After being forced to record his last album, Broken English, remotely in the spring of 2020, the Portland-based folk-rock troubadour Eddie Berman thought that perhaps he’d record all his albums that way moving forward. “I had exclusively recorded everything totally live before, but the comfort and ease of not having to leave my family for long stretches was pretty nice,” he explained. “And I definitely enjoyed being able to be a little more deliberate and discerning during the remote recording process.”
As comfortable with home recording as he was, however, Berman still decided to rehearse his new collection of songs in person with his band, whom he hadn’t seen in over two years, to flesh out the arrangements. It took about thirty seconds of playing together for the fog to lift: “Right away it was just a feeling of, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’” he laughs. “The point of this kind of music isn’t to be discerning, for God’s sake. It’s to be alive! I wouldn’t be able to recreate this feeling if I spent a decade recording remotely.”
Berman realized that, in fact, this is what the songs that would make up his new album, Signal Fire (due out January 19, 2024 via Nettwerk), were actually about. They were about emerging from the haze of isolation—isolation of a pandemic, of early parenthood, of a kind of existential and spiritual torpor. And in that emergence, Berman woke to see what mattered the most: the love and passion for his wife of 15 years, the amazement of his children, but also the fear of the world they’re growing up in.
Reveling in the liveness and immediacy of the rehearsals, Berman rode that feeling into the recording process. He and his bandmates joined their longtime collaborator, mixer/engineer Pierre de Reeder (Rilo Kiley), to lay down the album at de Reeder’s 64 Sound Recording Studio in Los Angeles, just as a rare Southern California rainstorm of epic proportions was ripping through. “There was something great about us meeting at the studio in sunny Los Angeles while it’s just raining harder than it ever rains in Portland,” he says.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the video for the standout track “First of Spring (Keira’s Song),” which encapsulates the mood of the album as a whole. Written about the difficult experience in the birth of his second daughter, the song is a stirring work of quiet folk that balances a sense of melancholy as well as hope and ultimately happiness. Berman is backed by sparse yet textured instrumentation, giving the song a sense of moody righteousness to complement his simple guitar strumming and quietly soulful vocals. What makes the video especially moving is that Berman’s daughters can be seen playing in the sunshine just outside the door, making a strong emotional statement.
Berman describes the inspiration behind the song:
After writing the song “Pascal’s Triangle” about my first daughter Bridget’s birth, and naming an album after her, I’ve known for a while that I’ve had to write something good for my second daughter. It took a few years of percolation, but while I was writing my latest album, this song just flowed out about the terrifying moments right after Keira’s birth: her shallow almost hyperventilating breathing, being whisked away to get her on a CPAP machine, her impending trip to the ICU, and then her last second reprieve when she, all of sudden, started taking her first deep, beautiful breaths. The song is about those thirty minutes that felt like an eternity, trying to help Keira through it, trying to get her back to her mother, and the appreciation it’s given me for every subsequent breath that child’s taken.
WATCH:
