For some foolish reason, I decided that Dan Bern wasn't my cup of tea without actually hearing his music. Maybe it was the "new Dylan" tag he was saddled with, or the Ani DiFranco connection or the strange album covers or... well, who knows? Regardless, it was my loss.

I finally had the chance to hear Bern (or rather, was forced to do so) when I was writing about arts and entertainment for his hometown paper in Cedar Rapids. He was coming to CSPS (another late discovery, that) for a show, and I got a CD in the mail with the hope I'd do something to preview the show. I listened to New American Language, his fourth album, and was hooked. Here was an artist who mixed witty wordplay with an international political awareness, all with a rollicking sound that blended folk, power pop, pub rock, blues and r'n'b. I picked up everything before and since, and count myself a solid fan.

I hadn't heard much out of the usually prolific Bern in a while when flooding hit our area. I remember wondering if he would come to town to perform a benefit, only to learn a couple of days later that he was already in town and planned to perform several times in flood-related events. We hooked up to do an interview to preview those shows, and I later followed up to ask him more general questions for the long-awaited return of the Monday Interview.

I learned that Bern had been as prolific as ever; if I had been more alert I would have known. He wrote and/or co-wrote many of the songs in the film "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" (in fact, his contributions are among the highlights of this otherwise uneven film), and released three albums on online music stores -- The Burbank Tapes, Divine & Conquer and Macaroni Cola. He also wrote and recorded the song "The Ballad of Jimmy Carter/Man from Plains" for the Jonathan Demme documentary about Jimmy Carter, "Man From Plains."

TIRBD: Your work on “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” seemed to open a door for you careerwise. How would you like to see that evolve and, if it became exactly what you wanted, how would you balance that with writing, recording and touring as a solo artist?

DB: I would love to do more projects along those lines. I love collaborating, and writing for characters, and just sitting around making stuff up! Ideally, I guess there'd be more projects than I'd know what to do with. I was on the road playing, part of the time I was writing “Dewey” songs. So there's not necessarily a conflict. But, at least for the time being, I’m probably more interested in doing movies and theatrical projects than "another record, another tour."

You worked with Mike Viola on that soundtrack. He's another artist once tabbed to be the next great (insert name here) but who now releases his own music and does various things to make a living. Is that a growing niche that you see yourself joining as the music business continues to change?

Well... we'll see. I guess everyone has to find their own way. Mike's a really skilled guy in a lot of different ways. In the past all I wanted to do was make records and bomb around playing every night. Seeing what a bunch of talented people can do when they pool together kind of opened my eyes.

Your deal with Messenger is done and you've released a few projects on the web for download. Do you want to work with a label again? Do you have more projects like The Burbank Tapes that might see the light of day online?

I did a short tour out east recently, just about three weeks, and I found myself playing all these songs I've never released, about 75 songs probably. Old & new. They felt good. I feel like I've got some great albums still to come. Just figuring out how to do it. These days, a label can be a help or a hindrance. I'll figure it out, I guess.

Which do you enjoy most: writing, performing or recording? With respect to the one you like least, would you stop doing it if that meant you could concentrate more on the other two and still make ends meet?

Well, really, I've always felt like they were three parts of the same thing. If I wasn't gonna perform anymore, would I write? If I didn't record anymore, would I eventually stop performing? I guess if I lost my voice and couldn't physically get out of bed, I might still write. But maybe I’d just do crossword puzzles... with “Dewey,” even though we were just writing songs, we were also recording and "performing" the songs, even if it was just for the demos. But John Reilly heard the demos, and it all helped shape his character I think. So even with that, it's hard to separate writing from performing and recording.

I think that maybe at this moment, I still love to perform, and I think I always will, and all that. but I like doing projects the most. And I can envision (and kinda want) my own notion of "performing" to cover a wider range of things. I loved writing the "Dewey" songs, I loved writing the song that was in the Jimmy Carter movie, I loved writing the songs for (the Cedar Rapids flood play) "Moving Home" and singing them in the context of the show. I really like that in all of those things, it's more than about just me singing songs. They're part of a larger context. It's the greatest thing to be able to write a song or a batch of songs for something, something bigger, and meaningful in a different way, than just me singing some songs, nice as that might be sometimes. and if I can contribute to it in a performance aspect, in a way to make it just a little better, then I'm pretty happy.

How has the economic downturn – high gas prices, less disposable income spent on the arts, etc. – affected you as an artist?

I guess at the end of a tour, there's less in the wallet after paying $4 a gallon. It's amazing how you start being aware of every danged mile. Take one wrong turn and you start calculating how much gas you're spilling. Obviously, the problems with energy and fuel are bigger than that. We could've had a good light rail system in every medium-sized city in the country by now, for what we've spent in Iraq the last few years. Tragic. Not to mention how the cupboard's bare when a real emergency comes up, like these floods. Does it take environmental disaster to rebuild green? Anyway... I don't know, maybe musicians will go back to hitch-hiking and hopping freights.

You were among a handful of artists four years ago who wrote and sang songs against President Bush. He won despite those and many other efforts, but has clearly been damaged by the past four years. Is there vindication for you there? Or perhaps frustration that your message didn't get through until it was too late?

More the latter. That the country's been damaged and the future made a little bleaker is the tragedy. Those guys'll be floating on their islands while we'll be left to clean up the mess. The most frustrating thing for me was that I couldn't reach more people, doing my lone troubadour thing. I guess that's partly why I'm now more interested in collaboration, being a part of something larger than just me railing into the wind.

You wrote 10 songs for a Cedar Rapids theater project that dealt with the impact of devastating floods here in Iowa. While those might be recorded and released, it struck me that you must have dozens, if not hundreds of songs written for specific occasions or events that haven't been properly recorded. Do you remember them all? Do you have documentation of them? If not, does that bother you?

Some of them probably deserve to go the way of newspapers at 11 p.m.! In the past, most songs didn't get recorded, or even written down. They just got sung, and passed around, until they didn't anymore. It's the rare song that sticks around, really. But, unless I die tomorrow, I'll probably get to some of them, sometime.

Labels: Monday Interview, movies, music