Fanatic is a music marketing company established by Josh Bloom in 1997 to build fan-to-fan connections between artists and the media. For 25 years, Fanatic has continued to help launch careers through the strategic advocacy of creative talent.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Dan Bern adds to catalog of thousands of songs with new album “Starting Over,” arriving this Friday; Title track streaming now via Rock and Roll Globe
“Ransacking history and the present for subjects to
attack, Mr. Bern wrestles with the domesticated folk tradition.” — Ann Powers, The
New York Times
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Dan Bern as photographed by Judd Irish Beadley
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Dan Bern | About
“He’s been
one of my favourite songwriters and musicians for the past 28 years.” — Roger
Daltrey of The Who
In addition to being a Jeopardy clue, Bern has
written thousands of songs, among such other notable career and personal
highlights as writing songs for the Judd
Apatow film “Walk Hard: The Dewey
Cox Story,” and Jonathan Demme’s
film about Jimmy Carter (which Carter recognized Bern for when introducing Bern
to his wife Roslyn, saying, “This is
the fellow that wrote that song.”) Bern
has opened for The Who (Daltrey has covered Bern’s songs), is a member of the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and
taught tennis to Wilt Chamberlain.
The remastered, first-time-on-vinyl edition of Bern’s 2001 masterpiece New
American Language is out now. Starting Over, an all-new album of Bern songs is scheduled for release on March 1, 2024, via Grand Phony.
About the upcoming new album Starting Over, Bern explains, “I started playing with
the Jane’s Great Dane guys out of
Boston after a snow blower incident that cost me a couple of fingertips and put
me out of commission as far as playing the guitar for a while.
“Then, In the middle of the pandemic, Jonathan Plaut, from the band,
suggested I come out to Connecticut and record some songs with them. I hadn’t
been in a room with other musicians for over a year! Those sessions led to a
second session, some months later, and eventually, Starting Over.”
Dan Bern is
available for interviews. Contact Josh Bloom
at Fanatic for more information.
Listen to “Starting Over” by Dan Bern
via Rock and Roll Globe here
or at the link above.
“For nearly 30 years, Dan Bern has established himself as a true songwriter’s songwriter
whose ability to transform thoughts and observations into poetry is
unparalleled,” says Rock and Roll Globe
in its premiere coverage of the title track taken from the new Bern album Starting
Over, out this Friday, March 1.
“‘Starting Over’ is about a kind of
freedom,” says Bern. “Of always
having a corner to turn. No matter how bad you think a situation may be, just
keep going. You never know what’s around the bend. I read once that a certain
group of Japanese painters, no matter how well-known they got, would change
their names every seven years or so, and start again. I thought that was kind
of cool.”
Listen to “Bible” by Dan Bern via Glide
Magazine here
or at the link above.
Glidecalls“Bible” by Dan Bern, “a piano-driven work of folk-pop that carries a chorus
that speaks to our current climate of divisiveness. Littered with pop culture
and political references, not to mention a colorful history lesson, the song is
both humorous and poignant in its lyrics and message.
“We also get plenty of grandiose rock and roll guitar,
making this the kind of clever piano-rock that would make Warren Zevon smile.”
Bern says, “In the midst of so much rancor and division, ‘no one in the
Bible was white’ was a phrase that I had seen somewhere, and it seemed worthy
of a song.”
“In a series of brisk, moving sentences… he begs God
to send him back in time, saving the good and destroying evil.” — The
Washington Post
Thirty albums into his
career, the genius tunes of Dan Bern finally hit wax as the revered
songwriter’s 2001 masterpiece New
American Language gets a remastered double-album reissue.
Today sees the reissue, in a newly
remastered edition, of New American Language, the 2001
album by acclaimed American songwriter, Dan
Bern. Surprisingly, the occasion marks the first appearance of a Bern album on vinyl, during a career
spanning more than 30 releases.
“Dan’s epic‘Thanksgiving Day Parade,’ literally took two years to record,”
says the song’s producer, Wil Masisak
in the liner notes of the upcoming reissue. “The sense that we’d made something
worth hearing coupled with the knowledge that we couldn’t have done this alone
or without difficulty was immensely rewarding.
“Unfortunately, the release date was set for Tuesday,
September 11th, 2001, and so it is that this incredible collection of American
songwriting seemingly meant for those who did their best to carry on after 9/11
finds itself a little lost to time.”
“With Dan Bern’s
large and acclaimed catalog, I have no idea how he has never had a vinyl
release,” says John Young of Grand Phony Records (Mike Viola, Trapper Schoepp), the label that will reissue Bern’s landmark album. New American Language is my favorite
Dan Bern album, Young says. With “fresh and vibrant” remastered audio, it is
literally clearer that Bern’s lyrics
“have proven to be prescient, as if they were written yesterday,” according to Young.
“National treasure” is an overused phrase to denote
somebody whom Americans acknowledge as important. Someone whose contributions
to the American fabric are numerous, never in doubt, but rarely at risk.
Bern and his work is something more ingrained than what “national
treasure” can measure. What Bern has
offered throughout a 30-album and counting career speaks to something deeper in
us than any two-word workaround for actual criticism could define. Bern’s work takes those risks, and New
American Language is his career’s most precarious statement. In a world
filled with plenty of “safer” controversial subjects to write about, Bern could do that if he felt like it.
We are better for his decision not to.
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