World Cup: A Sort of Travel Diary (book and CD)

Dan Bern | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 12, 2002)
• Original Release Date: November 12, 2002
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Messenger Records
• ASIN: B0002CSAPI
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #642,638 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

About the Artist

Over the course of his five official recordings and the many EPs, performance-only specials, and soundtrack contributions the man and his lethal guitar have recorded since 1997, Dan Bern has been finding the big picture in the small — whether plumbing the infinite sadness of being Van Gogh’s overlooked son or describing a horrific breakup through the gentle light of an Italian holiday. He processes the monumental, sifting through the rubble of increasingly distant youth and devastating world events, and comes up with gems of insight and emotion.

Bern is reflexively literate, in the style of his favorite authors, including L.A.'s legendary bohemians Charles Bukowski and John Fante, urbane fantasist James Thurber, and yarn-spinning humorist Ring Lardner. He's in love with the power of words to turn on themselves, to frolic, to bite, and his strong, friendly voice can go from earnest to ferocious within seconds.

The nomadic Bern, a Mid-westerner-turned-Angeleno now residing in fittingly quirky Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, has always had an outsider’s wry vision. He grew up in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, informed equally by the wholesome wheatiness which inspired his longtime passion for sports in general and baseball in particular, and his Jewish immigrant parents’ artistic leanings (he played cello as a child) before decamping for the West Coast neo-folk scene in the early 1990s, where he began his professional career.

Being captivated by Dan is the easy part; describing his music to the non-initiated is more difficult. One journalist tried: "topical-poetical-sarcastic-punk-folk." An admirable effort, further elaborated by the New York Times: "He veers from comedy to anger, conjectures to shaggy-dog stories; he takes sidelong approaches to theology, science fiction, consumer culture, art, love and baseball."

Product Description

In the past decade, few songwriters have proven as prolific, and at such a phenomenally high consistency of quality, as Dan Bern. Here we have the opportunity to glimpse into his method and madness, as every witticism and whim unfolds, as both the sour and sublime moods hit, and as he ultimately undergoes the process of birthing and molding all those amazing songs. That, at its core, is what World Cup provides.

World Cup is a travelogue, "A Sort of Travel Diary" that follows our intrepid guide, armed with a well-traveled acoustic guitar, a notebook, and strumming partner Slim Nickel, on a short two-man European trek—through London and Spain, Italy, Switzerland, France, and The Netherlands—in support of the previous year's "New American Language" CD. The book is ostensibly about international soccer, World Cup fever having overtaken the continent at the time, as well as the delights and frustrations of touring. But more fascinatingly, it is a journey through the mind and imagination of one of rock & roll's preeminent creative artists.

Through bits of lyrics, offhanded jottings, flash aphorisms, off-the-cuff sketches, and snatches of conversations, intoxicating portraits of the artist and the summer gradually take shape. In the cracks between, we are treated to some indelible flights of fantasy: carefully wrought set pieces during which Pablo Picasso's father becomes a pigeon-sketching artist, or Dan imagines himself as a spirited old Catalan bricklayer, or Mozart stars in a stand-alone time travel story, with a walk-on role for the ghost of Hitler.

Best of all, Dan treats us to five pristine new songs—intimate, acoustic, troubadour tunes, simply recorded and decidedly somber, but in the romantic, mooning, starry-eyed mold of mythic old Europe.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Berning down the house...., February 7, 2007

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Richard Cumming "dick" (the heartland) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: World Cup: A Sort of Travel Diary (book and CD) (Audio CD)

Dan Bern is a genius. I collect everything that he does. I have a number of autographed books and CDs and when I saw this item in the Amazon catalog I just had to have it. A book AND a CD! It's not one of his most monumental efforts but it's still the man from Mount Vernon, Iowa. A visionary man. If you ever get to see him ask him to do his song called SWOOSH. It's not on any album and after you hear it, you'll know why.