A Conversation with David Berkeley – HuffPost 7.22.11

Mike Ragogna: David!

David Berkeley: Hello there.

MR: Dude, what the heck have you been up to?

DB: Most recently, I’ve been working with a couple of DJs doing an odd departure from my normal folk singer-songwriter world–collaborating on dance tracks. I’ve been writing vocals and singing melodies over long, extended drum and bass and synth songs. On this last tour that I did, I actually got to do my debut performance of one of these songs at a big dance club in New York. The show began at 2:00 am, which, for me, is at least twelve hours after I’m used to performing. It was a pretty intense experience, it was one of the first times that people have been sort of in a frantic drug-crazed dance while I’m singing as opposed to, say, sitting down and brooding. It was pretty exhilarating, actually.

MR: Is this something you’re going to find yourself doing in the future, maybe even for the next album?

DB: (laughs) I don’t know…if so I need to have a new name for it, but it’s definitely something that is operating from a different side of my brain. It’s been really fun, and just kind of an interesting exercise for me because a lot of the art of songwriting that I’ve tried to craft, those rules are getting thrown out of the window for this. Not that there aren’t rules for this, there are different rules, so I’m trying to learn that language. It’s a very different process from how I normally write songs.

MR: You’ve also approached your latest album differently. Not only is Some Kind Of Curean audio album, but you also have a book, 140 Goats And A Guitar: The Stories Behind Some Kind of Cure.

DB: When I write songs, I tend to write them out of experiences and stories that happen to me. Then I kind of fictionalize them or change them and find different ways to approach my real life experience. I enjoy telling stories as I perform in concert, and I thought it might be an interesting exercise to try to actually write the stories that led to or inspired the songs. They’re not all anecdotal stories–some are descriptions of events or things like that. So, I wrote 13 short pieces–stories, essays, whatever you want to call them–that inspired the 13 songs on the album. The book gives you the music, and the concept is that the reader would kind of move through the book and the record together, alternating between story and then song. I think that for people who are interested in the craft of songwriting, it’s kind of neat to pull back the veil and kind of play with the relationship between real life and art. You get to kind of experience my world with me and listen to the song that arose out of it. You can sort of see how things have to change or how things happened to change for me as I kind of worked from the real life experience and put it into something that is hopefully more poetic.

MR: What’s the story behind “Parachute”?

DB: “Parachute” is actually the funniest story, I think, in the book. The song is set on a road, driving back from Massachusetts. A car breaks down with a guy and a girl in it, and the breakdown of the car is sort of a metaphor for them sort of breaking down emotionally as a couple. Ultimately, in the song, things work out and the quasi-crisis that happens with the breakdown on the road turns into a thing that holds the couple together. A lot of my songs deal with themes like that. In fact, the title “Some Kind of Cure” is about finding cures to things that are troubling us or alienating us. It’s about trying to find some hope and light through difficulty. In this case, it’s this anecdote about a car breaking down.

The story that inspired this song is that I have this habit of pushing a tank of gas well beyond where one should push a tank of gas, and I tell several stories–two stories, actually, in this piece–about times when I’ve run out of gas. The primary one is a story about running out of gas with my pregnant wife on a highway on the border of Georgia and Tennessee and the awful experience that came out of that as we had to hike across a field, which turned into a swamp, to try and get fuel to fill up our empty gas tank. Then I tell one further story about running out of gas with my trumpet player and kind of make fun of myself a bunch. It was a real situation–and not a fun situation–that as I kind of worked into the space of a song turned into something that’s much more romantic and less muddy and painful and potentially divorce-provoking.

MR: (laughs) David, everyone always thinks they can make that gas stretch out longer.

DB: Oh, fully. I started the story by kind of explaining my philosophy of why that’s a valid thing to do, and then, of course, undermining my whole philosophy by telling you how many times I’ve run out of gas. (laughs) Depending on the angle you can look at that gas gauge, it can look way above empty if you want it to.

MR: What’s the story behind the title track, “Some Kind Of Cure”?

DB: I wrote a lot of this album while living on the island of Corsica, which is a small island in the Mediterranean. My wife and I and our then one-year-old son Jackson lived there for a year. “Some Kind Of Cure” is actually the only song on the album that mentions Corsica by name. It starts with the ringing of the bell that was in our little village of Tralonca–we heard these bells all the time on the island. It actually has a little bit of Corsican singing buried in the mix as well that I recorded while I was there. This song is a good kind of representation of the overall theme of the record, like I talked about a little bit. It tries to provoke a bit of alienation and longing for home and kind of a displacement feeling, which we felt a lot while living there. Ultimately, it hopes to find some kind of cure that can get you through that.

MR: “Jackson” as in Jackson Browne?

DB: No, “Jackson” as in my grandfather, but Jackson Brown is a good extra reference for that.

MR: So, how do you write, what’s your process?

DB: If you listen to my songs, one might think that lyrics come first for me. I tend to spend a lot of time on lyrics and I care greatly about them, but despite the fact that I consider myself more of a writer than a guitarist–or more of a singer than a guitarist–I actually write the melodies first most of the time, or at least things start with something on the guitar. Ideally, as I’m kind of working through that, I’m playing with some lyrics and always have ideas and things in my head that are affecting me emotionally. So, hopefully, what is actually fueling the guitar things that I’m playing with are coming out of something that I’m feeling. I sort of know what it’s about, but it helps me to find a poetic pattern or some kind of a rhythm or a rhyme scheme that helps narrow the feel a little bit for me. Once I’ve kind of developed that flow of words, then I can try and shape the themes into something that makes sense as a song. I work really long and hard on my songs–I don’t write very quickly although sometimes, things come almost intact and those are great ones.

The song “Homesick” is one of those that actually came quite quickly. I wrote it when we were living in Corsica and it also has a pretty funny-sounding story that is in the book–140 Goats And A Guitar, which actually is the book’s title. I’m not going to say a ton about it right now, but the story does involve a goat initially. It’s a good indication of how I write songs and how the book came to be. There was an initial founding story for that song, which, if you read it, is an awkward and painful encounter with a goat, and yet the song is not humorous and doesn’t mention goats at all. So, in the book, I tell the story of the goat, which is what led me to kind of get in the space to fuel the emotion behind the song. But then I kind of go into what went on in my head and heart over the next months as I was coming up with the actual song. I think that’s one thing that separates an essayist and a songwriter–or at least my kind of songwriter. If I was just going to be a humorist, I would just write the story of the goat and that would be great. That was fun to do in the book.

But as a songwriter–unless I was a comic songwriter–that, for me, didn’t make a good song. What made a good song for me was finding something deeper in these emotions that were below it and behind it. For me, what that was was this incredible contrast between the beauty that I was feeling in Corsica and this real sense of displacement and alienation that I felt living far from home, which was enhanced by being a father and feeling protective and wanting my son to be okay and not always having the ability to make him okay. So, what “Homesick” ends up being about is that. I took something that was painful and kind of humorous and funny and it led down that road.

MR: How did it feel to have Some Kind Of Cure singled out by Yahoo, which placed your album at #19 on the list of “Albums That Should Be In Every Home” for the first half of 2011?

DB: Yeah, that’s obviously great. It’s hard to pay a lot of attention to that stuff because just as many people pan you and tell you that it’s one of the 25 records that should never enter anyone’s home. (laughs) You try to do what you do and you hope that people like it. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. But yeah, that was a nice surprise for sure.

MR: Let’s move on to “George Square.”

DB: So, maybe two thirds of the record is set in Corsica–one might not know that from all of the songs–but I wrote the vast majority there. Several other songs were written other places. “Parachute” was written in America and “George Square” was written in Scotland. George Square is a place in Glasgow, it’s a big open square in the center of town. I’ve been through Glasgow a bunch and I get affected a lot by seeing new places and by traveling. Glasgow’s always kind of hit me in a weird way. It’s a beautiful city, but it’s also kind of a frightening city. There are a lot of drunks around and it’s a hard city…it rains a lot. It can be a place that can be not so fun to be if you’re in the middle of a long, grueling tour and far from home. That song tells the story of a girl that I saw wandering across the square and she had this kind of sad beauty about her. I just kind of made up a narrative about her being lost and what she might be looking for. So, that’s what led that one.

MR: Then there’s the beautiful “Soldier’s Song.”

DB: You know, being a songwriter is an odd place to be to write songs about things that you don’t always know about or experience. As we’ve been seemingly in perpetual states of war for about a decade or so, I’ve kind of wrestled with writing war songs and whether I had any right to do so. I don’t write a lot of political songs, but I found myself feeling an intense guilt about the fact that I was sitting in one park or another apartment with my guitar while people relatively the same age–and a not lot younger than me–were in far worse circumstances, and not with a guitar at all. Regardless of my politics and what one might think about whether a war is right or wrong, I felt like there weren’t that many songs that kind of sympathized and tried to empathize with the plight of a soldier. There was so much discourse. I’ve lived in mostly places that are blue states where most of the time, people criticize the war efforts. Whether or not I sympathize with those arguments, I still felt like there was a voice that wasn’t really being heard. So, this song is an attempt to just kind of capture the emotion and the fear and the experience–to as great an extent as I can–of a soldier fighting and being afraid to die. So, that’s what it is.

MR: David, what advice would you have for new artists at this point?

DB: Go and do it. (laughs) I think that you have to really believe in what you’re doing and try to be true to what it is that inspires you to want to make music. And just do the best you can to follow that voice and not any other voice. That doesn’t get any easier as you do it for a long time, but it’s, I think, the only way you can keep your integrity and make art that’s valuable and keep your sanity.

MR: The keeping your sanity part’s got to be hard.

DB: (laughs) For sure. And don’t get sort of tricked into thinking that it’s like, an easy road or all just glory. For a few it happens that way, I assume or I imagine, but it’s a hard path. The potential applause or praise you get is a very small part of the journey. You have to try to be doing it for the right reasons. If you’re doing it for the thrill of being onstage and getting people to kind of adore you, then you’re asking for trouble at some point or another. But if you’re doing it because you love to create things out of places and spaces that you feel and think, and if you see the importance of that, and if you need to do that–if you need to express these things and that’s where you get your fulfillment–then perhaps it’s a safer path.

MR: You’ve got a have a lot of touring on your schedule.

DB: I do, I tour a lot. I’m a father now–twice over–and it’s kind of a joke in my band that the moment that I’m offstage I’m either on the phone or having some sort of a chat with my kids. Actually, most of this year, I was on the road, and I’ve been reading the entire Lemony Snicket series to my son over the phone or over chats. It’s an attempt for me to keep things okay at home as I’m away, and it’s not always an easy thing to do.

MR: Let’s end by talking about “Independence.”

DB: It’s set on the fifth of July, which, as we’re talking is a relevant date. It came out of this morning on the fifth of July a few years ago when I was walking at a really painfully early hour with my son who couldn’t sleep past 5:00am at that time, and seeing all of these spent fireworks all over the ground in Brooklyn. I was just kind of thinking about the day after a victory–the day after independence, the day after celebration–and that kind of coming down and hung over waking-up, thinking about what the new day now brings and all the responsibility that that comes with. So, that’s the backdrop for that one.

MR: David, I think we’ve covered a heck of a lot of territory.

DB: By the way, I wanted to mention how I love your station, solar-powered KRUU-FM. I’ve been through your town a few times and I really dig being out there.

MR: Apparently, we like you too. You keep coming back! (laughs)

DB: My good friend Tim Britton just modified a great little amp for me and sent it over here, so I’m playing through a bit of their field all the time.

MR: That’s really sweet, I’ll mention that to him and thanks David, I’m very grateful for your time.

DB: It’s my pleasure, Mike. Thank you so much for taking the time yourself. And hello Fairfield!

MR: (laughs) All the best, man.

Transcribed by Claire Wellin