Geoff Berner: The Ultimate Wedding Singer

Geoff Berner has recorded a follow-up to the acclaimed Whiskey Rabbi along with percussionist Wayne Adams and violinist Diona Davies. The Wedding Dance Of The Widow Bride looks back at the Jewish wedding tradition, seen and heard through Berner's klezmer-punk, no-holds-barred filter. Berner always has a whole lot of interesting things to say and he shared a few thoughts with ChartAttack.

ChartAttack: You refer to the record as "your fucked-up wedding album," but you say it's not a concept album. What gives?
Geoff Berner: Well, it's not a concept album in that it's not like a prog-rock, "let's-make-a-rock-album-of-journey-to-the-centre-of-the-earth." I feel like an album of songs, especially these days, when, if you want to, you can just have bits and pieces of whatever you want of an artist's work. If you're gonna organize songs into an album, you have to have some kind of cohesive reason for why they're all in the same place at the same time. And they're all songs about — I'm trying to find a good way to express this — but really the best way is on the record. So it's hard to talk it, but it's about women and happiness and Canada and Jewish-Canadian anglophilia.

The bride is the symbol that pervades the record because the bride is a symbol of happiness and prosperity, fertility, promise. And the Widow Bride is where the darkness of the possibility that our happiness might be built on the misfortune of others.

The songs are inspired by traditional Jewish wedding songs. I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but don't you think it's kind of blasphemous to twist 'em around like this?
I think there are going to be people who will consider it blasphemous. But my argument is I'm trying to use these forms to talk about things that matter to me and my friends. I'm keeping these forms alive because when klezmer, or what we call klezmer culture, was at its height, it was a constantly changing, living thing. It wasn't a sculpture in stone, it was like a tree. So, by not treating it perfectly respectfully, I feel like I'm giving it more respect. And I feel like the fact that I've devoted my life to my career, to this goal, is an indication of my level of respect towards the form.

You, Diona and Wayne went to Romania to study under a "klezmer guru" in 2004. First of all, how exactly does one locate a klezmer guru and how did that experience influence this record?
Bob Cohen is like a character out of a novel, but he doesn't seem real, even when you're sitting beside him... He lives in Hungary and he plays the real thing. When I was researching klezmer, when I wanted to get more into it, six years ago, that's where I first heard his band [Di Naye Kapelye] on a compilation, and I had really not enjoyed a lot of the klezmer. I found it very anodyne or jazzy, in a jazz-cool kind of way. Then there was Bob, and I knew I had to find him when I heard his record. He was just exactly how I imagined him from the sound of his record. This garrulous, vodka-swilling, adventurous, wildly knowledgeable madman. He has been going to Romania and researching this music since the earl-'70s! Smuggling penicillin past the Securitate [Romanian secret police]. He's been going to these villages in the Maramures region, which is like the Ozark Mountains of Romania and learning the language and living with people respectfully.

So, when I said, "What are you doing in June? We're thinking about coming to hang out with you in Budapest." And he said, "Well, I can't. I'm busy. I'll be hitchhiking around Romania doing some more documentation work." And I was like, "Would you like someone to drive you around?"

And so I drove Bob around and he sat in the passenger seat and he talked non-stop for weeks. And we went to these villages and found these old guys and it never would have happened for us if we hadn't had Bob with us, because we just would have been weirdo, loser foreigners. So, that was an extraordinary experience.

This is the second record in a trilogy that also includes Whiskey Rabbi. What can we expect next?
Yeah, yeah. I was thinking it was going to be ideas about children and cultural authenticity.

After the wedding come the babies, right?
Yeah, exactly. Booze, then weddings, then babies. That's my hope — that the three records can stand together as a set and that we're exploring ideas about Jewish identity and my own identity in a way that everybody, I hope, can relate to. Because everyone is dealing with the same issues these days. I was reading an interview with Alan Ball, the guy who did the series Six Feet Under. He said he was interested in characters who were struggling to lead authentic lives in an increasingly unauthentic world. That's an interesting idea. And I have found that that response from the audience — people who aren't Jewish respond just as well to what I'm talking about.

Do you think anyone will invite you to play these songs at a wedding? I think "Traitor Bride" would really get the party started.
Well, I have been asked to play! Mostly "Weep Bride Weep" at weddings. People are planning weddings who are talking about having me play this summer. Some people have asked me to actually perform the service, perform the legal ritual.

Are you legally able to do that?
I'll have to look into that and find out what's involved there. I knew a guy who got some kind of clergy license in order to smoke dope on stage. Unfortunately, he's dead, so I'll have to find somebody else.