Cellar Sessions: Eddie Berman - The Bricklayer's Son November 14th, 2017 City Winery New York
Ehud Lazin
2019-04-09
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Eddie Berman sits down for a One On One Session at City Winery New York on November 14th, 2017. Watch the full session here: https://youtu.be/BouHgp3Mgis For more info visit: https://www.eddiebermanmusic.com Audio & Video by: Ehud Lazin
Setlist:
Easy Rider
Untamed
The Bricklayer's Son
Tarmac Blues
The title of singer-songwriter Eddie Berman’s new album, Before the Bridge, refers to the period of time in the LA-based musician’s life between getting married and the birth of his first child. It was that span, spent mulling the decision (and consequences) of creating a life, that also inspired this crowning musical work. The album was written and recorded during that one-year interim, as Berman was coming down from the crest of his lauded 2014 self-released debut LP, Polyhymnia. The songs on Before the Bridge draw, more than ever before, from Berman’s own life experiences, resulting in a rich, evocative, and moving collection.
“My wife and I were being confronted with the somewhat unknowable complexities of trying to bring a life into the world—and specifically into the little sphere of our lives, living in Los Angeles in 2016,” Berman says. “My writing falls between being autobiographical, narrative, and a bit obtuse—but each of these songs were certainly informed by my own life.”
Berman grew up in Southern California and taught himself guitar and piano. He fell in love with the troubadour styles of Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk as a teenager and learned to fingerpick on his father’s 1950s Martin guitar, first writing his own songs as a college student at Berkeley. He made waves in the acoustic music world half a decade ago when his bedroom demos were given significant airplay on influential LA radio station KCRW. In 2013 his EP Blood & Rust, featuring duets with British artist Laura Marling, along with his subsequent international tours, connected him to an even bigger audience. All the while, Berman steadily developed his craft while staying true to a familiar formula.
Despite an open-tuning change and adding a bit more percussion and harmony, the sound of Before the Bridge retains the stark, elemental power of Berman’s former work. “I love the sound of just a person with their instrument and their voice,” Berman says. “That’s always been what’s spoken to me the most.” In addition to that foremost calling card, the album was recorded with his same crew of expert musicians from Polyhymnia: Gabe Feenberg, Gabe Davis, Sarah Pigion, and Polly Hall, with engineer/mixer Pierre De Reeder—and in the same manner: tracked live, together in a single room, in only two days.
The first song Berman wrote and completed for the album is the stark and lovely “Joann,” with its lilting harmonies and melodic, reverberating finger-picking. In addition to being the first release from the album, the track also represents for Berman the core of what Bridge is all about, as the song shares its name with his wife—well, almost. “When I was writing the chorus, the three-syllable ‘Joanna’ just didn’t quite work. So I feel like: glass half-full I wrote a song for my wife, glass half-empty: I got her name wrong.”
Another standout track, “Untamed,” is a soft and slow-burning number led by Berman’s guitar and confident, quiet vocal delivery, and accented by piano notes and low, stirring strings. In Berman’s finger-picking style, the song ends with the delicate delivery of the line “We’ll know we were alive once and at least for a moment untamed.” Like “Joann” before it, he identifies the sentiment as one examining the notion of modernity closing in on them.
“It’s about the strange isolation of a metropolis, which is only getting intensified by people being sucked further and further into this dystopian obsession with media, paired with the feelings of wanting to escape it, but not knowing how or where or if that’s even possible anymore.”
Setlist:
Easy Rider
Untamed
The Bricklayer's Son
Tarmac Blues
The title of singer-songwriter Eddie Berman’s new album, Before the Bridge, refers to the period of time in the LA-based musician’s life between getting married and the birth of his first child. It was that span, spent mulling the decision (and consequences) of creating a life, that also inspired this crowning musical work. The album was written and recorded during that one-year interim, as Berman was coming down from the crest of his lauded 2014 self-released debut LP, Polyhymnia. The songs on Before the Bridge draw, more than ever before, from Berman’s own life experiences, resulting in a rich, evocative, and moving collection.
“My wife and I were being confronted with the somewhat unknowable complexities of trying to bring a life into the world—and specifically into the little sphere of our lives, living in Los Angeles in 2016,” Berman says. “My writing falls between being autobiographical, narrative, and a bit obtuse—but each of these songs were certainly informed by my own life.”
Berman grew up in Southern California and taught himself guitar and piano. He fell in love with the troubadour styles of Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk as a teenager and learned to fingerpick on his father’s 1950s Martin guitar, first writing his own songs as a college student at Berkeley. He made waves in the acoustic music world half a decade ago when his bedroom demos were given significant airplay on influential LA radio station KCRW. In 2013 his EP Blood & Rust, featuring duets with British artist Laura Marling, along with his subsequent international tours, connected him to an even bigger audience. All the while, Berman steadily developed his craft while staying true to a familiar formula.
Despite an open-tuning change and adding a bit more percussion and harmony, the sound of Before the Bridge retains the stark, elemental power of Berman’s former work. “I love the sound of just a person with their instrument and their voice,” Berman says. “That’s always been what’s spoken to me the most.” In addition to that foremost calling card, the album was recorded with his same crew of expert musicians from Polyhymnia: Gabe Feenberg, Gabe Davis, Sarah Pigion, and Polly Hall, with engineer/mixer Pierre De Reeder—and in the same manner: tracked live, together in a single room, in only two days.
The first song Berman wrote and completed for the album is the stark and lovely “Joann,” with its lilting harmonies and melodic, reverberating finger-picking. In addition to being the first release from the album, the track also represents for Berman the core of what Bridge is all about, as the song shares its name with his wife—well, almost. “When I was writing the chorus, the three-syllable ‘Joanna’ just didn’t quite work. So I feel like: glass half-full I wrote a song for my wife, glass half-empty: I got her name wrong.”
Another standout track, “Untamed,” is a soft and slow-burning number led by Berman’s guitar and confident, quiet vocal delivery, and accented by piano notes and low, stirring strings. In Berman’s finger-picking style, the song ends with the delicate delivery of the line “We’ll know we were alive once and at least for a moment untamed.” Like “Joann” before it, he identifies the sentiment as one examining the notion of modernity closing in on them.
“It’s about the strange isolation of a metropolis, which is only getting intensified by people being sucked further and further into this dystopian obsession with media, paired with the feelings of wanting to escape it, but not knowing how or where or if that’s even possible anymore.”
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