Eddie Berman - Easy Rider
LCM Song Of The Day: ‘Easy Rider’ - Eddie Berman
Our LCM featured track today is a great live version of ‘Easy Rider’ by LA based singer-songwriter Eddie Berman. It’s taken from Eddie’s 2017 album ‘Before The Bridge’.
“Easy Rider” is a toe-tapping, steady strum through some of Berman’s most assured vocals to date. Piano rolls trickle throughout and as Berman’s smoky voice is joined by his backing crowd in the “Come on, you easy rider” refrain, it’s easy to imagine the song filling some lamplit cabin in deep woods or floating out of your car stereo as you drive up the coast.
Eddie Berman has been writing songs since he was a California teenager. His bedroom demos have earned substantial play on vanguard public radio station KCRW 89.9 FM, he’s recorded and played throughout North America and Europe, and he performed for several thousand people over dozens of sold-out London residency shows in partnership with the singer Laura Marling. In fact, while recording a live EP with Marling in 2013, he realized that the way to make a record was to strip the process down, to get at the essence of the song.
The title of singer-songwriter Eddie Berman’s new album, ‘Before the Bridge’, refers to the period of time in the LA-based musician’s life between getting married and the birth of his first child. It was that span, spent mulling the decision (and consequences) of creating a life, that also inspired this crowning musical work. The album was written and recorded during that one-year interim, as Berman was coming down from the crest of his lauded 2014 self-released debut album ‘Polyhymnia’. The songs on Before the Bridge draw, more than ever before, from Berman’s own life experiences, resulting in a rich, evocative, and moving collection.
“My wife and I were being confronted with the somewhat unknowable complexities of trying to bring a life into the world—and specifically into the little sphere of our lives, living in Los Angeles in 2016,” Berman says. “My writing falls between being autobiographical, narrative, and a bit obtuse—but each of these songs were certainly informed by my own life.”
Berman grew up in Southern California and taught himself guitar and piano. He fell in love with the troubadour styles of Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk as a teenager and learned to fingerpick on his father’s 1950s Martin guitar, first writing his own songs as a college student at Berkeley. He made waves in the acoustic music world half a decade ago when his bedroom demos were given significant airplay on influential LA radio station KCRW. In 2013 his EP ‘Blood & Rust’, featuring duets with British artist Laura Marling, along with his subsequent international tours, connected him to an even bigger audience. All the while, Berman steadily developed his craft while staying true to a familiar formula.
Photo credit: Linda Arrendondo Photography