen’s Eye View: How and when did you first get involved in music?

Dan Bern: My Dad was a concert pianist and composer. He had a cellist over one time, Paul Olefsky, and they played. I thought it was cool. Up til then I had only been around piano. So I started playing the cello the next year, when I was six. When I was about 14 I quit the cello and started playin guitar. Needed more of a song instrument at that point.

PEV: Was there a certain point in your life when you told yourself that music was going to be a career rather than a hobby?

DB: Well, I got pretty serious about it in college. After that I went to Chicago and started playing seven open mikes a week. From that point I always put the music first, even though I had a bunch of different jobs along the way.

PEV: Growing up, what kind of music were you listening to? Do you remember the first album you ever purchased?

DB: The first record I bought was called “Tom Jones: Live in Las Vegas.” I got it for $2.98 at the hardware store uptown. Pretty cheesy. Great though. I mostly listened to the Beatles for a long time. And the Monkees. And my folks had the Tom Lehrer records, which I memorized. And then later, when I was about 14, I started listening to old folk and blues and country. And a lot of that is still my favorite stuff to listen to. But when I was falling asleep, my Dad would be practicing. Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, his own stuff…

PEV: Tell us about the first time you performed live. Did you think, then that you would be where you are now?

DB: I was just so scared beforehand, I think I was just relieved to get through it alive. But I liked doing it right away. That connection you get with an audience. Nothing like it.

PEV: What can people expect from a live Dan Bern performance?

DB: I don’t know, I’ve never seen one! I guess it’s different from tour to tour. Sometimes it’s with a band, sometimes not. We used to go to great lengths to involve people, get ‘em to sing, come onstage, whatever. Or we’d unplug and go play in the audience. Or get everyone to leave and go outside and we’d sing in the street. Or make up songs. Anything. Just make it real, make it about that night.

PEV: Your song “Baby Bye Bye” was featured on the “Your 3 Words” segment on “Good Morning America”, on Saturday, December 29. The segment was a tribute to people’s survival of this past year and dreams for the upcoming year. Did you like the way your song was utilized?

DB: Yeah, I thought it was cool. But I almost always like it when my songs are used in different mediums. I think of songs as, you know, like chairs that you make. And you want to see ‘em used. The segment you’re talking about, it had people sending in little videos with little 3-word messages. How can that not be cool? It’s not like the song’s being used to sell trucks.

PEV: Tell us about your work with the new comedy, “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” starring John C. Reilly. You wrote and co-wrote 14 of the 30 available songs on the soundtrack. How did you get involved with this project?

DB: Jake Kasdan, the director and writer, has been a good friend for a long time. He used my song “One Dance” in his first film, “Zero Effect,” some dozen years ago. Jake first told me about the Dewey Cox idea a year and a half ago, before there was even a script. I loved everything about it, and started writing Dewey Cox songs right away. Later I got to be involved in the whole collaborative aspect, with Jake and Judd Apatow and John C. Reilly, and Mike Andrews the music producer, and I wrote a whole bunch of songs with Mike Viola, who’s an incredible writer and musician. It was all really fun, and I hope to do more things like that.

PEV: How is your current album, “Breathe” different from your previous works as well as different from other music out today?

DB: Kinda hard to say. It was a group of songs written in a short amount of time, 2 or 3 months. It’s kind of a particular thing–the place the songs are coming from, how they sound, and all that. There’s something mystical about it I think. It’s the only record I’ve made that I didn’t go completely nuts at some point. Maybe because I was living on the beach in Malibu and saw the sun come up every morning and swam in the ocean and heard the waves all night. Or maybe it was the Ativan.

PEV: You recently re-released your 1998 self-released album, “Smartie Mine” and others. What made you decide to bring that back and how has your musical styling changed since that album?

DB: Well, that one’s now on itunes, along with some that never came out before, ‘Macaroni Cola’ from 2000, ‘The Burbank Tapes’ from ’98, to name some. It kind of appeals to me, the notion that people can get music now and there doesn’t have to be anything manufactured, no trees, no oil used up. I was ordering some DVDs of some old tennis matches, like McEnroe-Lendl, stuff like that, and it was all available. No big P.R. thing, but if you want them, they’re there. So I figured, what the hell.

PEV: Out of all your writing, is there that one song that still sticks out as the most special one? Why, yes or no?

DB: Not really. There’s ones that I still play after a long time. Jerusalem, Tiger Woods, Chelsea Hotel, Wasteland, I still like playing those. But mostly, I’m more interested in the new stuff, the stuff that seems more immediate. Or stuff that’s been around that I haven’t recorded yet. I have a couple of batches that are probably 2 separate records at least. So those I think about.

PEV: Who is currently in your CD player or on your iPod right now?

DB: Tampa Red. Big Bill Broonzy. Willie Dixon. The new Springsteen. Mike Viola’s “Lurch.”

PEV: What up and coming artist do you think we should all be listening to now?

DB: The Mammals. Chris Chandler. Janos, out of Las Cruces. Greyhound Soul.

PEV: In all your travels, which city do you think offers the best appreciation for music?

DB: Anchorage, Alaska. I guess not that many people make it up there. For whatever reasons, they make it seem worth your while. I think they think I’m a major star everyplace else, like Paul McCartney maybe. One time I finished a tour there with my band, the IJBC. At the end of “Alaska Highway” I swear there were 100 people on stage, singin and dancing and carrying on.

PEV: How is life on the road for you? Best and worst parts?

DB: When it’s going good, you just never want to stop. When you have a good band and the crowds are good and everyone’s having fun. Then it’s great. Of course, there are the other times too. When it’s lonely and you feel like it doesn’t matter that you’re out there. But you just never know. Lousy gigs can turn into great gigs in a moment. And you just never know what’s gonna happen, who might turn up. I’ve had great gigs with 5 people and crappy ones with 500.

PEV: When you are not traveling or performing, what can we find you doing in your spare time?

DB: I don’t really have a strong boundary between “work time” and “spare time.” I might be riding my bike or playing tennis, and have some lines running through my mind. So, I’m working. But the work is fun, or it isn’t any good. So, it’s all spare time. When it’s good it’s just a flow. Right now I’m reading my tenth Murakami book since the summer. He’s right there in a very short list of my favorite writers. Fante, Hemingway, Salinger.

PEV: You offer a lot of downloads on your site for fans. What is your opinion on the heated debate over downloading and file sharing music off line?

DB: Is that still a debate? Seems like it’s out there now. If you can get a buck a song, great. Sometimes people are gonna get music without paying for it. And, really, that’s probably how it should be. The music is supposed to be spread around. Would you rather have someone not hear your song at all? I don’t think so.

PEV: What’s one thing, people would be surprised to hear about you?

DB: I did the voice of Howard Cosell on a recent monday night football, introducing Dewey Cox. I gave Wilt Chamberlain tennis lessons. I write a sports column for the hot springs herald in New Mexico. I wrote a song with Hunter S. Thompson called “shit on your chest.” I met Gale Sayers when i was a kid. My uncle was a mathematician. My mom saw Kristallnacht happen. I met McLovin.

PEV: When you sit down to write music, what kind of environment do you surround yourself in?

DB: I don’t always have control over it. It can be in a car, a bar, anyplace. When I’m around home, I have a studio space that I go to. There’s a bunch of instruments, some recording stuff, my painting stuff, a ping-pong table…

PEV: What one word, best describes Dan Bern?

DB: In German, they have these really long compound words that can contain a lot of information. Like “Gitarremundharmonikasangerundliedermacher.” Which means, “guitar player, harmonica player, singer and songwriter.” So maybe that’s the one word. Or else, “Cheeseeater.”

PEV: So, what is next for Dan Bern?

DB: Dunno. I’m hoping someone calls me and wants me to write a bunch of songs for their next movie. I’ve got a fast pen and I’m ready, so…I ‘ve got some records I want to make. Some pictures to paint. And one of these days, I’m gonna play a boxer in a movie. Just like that DeNiro fella. And, of course, I might want to do some bullfighting.

For more information on Dan Bern, check out www.DanBern.com

By Kim Ruehl

If you love classic country music, contemporary folk, protest songs, rockabilly and corny showtune pop songs, and you need a good laugh, look no further. Built on a solid foundation of rather talented songwriters like Dan Bern and Marshall Crenshaw, this soundtrack is mostly just downright funny. What else could you expect from the folks who brought you Anchorman and Talladega Nights.

Silly Folk, Country and Pop Songs

The title track of Walk Hard was written by none other than Marshall Crenshaw. Clearly a spoof of Johnny Cash, the tune is corny as all get-out, with great lines like “I took it in the face and walked as hard as I could.” What does that even mean?

Every song is performed by Dewey Cox star John C. Reilly (A Prairie Home Companion, Talladega Nights, Chicago). One of the best highlights, though, is when Reilly is joined by Angela Correa on “Let’s Duet”—a sweet love song chock full of innuendo and sharp puns. “(I Hate You) Big Daddy” is an Elvis-style rockabilly tune about, well, pretty much what it sounds like it’s about.

Dan Bern’s Work Shines Brightest

Dan Bern’s “Dear Mr. President” is a scathing letter to the president, or as Reilly introduces, “for the so-called commander-in-chief, wherever you are…wherever your heart is.” “Dear Mr. President,” he sings, “I want you to know I am deeper than you, listen and learn.” Then, in typical Bern fashion, it proceeds to offend just about every group it could possibly offend, calling to mind every ridiculous stereotype in a way that would be offensive if it weren’t so completely candid (and funny).

Another Bern masterpiece is “Royal Jelly,” which Reilly sings in his best Bern-esque/Dylanesque voice. It’s about nothing, really, and it just goes on and on with hysterically meaningless, killer lines like, “Stuffed cabbage is the darling of the laundromat / and the sorority mascot sits with the lumberjack.”

Other Highlights

“Dewey Cox” does a silly Tom Jones-ish lounge version of David Bowie’s “Starman.” “Beautiful Ride” is another anthemic Bern contribution, co-written with by Mike Viola. It’s a very show-tuney number about mortality, in the least serious possible way. Finally, the soundtrack ends with another Bern tune, “(Have You Heard the News) Dewey Cox Died,” which tells the story of Cox’s death in a touching, silly way.

Dan Bern: Breathe

By Mike Schiller

The first sign that Dan Bern’s latest album Breathe is a good one: a baseball reference. “And my friend comes in / Sees old Barry on the wall / Says ‘you ought to have an asterisk up there’ / So I painted on the wall / With a paintbrush in my hand / An asterisk, but what the hell, he’s still up there,” is how Bern begins “Trudy”, the first song on Breathe. The implication in such a metaphor is plainly laid out as the song progresses, that no matter how you qualify your mistakes, no matter how many excuses you have for them, even as you accept them, they’re still there. They still happened. And somehow, you have to live with it.

This is not the Dan Bern we once knew, the one who would hide his Big Ideas in sophomoric couplets, nor is it the one who would cuss ‘cause he liked the sound of it. This isn’t even the Dan Bern of New American Language, the man who dreamed of Utopia and meeting God. No, this is a Dan Bern whose Big Ideas have gotten smaller, as he tries to parse the personal relationships and struggles of everyday Americans. Granted, he still sounds like the Dan Bern we always knew, with that nasal timbre that makes Dylan fans do double takes, and he’s still toting a band around for his studio efforts, fully orchestrating them with all of the drums, bass, harmonica, and even banjos, mandolins, and keyboards where he feels them necessary. Producer Chuck Plotkin seems to be going for a traditional Rock-Americana sound by way of Bruce Springsteen’s mellow side, though Dylan still takes the prize of most obvious influence, thanks to Bern’s narrative style and not exactly unique vocal phrasing.

And yet, while there may not be a single original musical idea on the entire album (and there isn’t), none of it sounds tired or clichéd, thanks partly to the earnest performances given by all involved, and also thanks to Bern’s still-unique way of telling stories. He inserts “I” into all of his songs, giving every single one of them an autobiographical feel, whether they’re as personal as they sound or not. It’s a trick that makes every song sound like a diary entry (or, if you must, a blog entry) from someone far more literate than your average MySpace addict, drawing the listener in and holding that listener hostage for 45 minutes while he recounts his deepest darkest secrets.

There are hints, however, that the songs aren’t necessarily about him, which further drives the idea home that he could be talking about mankind in general just as much as he’s talking about himself specifically. Many of Breathe‘s first-person characters are epic generalizations, metaphors for a mindset rather than literal tellings of the travails of an actual person. “Suicide Room” is a beatiful tale of perseverance, a man beaten down by the world who takes on the smaller but no less significant challenge of not killing himself in a hotel room where two others have ended their own lives. It is bleak, perhaps, but it speaks to kind of a desperate perseverance, the human spirit giving itself every opportunity to succeed at something: “Figured if I can’t beat this world / Maybe I can beat this room”, he sings, and the listener can’t help but hope that Bern’s “I” succeeds.

Breathe is Dan Bern’s “nice” album, it seems. It’s orchestrated nicely enough, it won’t offend anyone, and it does just fine whether it’s in the background or the foreground. Bern’s still a master with one-liners—“I could do card tricks you wouldn’t believe”, he says in his title-track’s examination of an everyman’s experience as a self-made messiah, and “We’re all just gasoline on the funeral pyre” is his idea of a moment of mortal perspective—but as a whole, Breathe is a portrait of maturity. This is a Dan Bern that’s getting older and wiser, not fighting his age like, say, Ben Folds, but quietly accepting it. If you can identify with this sort of sentiment, there’s a good chance you’ll fall in love with Breathe; if you can’t, you’ll probably kind of like it anyway, for while it may not reach out and grab you by the throat, it’s also impossible to hate. Sincerity in matters of self-reflection can have that effect on an album.

Skewed Inner Vision

By Tim Porter

Since his self-titled major-label debut in 1997, Dan Bern has had to deal with the “new Dylan” hype that attached to him.

“At the very beginning I think it felt flattering,” the Iowa native (born Dan Bernstein) explained from his home in New Mexico. “And then it felt like the opposite of that. Like I have no identity of my own. And then the third phase is mostly just kind of ignoring it, because you don’t know what it means anyway.”

Nonetheless, the comparisons were easy to draw. There was the voice and vocal style, somewhere between Dylan and Petty. There were the melodic and rhythmic similarities, perhaps unconscious from listening in his formative years to both Dylan and Dylan’s influences—Woody Guthrie, Lightin’ Hopkins, Hank Williams and others. There was the stream-of-conscious wordiness characteristic of some of Dylan’s work (even apart from the various “Talkin’ Blues” homages). As much as anything, there was all this packaged in a man with a guitar and sometimes a harmonica.

“A ragtime band”

The comparisons broadened with the release of 2001’s New American Language and the introduction of a full band, The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy (IJBC). A wonderfully varied pop-rock production, New American Language showed as much influence from Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen as from The Great Poet.

Bern’s new release, Fleeting Days, builds on the sound of New American Language, producing yet another nicely variegated integration of the sounds of our pop, rock, blues and country masters. Working with the IJBC for the past couple of years helped Bern to flesh out his songs.

“[Fleeting Days] is a band record more than anything,” he explains. “It happens when I’m playing with the band a lot. You just start thinking of parts differently when you’re actually writing it.”

“Skewed inner vision”

Fleeting Days also completes the process of lyrical maturation begun on New American Language. Bern’s lyrical style has become much more his own. His lyrics are crisper, his themes and metaphors sharper. The stream-of-conscious style of early albums has given way to well-crafted … well … songs.

What has always set Bern apart is his lyrical content. He fearlessly mixes the stuff of romance, family and friends, politics, religion, sports, pop culture icons and dreams. He doesn’t compartmentalize these aspects of life but approaches them more or less holistically—the way we experience them—with humor and insight.

“I think it’s just whatever’s happening, both outside in the world and then whatever’s happening to me personally,” he explains. “I think it’s always kind of been like that. For whatever reason—and I never thought it was particularly unusual—if I’m in songwriting mode, whatever’s going on gets into the song.

“I never thought there were certain topics that songs were supposed to be about and other topics that they’re not supposed to be about. So when you’re not bound by ‘It’s gotta be in this form and it’s gotta be about this and it’s got to have this emotional landscape and anything else is not suitable for song’—it’s just more fun not to limit it.”

“Now I feel the changes coming down”

That is not to say, however, that his focus has not changed. As I worked my way through Bern’s back catalog, I was struck by the considerable difference in his pre-New American Language work. His early work was not just stream-of-conscious. It was overflowing with pop icons and dadaist sequences, with a bawdy sense of humor that would have made Lenny Bruce proud. At times, it approached inspired brilliance. But often the mix merely made for briefly amusing and interesting novelty songs.

With New American Language and Fleeting Days, Bern becomes more of a lyrical craftsman. He still cuts a broad swath across life, but he seems to have more to say and is more focused about saying it. He still uses his wit, but it’s more sophisticated, with less ironic distance.

With New American Language, we find someone with “a dream of a new pop music that tells the truth, with a good beat and some nice harmonies.” We see the brilliance of “God Said No,” where the narrator begs God to let him go back in time to right historic wrongs, and the anxiety of “Toledo” or “Black Tornado,” where “everything is changing faster than I can describe.”

On “My Love Is Not For Sale” from World Cup, a CD/tour-diary booklet released via his website (www.danbern.com) last year, Bern sings:

It’s all been bottled, packaged, drawn to scale
But my love, my love is not for sale
Take just a minute of your day
Tell me one thing that you would live for
Dying, dying’s easy, getting easier all the time
Tell me one thing not to throw it all away for

In Fleeting Days, Bern laments, “Nowadays it’s hard to write a line / My own thoughts bore me” on “I Need You” and “Half of me wants to crack the code / The other half don’t care” on “Fly Away.” Intense longing is eloquently expressed in “I Need You:”

I thought I could escape myself
by just not getting dressed
I thought I could escape you
by coming to Key West
Sometimes you get lost
and you don’t find something new
I need you

He concludes the album by probing, “Are you gonna follow your soul / Or just the style of the day?”

It’s not that such sentiments were absent from his earlier work. In “Wasteland” from Dan Bern, the singer bemoans, “I watched as the best of my generation / Abandoned their dreams / And settled for making a little money.” And in “Estelle,” he sings:

You know sometimes it feels
Like there’s so much that you need
Sometimes the world is upside down
Sometimes it feels
Like the only thing you need

Is holdin’ someone’s hand as you walk through town

Nor is it that he has abandoned his sense of humor, pop references, non sequiturs or dadaisms. Witness the parade of dream-like images of “Thanksgiving Day Parade” from New American Language, or the pop culture romp of “Graceland” from Fleeting Days. Or especially “Talkin’ Al Kida Blues” and “My Little Swastika” from The Swastika E.P., another Internet-only release sandwiched between his latest label releases.

The difference is that tighter threads hold the songs together. They are more focused, and we’re not distracted by parades of celebrities or proclamations like “I got big balls” or “I am the Messiah.” The humor, the pop references and the non sequiturs that do remain are there to serve the song, rather than acting as novelties or gimmicks (or resulting from the lack of self-editing).

“Judge me by the songs I write”

When I asked Bern, a Jewish descendent of Holocaust survivors, for his perspective on how his songwriting has changed, he demurred. “I don’t know. What would you say? I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m entirely conscious of how it might be different.”

Last year, however, he had the following to say to Monica Datta at the Tartan, Carnegie Mellon University’s student newspaper:

“From a personal standpoint, the period that produced these songs [from New American Language] was a period of tremendous change and upheaval. Some of it has to do with going to Lithuania, where my Dad and his family were from,” he said. “I think I’m more comfortable with myself and don’t feel the need to posture or point at myself. ‘God Said No’ is a crystallization of ideas I’ve been trying to get ‘right’ for a long time.”

As our interview delves deeper into Fleeting Days, Bern does begin to address how his songs have changed. “It used to be that every single thing that happened, it turned into a song,” he said. “Lately, I’ve been writing in different forms, like stories, even longer stuff.”

“The truth, with a good beat and some nice harmonies”

He also differentiates the thrust of Fleeting Days’ songs. “They’re not like past records of mine where there were some songs that are pretty heavy—like ‘God Said No’ [New American Language] or ‘Lithuania’ [The Swastica E.P.],” he explains. “Those are like deep, deep heavy songs with a lot of breadth.

“And some of these songs on this record, they’re really focused about what they’re about. There’s a dominant metaphor running through it. … I think they’re fun to sing, and hopefully they’re fun to listen to. They’re this kind of thing that maybe kind of gets in your head a little bit.”

Some of the lighter pop songs on Fleeting Days Bern had sitting around for a while (“Jane” is a decade old). “With the last record, I thought I was going to use some of these songs,” he says, “and then I started writing songs like ‘God Said No.’ And once again those songs kind of got pushed aside.”

“The newer songs on this record—‘Superman,’ ‘Closer to You,’ ‘Soul,’ ‘Graceland’ and ‘City’—there’s probably more depth than breadth to those songs,” he adds. “But they rub against the other ones in a way that I kind of like. You know, I could have done a record of all those old songs, and I could have done a record of none of them—just what I wrote in the last year, and for whatever reason, it seemed like pulling some old ones and having some brand-new ones on the same record was just an interesting way to go this time.”

The net result is an immensely enjoyable album that is an early candidate for Paste’s 2003 20 Signs of Life.