Interview: Dan Bern has still got his fastball, and a change-up

In the smart and lively songs of Dan Bern, nuances are at work like honeybees in a hive. A busy swarm of subtleties generates a nucleus of narrative honeycomb that has more layers than an archaeologist’s wedding cake, and they are all the more amazing because their intricacies seem at first ambiguous and offhand. Horizontal layers of humour and angst crisscross with vertical layers of wit and criticism that are delicious to the ear and brain. But the layer that most delights you (and drives the dullards daft) is the oblique stratum of weirdness that angles through his musical matrix like a butter knife that forgot to take its lithium and turned into a corkscrew.

Some have called his songs goofy, in a good way, mostly. For many listeners, “goofy” might suggest a kind of good-natured absurdity with humorous overtones. Practised observation, however, has led me to define goofiness as user-friendly weirdness, also with humorous overtones. Example: one of his early popular songs, ‘Tiger Woods.’ I got big balls, Big ol’ balls, Big as grapefruits, Big as pumpkins, yes sir, And on my really good days, They swell to the size of small dogs. In the same song, he name-checked Muhammed Ali: But it ain’t braggin’ if it’s true… Back when he was Cassius Clay, Before he fought too many fights, And left his brain inside the ring. And his unforgettable take on Madonna: I got a friend whose goal in life, Was to one day go down on Madonna… He got his wish in Rome one night in some hotel.

In case anybody has failed to notice, Bern’s songs are on the brief but bizarre side. The less humorous can relate to the secret buds of personal evil that David Lynch likes to press into his scrapbooks of small-town America. Those of the far less threatening variety take into account the quirks, tics, discrepancies, idiosyncrasies half-concealed and the passionate impulses that, when indulged, put a strange new spin on topics. Like his song ‘The Fifth Beatle’, where several prominent musicians join the Fab Four. In Elvis Costello’s turn, Bern sings: Alison, cut her hand, While my guitar gently creeps, Through a little girl’s room of electrified plastic.

All of our lives are at least a little haywire, particularly in the areas of relationships and politics. It is Bern’s special genius to illuminate those haywire tendencies and reveal how they – and not convention or rationality – channel the undermost currents of our being. It is precisely Bern’s attention to our so-called off-the-wall behavioural traits that gives albums such as “Four Feet Tall and Rising” (2021) their comic and ruminating freshness, their beneath-the-surface veracity, their ovoid contours.

Either ovoid, round or elliptical will do. Most songs bounce like basketballs, which is to say, up and down, happy and (mostly) sad, though also travelling in a forward or backward direction in a generally straight line. Bern’s songs, on the other hand, bounce like footballs: end over end, elusively, changing or even reversing direction, wobbly, unpredictable and wild. Like so much of life itself, they produce the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual equivalents of gridiron kickoffs with either bone-jarring tackles or exhilarating returns. He does write about basketball, as with the Frenchman Victor Wembanyama, dubbed the Eiffel Tower. Tall and skinny as a French fry, 3-pointers rain down from the sky. This correspondent – a San Antonio Spurs fan – welcomes the tribute.

Bern’s songs are not formulaic devices calculated to manipulate the Spotify hordes by means of manufactured “feelings.” Rather, they liberate the listeners by disconnecting them from their expectations and connecting them in a visceral manner to questions and observations that often go unheeded. In his marvellous 2024 release, “Starting Over,” he somehow manages to breach uncharted territory once again. Ultimately, no matter how weird, goofy or playful a Bern song might be, when you take off the headphones and store the CD under “B” for brilliant, it feels rewarding. If any among you are aware of a better way to feel after hearing a record, please text me right now.

Slow Bern interview

Americana UK: You are turning the Big Six-Oh. Have you gotten better with age?

Dan Bern: Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t think I’ve gotten markedly worse yet. How about that? That seems like a victory.

AUK: What would you say is your most successful album? “Breathe” won awards, but as to your best, isn’t a little like picking your favourite child?

DB: That’s right. I mean, we spent a lot of time on “New American Language.” It was a real band record. I was doing nothing else for a good long time, over a year, and it is just for the fact that I still play half of those songs regularly and all of them somewhat. In many ways, I was in a good spot when we made that record.

AUK: That’s interesting. I’ve often heard from musicians that they write their best material when they’re either sad or depressed, or breaking up with someone. Do you feel that’s the way it works with you?

DB: I would say there is something inside merging with what’s going on outside that comes together, and I’m a big believer in writing a lot of songs, keeping the songwriting muscles toned. I don’t necessarily subscribe to just because something is happening momentous in your life that you’re going to write a great song. What you want to have happen is your songwriting muscles are greased, and then when God reaches down and gives you something that you’ll know what to do with it. Maybe you’ve written a bunch of songs that, for better or worse, are songs you leave by the side of the road, but because you’ve wrote those songs, you’re ready when something does come along.

AUK: Do you have a go-to method for writing songs?

DB: I mean, that’s a luxury. I feel like my go-to method is that when the germ of the song comes in, that you need to pay attention and capture it, whether you’re at the grocery store or on a drive or doing something else. Sometimes I’ll be playing tennis and a song will come in, and I’ll have to go to the side and sing a little bit of it into my phone or scribble something. Before we had the luxury of having a recording studio in our pocket, you had to sometimes pull off to find a payphone, call your answering machine and sing a little bit into it just so you don’t forget it. I think these things, when they come in, they come in strong. But they can be fleeting, and then you hear a commercial for Sprite, and the thing you had can be gone.

I’m going to earmark a period of time when I’m involved with a project. Maybe if I’m writing something for a script or a song for a cartoon, movie or a TV show, when I’m lucky enough to have those things, then I can sit down with a cup of coffee at the desk and, okay, I’m working during this time. But those things can come in unexpectedly.

AUK: Of your songs that have been synced to TV or movies, have you watched those movies? And if you have, which one do you like best?

DB: Well, of course, I am partial to “Walk Hard.” One, it’s a really fun movie, and I had a lot of songs in it. I pretty much put everything else aside for two years and just wrote Dewey Cox songs. Some of them came right out of the script, and some of them were just because I was so steeped in Dewey Cox. I mean, it was harder to stop than to write all those songs. It was like there was a detox period when it’s like, oh, I’m not Dewey anymore. I have nowhere to send these Dewey songs. They’re not me songs. All that was really fun, and I got to collaborate with some fantastic people. I wrote a bunch of them with Mike Viola.

AUK: What was the significance of Dewey Cox regaining his sense of smell?

DB: It’s the typical story of the musician, particularly the old blues guys like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie. Beethoven went deaf. It was a twist on losing a sense, and I think they thought it was funny that losing your sense of smell was treated as tragically as losing one’s sight.

AUK: Was the star of the movie, John C. Reilly, also a musician?

DB: Oh, sure. I think he is really. Sometimes he wants to be a musician more than he wants to be an actor, which isn’t surprising. I think a lot of musicians want to be actors. A lot of athletes want to be musicians, and the other way around. Most people think they could be good at something else.

AUK: Like wanting to be a lawyer instead of a journalist?

DB: Well, hopefully the world would be better off by staying a writer, but I don’t know about your bank account. I loved writing. I was writing for a cartoon for two seasons, so I wrote all the songs for the one on Amazon Prime called “Stinky and Dirty.” People coming to my shows say their kids are still into it. I wrote a bunch of sports songs for a podcast called the “Tony Kornheiser Show”. I love anytime somebody calls me up and says, I want a song for this or that. I’m good until AI takes over.

AUK: What got you involved with Mr Tony? Did you just send him a song or two?

DB: Well, I started listening to his podcast, and people would send in songs that they’d use for the bumper music. And then I realized, well, I’ve got all these sports songs. First, I sent them ones that I already had from my “Double-Header” album about baseball, and they started playing them. Pretty soon, I got into the weeds with them and just started writing songs about the show and stuff that Tony would say. They would generally play the whole song in the body of the show, then laugh and comment on it. It makes me feel like I’m part of the show, which, as a longtime listener of all kinds of radio since I was a kid, it’s a gas to feel like you’re actually part of it and can participate and be part of a dialogue.

AUK: You also have your own podcast, which half the people in the world seem to have one. What type of people do you interview?

DB: When you say a podcast, are you talking about the “Hunkered in the Bunker” shows? I had some of my songwriting buddies, but mostly I flew solo. It was mostly a pandemic thing when everybody was stuck at home and couldn’t go out to shows, like the placeholder for that. I liked it a lot because you could play any cover you ever thought about playing without having to memorize it or any song you ever wrote.

AUK: You do write a lot of songs, several baseball songs. Is that your favourite sport? It’s incredible how many musicians are baseball fans.

DB: It’s between baseball and tennis. Close. Tennis is my sport to play. I coached for a long time. My daughter is on her high school team, so I help out with them, and she just learned her slice serve, which is really exciting. I write songs about it and have a two-person play called “Two-Hand Backhand,” where the two characters are the right hand and the left hand. They have this ongoing argument about two-hand or one-hand backhand. I also paint portraits of both tennis and baseball players. Other sports move too fast. Baseball seems to suit the contemplative mind.

AUK: Have you ever had a Bill Buckner moment? One you’ll never live down? (Buckner played for the Boston Red Sox, and they lost the World Series to the Mets when he let a ground ball go between his legs.)

DB: Right out of college, I was living in Chicago in a crappy little apartment, but I could go up to the roof. It just so happened that Buckner had a fancy townhouse right next door, and I went to a lot of games because I didn’t have anything else to do. I played open mics every night, and the Cubs still played day games every day. So, I go to a game, and Buckner goes three for five, as he often did. After, I went back to my place and was hanging out on my roof, and here comes a fancy car. It pulls in, gate closes, and there’s Buckner.

He gets out of his car and is walking into his house, probably figuring he’s finally immune from people yelling stuff at him. I yell, Hey, Billy Buck, three for five. Good job. He paused as he was walking in and said thank you. That was that. Many years later, when he was with Boston and the ball went through his legs, and it’s like the Butterfly Effect idea that every little thing in your life can alter the rest of the journey. I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t made him pause that microsecond, that maybe he fields that ball, maybe everything’s different. Maybe your Red Sox wouldn’t have had to wait another 17 years or whatever to win a World Series.

AUK: Have you ever been in a band with a name?

DB: A couple of years ago, we formed a band called The Needles Pop Group, which was me, Orit Shimoni, Paul Kuhn and Adam Busch. We did a couple tours and put out a record. That was really fun. But I really wanted to be in The Beatles. When I was 16, 17, I didn’t know how to form a band to do what I wanted to do. And then I heard Woody and Phil Ochs and Dylan, and that kind of turned on a light bulb. I realized, well, you can actually do this on your own. You don’t need Paul, George and Ringo. There is nothing more fun than playing with a bunch of people.

AUK: Is there really an ‘Ivan’s Barbershop’ like in that song?

DB: There was. It’s since closed, and Ivan has retired. I think he is still around and doing okay. He would play the old country songs and knew all the gossip because it was in a small town. He knew sports results from fifty years back.

AUK: From your “Wilderness Song” album in 2012, what do you think happened to Edward Ruess after he disappeared in Utah? Did he die or just drop out of civilisation?

DB: I think he died, and we never found what happened. Having read all his stuff, he craved his solitude and one-on-one relationship with nature, and sort of shunned society. He certainly didn’t dislike people and enjoyed company when it was congenial. I don’t see any reason he would’ve simply dropped out and never come around again. I think he met up with some rough characters, and maybe he had something they wanted.

AUK: Did you ever read “Into the Wild” by Christopher McCandless, who disappeared in Alaska? Or seen the movie? And did you ever want to be alone in the wilderness?

DB: I did read the book. But I am not a great outdoorsman. I’m not a fisherman. I’m not a hunter. I tried to set up a tent at Kerrville one time, and it was pretty sad, but I like that kind of isolation. I often think about kind of disappearing, but there’s too much tethering me to society. For a long time, it was, well, my mom’s still around, and then it was, well, my kid’s still around. Someday, though, who knows?

AUK: You write songs about animals. Not in a James Thurber sense, but did you have pets growing up, and still do?

DB: Oh, man, Thurber is one of my guys. We had dogs and cats and turtles and frogs when I was a kid, and I’ve had both dogs and cats as an adult. Currently, we have two cats that my daughter named Cooter and Scooter.

AUK: Here is the usual what artists influenced you question.

DB: I mean, a lot of them are fastballs down the middle. Dylan showed me that song is an infinitely big form and can contain anything, and the boundaries of it can stretch to fit what you want to put in it. The Beatles for the pure, wild, ecstatic joy of it, and the melodies and the harmonies. Woody for the simplicity of it. Elvis Costello, once again, the melodies, the harmonies, the edge. Social Distortion. When I was in Los Angeles, still trying to break through, I had a weekly gig at a place called Genghis Cohen on Wednesdays, and I would listen to Social Distortion every time before I played, and it would just pump me up and get me ready. We could go on forever, but those are the big ones.

AUK: While trying to break through, what was your last day job?

DB: Teaching tennis in LA. I had a pretty big clientele. About 40 regular students every week. I taught Wilt Chamberlain for a while. That was pretty good until I felt like this is not what I want to be doing with my life. Even something as fun and healthy as that can feel like you’re chained to a desk if it’s not exactly what you want to be doing.

AUK: There’s this TV show – “Red Oaks” – about somebody that taught tennis. Why do tennis players always have to have quiet? I never really understood that. I can see it in golf, but in tennis, you’re running around and hitting the ball.

DB: That’s a, nobody ever asked me that question. In Davis Cup, at least in the old days when they would play in a host country, they didn’t observe that kind of decorum at all. My guess is that it has to do with the players needing to hear the actual sound of the ball hitting the racket to help them understand what speed and spin is going to be coming at them. It would be cool to see what would happen if a tournament took the wraps off, so to speak.

AUK: Did you really meet Jimmy Carter, and was it before or after you wrote ‘Ballad of Jimmy Carter’?

DB: I got to write a song for Jonathan Demme’s documentary movie about him, and then I went to the Toronto Film Festival, where they unveiled it. I got to sing all thirteen verses of the song before the movie, and then, after, I got to shake his hand, and he said, “Rosalynn, this is the fellow that wrote the song.” That was cool since they obviously had heard the song.

AUK: In terms of your career, when you’re looking out the window these days, watching where the music is going and where you’re going, what do you see about the direction of music in your future?

DB: Well, AI concerns me. There are times I think, ah, the hell with it. People can just throw in a prompt and push a button, and they don’t have any experience or background in writing a song, but something will pop out in this, or that style and people consider it completely adequate or great or whatever. Maybe I’m not even going to bother anymore. And then other times I feel like, well, I’ll just have to do something better that AI couldn’t do. I just do what comes naturally to me, and as always, whoever will like it will like it. I’ve tried to hold to that.

AUK: Is there a particular musician you are glad to have met?

DB: So many of them. But we just lost Jill Sobule, who was a good friend. Horrible thing. We used to hang out a lot in LA and write and do shows. Just a couple months ago, she was staying at somebody’s house near Minneapolis, and there was a house fire.

AUK: Do you have a memorable Jill Sobule story?

DB: One time, we wrote a song about Pete Rose from the point of view of putting him in the Hall of Fame. He was hanging out in my kitchen, making me really uncomfortable, so we put him in the Hall to get him out of my kitchen. We just laughed as we were writing it. So, I think of her in that context as just a lot of fun. I think a lot of people miss her. I met a lot of great famous musicians and got to hang out with them – Springsteen and Daltrey, and luminaries like that. But the ones that I probably remember the most are ones who are actually friends. That’s where the good stuff comes out.