Biography
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, 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.
The band—consisting of Berman, Gabe Feenberg (piano, lap steel, electric guitar, B-3 organ, accordion, trombone), Gabe Davis (electric and upright bass), and Chris Wabich (drums)—gave themselves a self-imposed three-day deadline to record the 13-song album, letting the short window push them to not overthink it. Even the opener, “Rolling Over Me,” a blissed-out tune that feels like a bolt of sunshine fighting through the clouds of a rainstorm, was still being figured out arrangement-wise as the quartet worked in the studio. Berman wasn’t sure of the right way to present the song at first, but Wabich rearranged his drum kit and started laying down a totally different beat, and they, well, rolled with it. “Instead of rehearsing this new version at all I just said let’s lay it down and see what happens. And that’s the take.” Berman explains.
As the group worked, a picture of an album started to take place—an album that took the gentle grace of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and added it with some of the subtle sonic bite of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. Berman leads the band through the defiant yet rapturous “Mine All Mine,” steeped in soulful piano and sparkling percussion, and on the cinematic “Looking In,” he pushes them forward, into a parade of “silver-tongued hallucinations” fit for the song’s cinematic sound: “a feast of kings” rolls by, and then “azure chapels” later on. But on “Heartbroken,” above deft fingerpicking and mournful accordion, Berman is back where he belongs… in bed with his sleeping children, contemplating the beauty and horror of the future they’ll inherit.
Throughout Signal Fire, Berman is lyrically circling his relationship to his family. Serving as a companion of sorts to the 2019 song “Pascal’s Triangle,” which is about the birth of his older daughter, Bridget, Berman wrote “First of Spring (Keira’s Song)” about his younger daughter, and the frightening moments of her struggling to breathe when she was first born. The momentary terror in the delivery room after Keira’s birth was short-lived, however, and she’s now a happy and healthy child just about to start school. It’s a blessing he doesn’t take for granted, and part of a complex range of emotions he has for his family that captures everything about what Signal Fire is communicating.
The lyrical image of the album title appears on “Mare Imbrium,” an acoustic-led romantic ballad named after one of the moon’s largest craters, but the concept is apparent throughout— the Signal Fire is a message of both invitation and warning, with the protection of its warmth and the peril of its flame. And in the spirit of that duality, Berman sings of birth and death, hope and despair, defiance, and acquiescence. But ultimately, the album returns to a central theme: the bond and indestructibility of love, as he sings on the final lines of “Back to You”: “We’ll be walking these hills long after we’re done / Because our song lasts forever and it has always been sung.”
