Eddie berman

“When I first heard the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan I had this strange compulsion to learn how to play the guitar,” Eddie Berman says, also noting Dave Van Ronk, Mississippi John Hurt, and Leonard Cohen as early influences. “I never really had any interest in playing music before then, but as soon as I started fingerpicking, I never stopped and it all snowballed from there.” His fourth album Broken English (released in January) is a modern folk commentary on our tenuous American life–written before the pandemic. Though performed on guitar, the songs were written on the banjo. “With the fingerpicking, flat-picking style I play there’s sort of the bones of the melody baked into whatever I’m playing. When I come up with a progression I like, I turn on a recorder and just start singi...