Worcester alt-folk project led by Dan Lambert releases expansive
and panoramic debut album on Friday, April 24
Music is often built upon a notion of movement. A listener takes a journey with a song, whether mental or physical, and an act of motion usually transpires, from the simplest head bob to a full-body dance routine. A beat or a riff or a melody can shift our weight with the greatest of ease, inspiring us to get up and move, delivering us to somewhere we weren’t just moments before.
The music of berm almost has an inverse effect. The calm, hypnotic sound from the Worcester alt-folk collective emits a droning sonic wanderlust, where the motion builds around the listener instead of within, opening an expansive aural portal where storylines play out in front of us with a cinematic and contemplative quality.
The listener can get lost in this music without moving at all, exploring a deeper sense of feeling and emotion, connecting the past with the present, and allowing the psychological songwriting to bloom as panoramic scenes play out like lullaby vignettes in haunting color and detail.
berm invite us into this world through debut album highway through the trees, a transportive and cerebral record set for release on Friday, April 24. The following night, the band celebrates live on stage at Hotel Vernon in their home city of Worcester alongside collaborator Mary Elizabeth Remington and Jake McKelvie.
Rich in scope and dense in musical imagery, the album swirls across loose themes of memory, mortality, and gratitude, and is highlighted by the beguiling focus track “cigarette,” a slow-burn indie folk ballad that floats and aches with tender precision. Vulnerability is at the core of the berm sound.
“I’m feeling relieved and excited to get these songs out in the world, and a strange mix of pride and discomfort having literally anyone give attention to something I’ve made,” says berm songwriter, vocalist, and rhythm guitarist Dan Lambert. “My feelings of excitement and pride finally getting to this point are strange bedfellows with my personality – I’m quite uncomfortable with attention and have always felt most myself on the sidelines. It’s been a process for me to learn how to cope with feelings of discomfort in an activity that requires strangers to pay attention to you.”
highway through the trees, its all-lower-case styling in one sense suggestive of its gentle nature, in another belying the ambitious splendor contained within each composition, is the follow-up to a pair of EPs released last spring in garden sessions and another ghost. It finds Lambert surveying not only the world around him, but the moments, both innocuous and epic, that brought him to the present day.
In berm, Lambert is rounded out by core members Z Harris (vocals, guitar, banjo, percussion) and life partner Gretchen Neff Lambert (piano, keyboard). Key collaborators Andy Thomas (cello) and DS Clark (percussion), as well as album contributions from Bradford Krieger (bass, pedal steel on “song for nate”) and Mary Elizabeth Remington (vocals on “winter blue,” echoing the work in her 2023 album with Adrienne Lenker and other members of Big Thief), also contribute to Lambert’s unique storytelling vision.
“I rely on songwriting for my mental health,” he admits. “When I’m feeling my best I am generating songs almost continuously, completing the demo phase of a new song every few weeks. Only a few of those are good enough to move forward from that stage, but the sheer quantity of output means that we had enough for an album for a long time before we stepped into the studio. It was just a matter of deciding what to include and in what order.”
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Krieger at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, Rhode Island, highway through the trees unfolds with a quiet but confident grandeur, where minimalism and maximalism are seemingly intertwined through melodic storytelling. It’s soundtracked by three consistent pieces of berm’s sound that form the foundation: Lambert’s nylon string guitar; Neff Lambert’s Casio MT100 keyboard; and Lambert and Harris’ vocal harmonies.
Neff Lambert’s keys, Harris’ guitar and banjo, and Thomas’ cello cradle Lambert’s deep and affecting baritone voice, propping it up to the point where the listener feels as if he is singing solely for them. It’s deeply personal music, but one that’s relatable to the complexities of surviving in the modern day.
Perhaps the berm origin story, in lockstep with Lambert’s songwriting, can be traced back to his time studying sculpture at MassArt in the early 2010s. A professor there espoused the notion that impactful art stems from leading with the hands and not the mind—avoiding a cogent concept at the start, and instead allowing concepts to develop naturally through play and experimentation.
“This approach made a lot of sense to me and is something I keep in mind whenever I’m making music,” he notes. “We experiment with words, chords, sounds and treatments, and avoid locking into any single idea too early. As a band we experiment and adapt what I’ve started – removing, rethinking, and adding to my initial ideas, and eventually the song congeals into a form that we begin playing live and/or on record.”
Lambert’s songwriting process is the merger of two parallel practices he maintains on a nearly daily basis. He collects strings of words and lyric ideas in a small notebook, always tucked into a back pocket, while fiddling with chord progressions each night before bedtime. Eventually, the works blend into songs, and what we hear on highway through the trees. The intuitive habit helps inform the storylines and messaging throughout the record, which flow with a connective lyrical tissue of the aforementioned memory, mortality and gratitude.
Focus track “cigarette,” with its magnetic allure and lullaby-esque disposition, is about the fallibility of memory when it overlaps with absence, and the possibility of true insight even within those limitations. It was inspired by a friend of Lambert’s who moved away, and as he reminisced in sadness about the relocation, he wondered if he romanticised the relationship, aligning it with his experiences before giving up smoking.
“In those days I would wake with a cigarette on my mind after not smoking for seven or eight hours,” he says. “I would fixate on this idea that the smoke would feel amazing, as if that’s how it always was. When I’d actually light the first one of the day, though, I’d feel nauseous and lightheaded – the memory was of something that didn’t really exist. I wondered if my thoughts around my friend were the same. Was I reframing him as a great friend just because he’s not around anymore?”
Lambert adds: “I turned it over in my head and concluded that no, my memory was right. Memory can be treacherous, fooling you into longing for a falsehood, but in this case I missed my friend not because of any warped perspective, but because he is truly a great dude.”
Other tracks in the memory lane include striking opener “leave this place,” a daydream floater with a repetitive guitar chord that reflects back on each home where he lived growing up (“My childhood memories are important to me and shape who I am today, but I don’t belong in those times and those places. I look back at them with a detached curiosity and no desire to return.”).
And the title track, expanding as an examination of vivid childhood memories that sometimes arrive uninvited to his mind (“Why does my mind suddenly present me with the memory of catching a fish in Alabama when I was four or five? Out of every moment in my life why can I recall that with so much clarity? With this much distance in time, how much of that mental image even dates back to that day, and how much am I inventing now?”).
Mortality is explored in the enchanting “epilogue”, taking us to the last days of his grandmother’s life where she embraced an end that was stubborn to materialize (“I imagine her talking to death, questioning what it’s waiting for. This song is about how death works by its own calendar, often with tragic results – she lingered for years past the point where she had any chance at dignity or happiness.”).
The track“last time” covers similar territory but shifts the focus to himself, inspired by sleep paralysis he experienced in high school that uncovered a startling indifference towards dying (“Thinking about how little warning people often have when their time has come, and how the final moments experiencing things come and go without ceremony.”)
Gratitude for small acts of respect and kindness play out in tracks like “Heron,” an examination of how different people in Lambert’s life approach religion, and how they view him for it (in both good and bad), and “song for nate,” which tells a story about a high school incident where an older friend showed patience after Lambert burnt a hole in his car seat with a lit cigarette (“I still feel a deep sense of gratitude for the way he reacted.”)
“From a songwriting perspective, my goal is always to find a sweet spot between specificity and ambiguity,” Lambert shares. “I want my writing to have enough specific ideas for a listener to grasp onto and consider relative to their own experiences, but enough ambiguity that there isn’t only a single meaning or message associated with those ideas.”
It’s what helps create the world that exists all around these compositions, flickering through sound and feeling in a way that pulls us along without needing to move at all. highway through the trees is an emotive journey, but one that has the ability to reflect not only what we want to see, but something else unexpected far off in the distance. It’s an album that unfurls like a movie.
After the album’s release, and the live show that quickly follows, the band is set to perform all over New England, from Nobleboro, Maine to Providence, Rhode Island to Dover, New Hampshire, with a couple of backyard, house, and barn shows in Western Massachusetts along the way.
Music videos for “cigarette” and “winter blue” will arrive later in the year, and the seeds of highway through the trees’ follow-up are already planted.
But first, berm is presenting this remarkable debut album for public consumption, allowing a world to spin around us as we sit quietly and listen. Absorption is easy when it’s delivered like this.
“The hardest part of making this highway through the trees was balancing how much we each care about this album against the fact that learning and experimenting is a central part of how we make music,” Lambert concludes. “We very much wanted to get this thing ‘right’ while also staying open to serendipity and willing to explore new ideas. It’s tough to be serious and playful at the same time.”
And in true berm fashion, where there is a push, there is a pull.
“The easiest part, however, was collaborating, especially among the core members of berm,” he concludes. “We were on the same page about the sound we were going for, and have developed a constructive and supportive working relationship. Others joined our effort with similar energy – I really couldn’t ask for a better creative collaboration.”
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berm is:
Dan Lambert: Songwriting, vocals, guitar
Z Harris: Vocals, guitar, banjo, percussion
Gretchen Neff Lambert: Piano, keyboard
‘highway through the trees’ production credits:
Dan Lambert: Songwriting, vocals, guitar
Z Harris: Vocals, guitar, banjo, percussion
Gretchen Neff Lambert: Piano, keyboard
Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Bradford Krieger at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, RI.
Andy Thomas: Cello
DS Clark: Percussion
Bradford Krieger: Bass, pedal steel on “song for nate”
Mary Elizabeth Remington: Vocals on “winter blue”
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‘highway through the trees’ release party:
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Meet berm and its collaborators:
Dan Lambert leads the band and is responsible for the songwriting, lead vocals, and rhythm guitar throughout the album. He is quoted below:
Gretchen Neff Lambert is a core member on record and on stage and plays keyboard and piano. Lambert and Neff met at MassArt, got married in 2012, and started playing music together in 2023. “I had booked a show that I planned to play with Andy (coming up in a minute), but he injured his ribs in a bike accident and had to drop out. Gretchen stepped in on keyboard on a whim and has made huge contributions in that role ever since.”
Z Harris is a core member on record and on stage and plays guitar, banjo and sings backup vocals. “I met Z at a songwriters event at the Starlite in Southbridge, MA, and they joined the band in 2023. Z has had an enormous impact on shaping the berm sound. Z also leads their own music act called Roath.”
Andy Thomas plays cello on the album. “I met Andy in high school and still remember him helping me to figure out how to play stairway to heaven on a guitar in the music room after school. We’ve worked together on numerous berm recordings.”
DS Clark was a member of berm in the leadup to recording the album and plays drums on most tracks. “We parted ways a few months after recording wrapped but remain friends.”
Mary Elizabeth Remington is a friend that the Lamberts met at MassArt. “She has her own solo project (released a wonderful solo album in 2023 with Adrienne Lenker and other members of Big Thief), and joined us as a vocalist on ‘winter blue.’ We’re looking forward to playing with Mary at our release show in April.”
Bradford Krieger engineered, mixed and mastered the album, and also contributed bass (nearly all tracks) and pedal steel (“song for nate”). “He was a wonderful collaborator and we’re so glad we got to finally work together.”
