David Berkeley

Strange Light

Thirty Tigers Records

By Rob O’Connor

David Berkeley writes with an ear for mystery. He amasses details. He asks rhetorical questions. He sings with a constant yearning in a voice that flirts with a range an octave higher than his natural tone when it looks to put the emotion across. And he's using a grander "family of musicians," as read the credits on his third studio album Strange Light. Since his debut release, The Confluence in 2002, Berkeley's been steadily gaining ground as a singer-songwriter and delivering on the promise his young talent suggested. Each album has brought forth several instant classics -- The Confluence features "Straw Man," "A Moon Song" and "Miss Maybe." His second album, 2003's After the Wrecking Ships has "Jefferson," "Chicago" and "Boxes." And this year's Strange Light has "Hurricane," (a tune so valued by Berkeley he used it to open the 2005 collection Live at Fez), "Willis Avenue Bridge" and "High Heels and All."

Jon Pareles in the New York Times heard "shades of Tim Buckley and Nick Drake." Under normal circumstances, this might be an overworked cliché, considering how many singer-songwriters have been compared to Drake in recent years, but this is Pareles, a distinguished critic not given to lazy comparisons and this is Berkeley, a singer-songwriter who aims high. Context-wise, I hear Berkeley fitting in comfortably in the early 1970s when the world was awash in reflective singer-songwriters from David Blue and David Ackles to Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, Terence Boylan and Judee Sill. But Berkeley is now enough his own stylist to avoid comparisons and simply join the esteemed company.

David Berkeley's a New Jersey-bred troubadour who graduated from Harvard, where he studied literature and philosophy, and has now lived in Brooklyn, Sante Fe, Alaska, Idaho, Santa Cruz, Corsica, France and Atlanta. Like many struggling young songwriters, Berkeley strings his career together on tireless touring, the occasional public radio appearance and a song serenading the ends of a television drama ("Fire Sign" on Without a Trace). It shouldn't be this hard for someone of his talent to make inroads, but at a time when you're more likely to make the music news with a gimmick than a well-written verse, Berkeley would do more for his career insulting the Pope than pursuing the quiet craft that brings the magnificent "Willis Avenue Bridge" to its circuitous conclusion.

Berkeley intuitively uses understatement to glue his songs together. The young lady driving home at the first sign of winter on "Willis Avenue Bridge" bounces along with the thoughts in her head, "heat turned up, the windows rolled down to the edge." "Used to be a hard merge" takes on a finality that's never given away, the sense of loss lingers in the air as it transforms into "Used to be a heartbreak" and "Used to be much harder." It isn't so much a story as a series of thoughts coming together to form an opening -- like our own memories, the reasons and motives disappear while the little details ache for a past that was never quite what we perceive.

The album is littered with these sneaky little moments where the lyrics suddenly poke out at you. "It's dangerous for a thinking man" sings Berkeley for "Scraps of You." "How to measure a man, who thinks God is in his hand?" he asks in "Measure of a Man." "Faith I'm an orphan, hold my hand" Berkeley admits on "Only Broken Man." "Isn't it a hard life?" he asks pointblank on "High Heels and All." No narrative arc draws these thoughts together. This is imagistic, impressionist writing working in perfect concert with gently picked acoustic guitars, keyboards, the occasional horn, and solid, never overwhelming percussion. The geo-political world-weariness of the previous eight years is subtly felt, the mental taxation of living on both offense and defense and never in peace with a world situation completely outside an artist's control. Berkeley never literally interprets the world but he feels it seeping into his consciousness when he tries to find his own context.

"Now everybody's in their 20s/ Look who got married /Look who's lost." It's the sound of a young man observing change and not sure where he's headed. You want to warn him: "Buddy, it only gets worse." "Oh Lord, Come Down" is less a spiritual call to arms than a frustrated plea for some cosmic reinforcement, a sign that all coincidence will eventually solidify into something resembling a game plan where the familiar is once again, well, familiar. Like Randy Newman's plea where Lord, if you won't take care of us, won't you please just let us be?