Rick Berlin has written his share of “personal” songs of what he calls the “I love you/I lost you” type. But he’s at his best when he’s telling his own life story through portraits of others — character studies rich with overheard dialogue and cinematic detail. When we get together at the Trident bookstore café on Newbury Street to talk about his new Me & Van Gogh (Hi-N-Dry) and this weekend’s two-night Berlin extravaganza at the Lizard Lounge, he gives me an example:
“I go to the Brendan Behan Pub every single night — it’s right next to my apartment — and this friend of mine I’ve known for years tells me this story. This is what he’s told me: he says, ‘My roommate Michiko she doesn’t eat, I’ve never seen her eat. Anything. She’s into shoes. High-heeled shoes. My friends ask me, “What’s up with your hooker roommate, dude?” ’ I took that, I went upstairs, and I ripped him off. ‘Michiko,’ you know?”
Me & Van Gogh is full of characters who have walked into Berlin’s life and right into his songs. “Don’t Talk About Joan,” dating from the early ’90s and now recorded for the third time, is about friend and ex-Dambuilder Joan Wasser. “The back story there is that a friend of mine, Eddie, knew Joan from BU, they were both studying music there. And Joan jumped into a cab with us at the Middle East — she was on her way to go bartend at Bill’s Bar or something. And she had this hair.” Berlin extends his arms on either side of his head. “She looks like Gong Li to me, incredibly beautiful.” A couple of weeks later, he and Eddie found themselves in “this little hipster apartment, with these two little hipster girls in it, smoking pot — and I wouldn’t smoke pot because it freaks me out — and I started talking about Joan and they said, ‘Don’t talk about Joan! I’m in love with her!’ ”
It’s a long way from the histrionics of that moment (the girls didn’t know Joan, and Berlin promised to keep their crush a secret) to the plaintive piano chords and stalker’s lament on the CD. Although Berlin has performed solo plenty of times, alone with only his piano, this is his first such CD. He’s been making music on the Boston scene — with varying degrees of fame, including a couple of major-label deals — since the early ’70s, beginning with the semi-legendary Orchestra Luna, and then on to Berlin Airlift, Rick Berlin the Movie, Berlin Backwards, Rome Is Burning, and, most recently, the Shelley Winters Project.
About a year and a half ago, he pulled the plug on the Shelley Winters Project after — as he puts it — “three years, three drummers, three bass players, and two violinists.” There were also three CDs, all of which showed Berlin’s knack for pop song forms, his powerful go-for-broke vocals, and his storytelling acumen.
The title of the new album — and the mood — might give you the idea that it’s about Berlin’s own long artistic struggles. But it actually emerged from one of his characters — the blue-eyed redhead on the CD’s back cover. “He’s a kid I met, another guy who was in jail. But he looked like Van Gogh to me. He had red hair and blue eyes, really intense. He had a kid before he was in jail, his wife divorced him, now he’s got a new girlfriend and he’s up in Maine, going to college, trying to get work and help kids in trouble. . . . He inspired the song because he looked like Van Gogh and he seemed to be outside the orbit of most people, like Van Gogh. I think it’s hard for an artist not to imagine themselves in the undiscovered position that Van Gogh was, and yet having enough passion to keep making stuff because they have to do it or they’ll just die. And I always wanted to write a song about that, and this kid sort of set it up in my head.”
Berlin’s solo cabaret style has conjured Randy Newman and Tom Waits, but that’s only in form, not in musical content. For an untrained musician who writes everything by ear, he has a gift for the kind of emotive, subtle chord voicings that seem to draw from the heart of the American songbook. The obsessive cycling chord patterns of the infatuation song “Criminal” break for a beautiful change and the little lyric aside “Take you home/In my mind/Make up your story/Write every line” before returning to obsessive frustration. There’s plenty of sadness in these songs (“A Letter” is taken almost verbatim from a friend’s epistle from prison), but Berlin is often at his best in a tragi-comic mode, as in “Beerbelly” or “The Ride,” the latter a long trip that begins with observations in a familiar Cambridge watering hole (“Forty beers at the People’s Republik and nobody in there’s Chinese”). The pattering vocal line sometimes leaps and zags with Sondheim-like agility.