The Inspirational Songwriting Path To Eddie Berman’s Charming New Single

LA-based folk troubadour Eddie Berman has mastered the art of soothing melodies and charming guitar work with his latest single, Easy Rider, a taste of upcoming LP Before The Bridge.

He tells us of past songwriting expeditions that lead to his new sound.

Southside, Berkeley, California: 
I taught myself how to write songs in my small college apartment just south of the UC Berkeley campus. In lieu of studying, I spent thousands of hours sitting at a desk beneath an oversized Van Gogh poster of a single boat being tossed around by dark, rough seas.

I’d start writing late at night into the early morning, taking breaks to drink Red Label and smoke American Spirits outside my front door on the balcony that wrapped around the interior perimeter of the apartment complex, overlooking the small, kidney-shaped pool.

I never saw a single person go for a swim in the two and a half years I lived there. The cheap scotch and "natural" cigarettes were the perfect hackneyed accessories for feeling like a songwriter. Like most writers, the vast majority of my writing-time is spent distractedly trying to find some kind of inroad into focusing and steadying myself. I’d go back inside and stare at the small boat in the Van Gogh poster, embarrassed by the obviousness of the metaphor.

Wild Sky Studio, Morin Heights, Quebec:
About a year after college, I serendipitously connected with a pair of great producers, Sylvain and Dominique Grand. They had gotten ahold of some bedroom demos I made and invited me to spend a couple weeks recording at their incredible studio in Morin Heights, about an hour north of Montreal.

The remote studio had been converted from an artist’s loft, with dried paint splotches all over the wide wooden slats of the floor. The panoramic window behind the mixing board looked out on an enormous sprawling mid-autumn forest.

There was a single bedroom upstairs next to a drum tracking room where I slept. After long days of recording the Grand brothers would go back to their homes and leave me to wander around the studio. I would eat tangerines or leftover venison (which they had hunted), drink Heinekens, and fiddle around on all the exotic instruments they had laying around.
Everything we recorded over those weeks had been written before I’d gotten to Canada, except for one. I had the chord progression and melody for a slow melancholy song that had been in the back of my head for months.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever have another opportunity to record in a professional studio again, so I knew I had to finish the song. The night before our last recording day, I sat downstairs in the alcove off of the control room, with a beautifully restored parlor guitar from the late 1800s, and wrote the lyrics for the song, which I called “Paper Thin”. The pressure of knowing it had to be written right then was the perfect cure for my normal state of procrastination and laziness.

Los Feliz & Silver Lake, CA:
During a band rehearsal at the apartment complex in Los Feliz where, coincidentally, both of the Gabes (Feenberg & Davis) in my band used to live, Feenberg was noodling on the accordion, playing a few notes of something that sounded super familiar, but we couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. It finally dawned on us that it was the opening notes of Bruce Sprinsteen's Dancing In The Dark. So I half-jokingly figured out a John-Prine-picking-style for it.
Around that time I had been hanging out and jamming with Laura Marling at a place she was renting in Silver Lake. I played her the Dancing In The Dark cover and the two of us figured out a harmony for the choruses. The arrangement was sounding really nice so we decided to record it for my Blood & Rust EP, which was all tracked/filmed in just one day. Right before we laid down Dancing In The Dark, I suggested to Laura that she sing the second verse. Our slowed down version of the song gave that verse some tricky cadences, but in Laura’s casual virtuosity she sang it perfectly on the first take.

Koreatown & Santa Monica, CA
In the cramped living room of my old railroad style apartment in Koreatown I was playing It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, which is in this tuning where the low E string is dropped all the way down to a C. The tuning gives a deep rumbling droning sound when strummed. I started toying around with different chords in that Dylan strumming pattern and the song Easy Rider just poured out.

I usually write the chords and melody first and then put lyrics to it later, but this song came all at once. As I was writing it I could perfectly hear this ‘70s harmony over the verses. A few days later when I first played it for my band, during a rehearsal at Gabe Feenberg’s new house in Santa Monica, I clumsily explained the kind of harmony I had in mind. Despite my lack of eloquence, they still nailed it immediately. It was like the harmony was a built in resonance of the song. I think they would’ve known to sing it if I hadn’t even mentioned it to them.

Grab a copy of Easy Rider here.