Dan Bern
DAN BERN – BIOGRAPHY
Bern’s father was a concert pianist who emigrated from Lithuania to Palestine in 1939, a Jew who was one step ahead of the Nazis. Later he met and married Bern’s mother, a German Jew, a singer and poet who had also escaped the ravages of World War II. In the late 1950s they emigrated again and settled in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where Bern was reared, the cello-playing, baseball-loving progeny of two Old World artists in the American heartland. In time Bern found the guitar, and his way to the West Coast, whre he got his footing in the neo-folk music scene in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. He put out his first album in 1997. Breathe is his seventh. In between, he’s amassed a strong underground following, built in part on his prodigious output of intellectual and topical songs. He’s frequently been compared to Bob Dylan, because like the young Dylan, he’s funny and smart and has a regally Semitic nose.

Like Lenny Bruce, Bern can also be joyously obscene, which shouldn’t be obscene at all, as well as tender and even devout. “God Said No,” a wistful song from New American Language, continues a device he’s fond of: Bern’s persona interrogates God and indulges in a little speculative time travel. It sports a sensibility that seems to derive as much from Yiddish folk tales as Douglas Adams’s “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy.”

“There’s a long history of that kind of thing,” Bern said. “I recall reading things where a man is talking to God–the Bible’s full of that. I kind of feel the same way about that as I do about songwriting. People say, ‘Why do you write songs?’ and I say, ‘Why did you stop?’ You know, little kids make up songs, it’s a natural thing… and then one day they stop, some of them.”

“They told us in high school that writers write, and when they don’t write they read,” he said. “The writers that I love, some of them are songwriters, but a lot of them are story writers. The best of the lot, at least my favorite ones, are not writers that write in florid strokes so much as very vivid ones, like James Thurber and Ring Lardner, Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Hemingway. They’re not writers who are so in love with their own words; the picture’s what’s important.

“When I was making this record, New American Language, it was like, ‘Let’s be in service to the song — what do the songs want, what does the story want, what do the themes want?’ It’s hard to get out of your own way. When people are trying to master their craft, it’s more about learning to get out of the way.”