KIP BERMAN OF THE NATVRAL

You are a great storyteller; your lyrics and music are a perfect medium for conveying those tales. Is there a line between fiction and non-fiction, autobiography, and off-limits topics that you adhere to when conceptualising and writing?

Thank you, that’s really cool of you to say. Most everything I write comes from my life, though I’m not sure what that really means – as it’s not just my experiences, but people I’ve known and tried to know a bit better by looking out their eyes.

One thing I’ve noticed with my solo music is that sometimes I come at an idea I’ve written about a while back, but it seems the model has shifted their pose, or the light has changed. Some of my new songs “check in” on older songs – “Carolina” is one such song. Its subject is, more or less, the same as “The Tenure Itch.” That older song was fixated on the more prurient elements, the dynamics of power and sex. If it seemed a bit judgemental, it’s not exactly covering its eyes or averting it’s gaze either. It’s a bit of a “peeping tom” of a tune, looking through other people’s windows. But in “Carolina” I want to know “what happens after? Are you alright? Am I?” Maybe its concern still isn’t entirely noble, and that’s fine. But something has changed with what I’m after. Same goes with “Stephanie Don’t Live Here Anymore.” It could be another telling of “A Teenager in Love” – an old PAINS song. But where that one romanticized this uncompromising and ultimately destructive devotion to ideals and absolutes, “Stephanie…” is more cautionary. It’s thinking about my place – and culpability - in all that mess. It’s less an anthem (or elegy) for doomed youth and more a “hey kids, be careful.”

It doesn’t seem like anything needs to be off limits, but I do change some names to avert angry ghosts and awkward texts.

Every artist has their own methodology and approach when conceiving a tune, converting it from a concept and turning it into a tangible form. Can you talk us through your approach?

I have no idea starting out – or at least, I’ve never been able to write a song with intention “about” something. I do admire people like Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, or anyone that can. Me, I just pick up my guitar and sing while I strum. If it’s memorable, I’ll remember it. If I remember it after a while I’ll start giving it form, writing it down and building it out. But if I’ve forgotten it, I trust it’s forgettable.

Your latest release was one born out of an all too familiar time of lockdown and the global pandemic. This in its own right must have been a powerful and unfolding story to immerse yourself in and be stimulated creatively in ways that up until that time would have seemed improbable and unimaginable?

You know, it’s a hard time to talk about. Not because it was such a tragedy that it couldn’t even be spoken of. Nor because it was somehow “not so bad” or trivial—it certainly wasn’t. But it’s almost impossible to talk about those times ‘cuz we were all there. It’s like working in a family business, then asking your brother or mother “how was work?” No one wants to go there because everybody was there. And besides, this record isn’t about that time, it just came out of that time.

But the abrupt shift in the rhythms of how I was living opened me up. All day I was just trying to sustain a kind of mundane normalcy for my two kids who had just turned 4 years old and 18 months when it all started. It was whatever the opposite of what people think “ideal artistic circumstances” might be, certainly not the stuff of writers’ retreats or communing with babbling brooks or whatever. And I was far from remarkable in any of this, as my partner was working from home so tremendously hard – seemingly around the clock and still finding time to be with us in important ways. And of course it wasn’t just us, everyone out there was doing all they could just to get to the next day, intact- many without the privilege of taking shelter. Without school, their friends, or even playgrounds, I just did my best to make sure my children had routines, washed their hands, and had someone to use as a makeshift jungle gym (me).

When they went to bed at night I was exhausted – mentally especially, as there seemed no end in sight. I bet they were too. Every day was going to be like the one before. But in the moments when I could go to the basement and play my guitar a bit, I was doing a lot of cover songs, and singing everything from Margo Guryan and The Stones to Third Eye Blind and Galaxie 500. Some songs came naturally enough, others surprised me – but I felt I could try all sorts of things. And in my own music I was writing—and there were loads of songs that never made it on the record – it felt like the feelings and the desires weren’t so confined to (my own) expectation.

In that earlier question you asked about how I would take “something I want to say” and put it in a song-- it’s pretty much opposite. I don’t know what I want to say. I “say stuff,” and the meaning only comes to me when I listen back to what I’ve said. I have to interpret my own music, and sometimes even my interpretations change. There’s some part of me that can only come out when there’s an absence of intention. If I watch my own pot, I never boil.

Recorded during the height of the pandemic, it is inevitable that those times and feelings would be impregnated on the album. Particularly as it was a global unknown for so many which for most involved a lot of soul searching, isolation, and inner exploration. Now on the other side of such times, what is your take on the music you made and its relation to then, now, and the future?

I’m surprised by it, listening to it now. How did I make a record like this? I could go back and listen to what I was doing just a few years before with PAINS— and not just the sounds or the instruments, but my voice. Why does it sound like this now? Why do I lean into it when I used to try to hide it, obscure it? Why do I record mostly live and loose, when I used to be meticulous in search of some ideal? It wasn’t the pandemic or lockdown - this was happening before. No one wants to hear some cliché about “when I became a parent everything changed, man.” That’s a lot of bull. But I do think it casts your identity in this entirely different perspective – not the hackneyed “mature, gaining perspective on life, man” singer-songwriter BS. It’s more like you become unafraid of yourself because now all your worries are for other people. It’s liberating, sort of.

Was there a desire to demarcate where Tethers ended and Summer of No Light began so as to keep them as separate entities or is the new album in your mind simply a continuation?

I was fortunate in that I wrote Summer of No Light before Tethers came out. I had recorded Tethers in 2019 and was set to release it in Spring 2020, but because of, you know… the record was shelved for well over a year. So I wrote these new songs with no sense of expectation or even dialog with how people may have received Tethers.

Some artists really get off on “answering their critics” or “telling the haters where to go,” and all that. But I think it’s a dangerous thing to be in dialog with anything other than your own heart, your own muse. Rarely does anyone get the chance of creating in a vacuum – but between the isolation of lockdown and the first record not being released, I was able to do just that.

Drawing parallels between this time and that of the climate crisis of 1816. Where do those lines intersect and where do they diverge in terms of how you see the past and the present and how those thoughts are reflected in Summer of No Light?

I know I may look a bit worse for wear, but I wasn’t actually alive for the one in 1816.

But I did find the story of Mary Godwin (later Shelley), her (then married to another) lover Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and his lover (Mary’s half-sister) Claire Clairmont as debauched, barely-adults passing the time in a time of crisis by getting fucked up and fucking, while finding partial escape in writing to be… relatable— and also, not.

When I had just finished school, I was riding out a summer at a crumbling rental house in Portland, Oregon with some dubious characters, including one that – 20 years later – I’m now married to. For the record, she wasn’t all that dubious, then or now. I was working/napping in a library by day. The nights went on ’til dawn, but usually ended with being the first customers at the local bagel shop, possessing a now-unbelievable belief that no one “could tell” we’d been up all night. Unlike 1816, literary works of the stature of Frankenstein were not composed. I wrote a lot of songs that rhymed “night” with “alright.” More the stuff of Dracula, really. I was playing guitar in a band with my best friend that sounded like a not-so-good version of The Strokes. The less said about this time, the better. “Summer of Hell” might fill you in on the details. I do love the Stokes, though.

In 2020 I was taking shelter - and yes, I’m aware of the privilege to take shelter- as Mary did - and peering out the window at these lurking specters: covid, climate change, and the social upheaval happening all around as a suddenly vulnerable capitalism sputtered to a halt (though that silver lining was short-lived). And what was I even doing? Just trying to keep the ordinary things feel ordinary for my family and writing songs in my basement. They sounded less like The Strokes this time.

I still don’t know what any of it means. I felt pulled between the necessity of the present and a desire for anything else. I don’t think I was unique in that. On Earth, no one was having much fun. So, there I was, mourning the recent past and imagining an older one that offered some solace. And if I conflated other ‘summers of no light’ with the one of literary legend - it all made the present seem a bit more normal. We’d done this before, we’ll do it again- no doubt.

Having fronted Pains of Being Pure at Heart and most recently as a solo artist, how did your time with your precious outfits inform and shape your solo work and satisfy the creative urge you were seeking from it?

With PAINS there seemed to be too much need to have “stuff” to play music – pedal boards, certain amps—even a full group of 5 people. As The Natvral, I wanted to make music that only needed the song – just my voice and a guitar. Yeah, I’ll play with a band sometimes, and that’s a cool way to interpret the songs. But really, I can say “yes” to anything. I don’t want to poison this music with “stuff,” I just want to sing you a song, and as long as I have air in my lungs I can do that.

As the world is in an endless state of flux and in navigating all of life’s ever-evolving challenges, what has been the one constant or guiding principle that you have applied to your music and career?

“The best bands are just the best ideas.”

Having yourself been influenced by countless artists, and also having released a hefty body of work over the years, does your attention occasionally turn to thinking about how is it that you have influenced others and how your music has come to inspire fellow musicians and upcoming artists?

I’ll start with my old band - every once in a while, I see videos of kids in Indonesia, The Philippines – and even Japan either covering old PAINS songs or playing music that is part of the lineage of what we did. There’s a band called The Bunbury from Yogyakarta, Indonesia that’s great! Another called Morningwhim in Japan that’s cool too. It’s extremely heartening to think about a bunch of Americans like us in the 00’s and 10’s being inspired by bands mostly from the UK in the 80s or 90s and then that sound becoming most entrenched half-way around the world as its own distinct thing in this decade. There’s real community, a scene of DIY kids doing what they love just cuz. It feels so familiar, so relatable. Even though my bandmates in PAINS came from different backgrounds – I think too often there were people on the outside that saw the kind of music we loved as something that was only for “certain” kinds of people. It relieves me to see kids that have totally different experiences, language, culture and religion – can use jangly, noisy music to express something vital to them.

As for my new music, The Natvral? Maybe I can convince people to spend less on boutique guitar pedals and hand-wired amps, and more time just trying to make something cool out of what you already have? And you already have yourself. But it’s too early to think about that.

Performing live must surely be one of the most enjoyable moments of any release or tour and the last time Musicology had the pleasure of catching you live was at Rough Trade London during an in-store performance. Can you share with us a highly memorable gig you have played throughout your career and what made it so special?

With my old group, PAINS, I wrote the songs in my bedroom, and I simply wanted to impress Peggy, Alex, and Kurt and maybe play a show at Cake Shop with Crystal Stilts, My Teenage Stride, or Pants Yell– people we thought were cool. But when our first record came out, there started to be this feeling at the shows that went beyond how it felt playing to our 12 friends at Cake Shop.

Our show at Chorlton Irish Center in Manchester was one such gig, as was Primavera Sound in 2009 – our first festival and first time in Spain, a country that became so special to us and seemed to really embrace what we were about. But as the years passed, the more I tried to make our performances “good” the less that uncorrupted spirit happened. We could barely play when we started, but for some reason no one really noticed. When we eventually tried to do things like “tune” and “know what songs came next in the set,” it felt like we had made some inadvertent transgression against the shambolic gods of indiepop. It was almost as if we engendered some cosmic “tsk tsk” from Stephen Pastel, Comet Gain, or Amelia Fletcher.

That show you saw at Rough Trade, where there was no mic and just a borrowed acoustic, that’s the kind of thing that feels right to me. I just want people to hear the songs, and I don’t want anything material to get in the way.

Lastly, what does music give you that nothing else does?

When I play music I feel connected to myself and – sometimes - something beyond myself. Not aggrandized or special, mind you. But I feel this connection to something essential and enduring in what it means to be a person. Anywhere on earth, however far you want to go back - there was always someone like me singing a song of love, of loss, desire, frustration, or whimsical nonsense. They were bored, perhaps. And they could have been doing something more practical, sure. Maybe their parents said they ought to go to Hammurabi’s Coding Camp, or Solon the Lawgiver’s Law School. But for whatever reason, they didn’t. Their friends or family might have laughed or scoffed - but also, maybe asked to hear that one again. Every time that ever was a time is now mostly forgotten— and my time will be forgotten too. But it still happened. And, it meant something. Playing music means something. It is a gesture against the void.

Plus, it’s pretty fun.