5 Good Minutes with Musician David Berkeley

It’s difficult to determine what was more entertaining about singer/songwriter David Berkeley’s act: the songs themselves, or the playful, witty banter Berkeley carried on with the other two members of his band and the audience.

Berkeley, a 35-year-old Ivy League-educated (Harvard University ‘99) musician, performed with bandmates Jordan Katz (trumpet, banjo) and Bill Titus (guitar) at Holcomb Farm on Friday as part of the Concert in the Loft series.

The 15-song set was filled primarily with folky/Americana songs from the four albums that Berkeley penned, sprinkled in with covers, including a Beatles tune and “Shenandoah.”

He also read from his book, “140 Goats and a Guitar,” which serves as a compendium to his latest album, “Some Kind of Cure.”

While the prepared material was excellent, it was Berkeley’s rapport with the members of the audience and on-stage, private riffs with Katz that made the experience unique.

At one point during the first set, Berkeley invited everyone in attendance to sing along with him on “Shenandoah,” a practice that he said he normally shunned because “invariably, only one person joins in, and it’s usually a man, and it usually doesn’t turn out well.”

Enough people participated in “Shenandoah” for his liking, prompting Berkeley to quip, “After that last song, I should involve you in all of the decisions.”

Neither the music, nor the interludes, detracted from the other. The end result was that people were left wanting more of both.

Prior to the show, Berkeley shared with The Granbys Patch missives on his tour, his latest album and his affinity for playing in non-traditional forums.

So, you’re just your average, everyday Harvard-educated folk singer. How is it that you found your way to the Loft at Holcomb Farm in Granby tonight?

We were contacted maybe a year ago about doing a show at some point and I love the sound of playing in a barn. We’ve been playing now for a long time and if we can do shows that aren’t in normal clubs, we’ll do everything we can to do that.

You’ll play shows in people’s living rooms. ... Really for you it is about the music, isn’t it?

It is. And to be honest with you, I think the less-traditional the space, the more effective the music is because people are less guarded and they don’t know what to expect. Upon walking up there, you already feel like something special is going to happen. If you go into a club, before when smoking was still allowed you’re getting drinks, it’s noisy, whatever, and you kind of know what the drill is. But if you go into someone’s house, you don’t know. You go into a barn, you go into a church, wherever it is, a museum, you get this feeling that anything is possible. That can be really special. For us, too. We play in a normal club tomorrow in New York, we know what that show is going to be like. But I have no idea what tonight is going to be like and I’m really looking forward to it.

You’re touring [in support of] a new album. How was that pieced together?

The record is called “Some Kind of Cure,” and some of the house concerts I did, I started doing because I was raising money to fund the record. We raised $34,000 to make the record and to distribute it and that came through a lot of people paying us to come to weird places and do shows. … I wrote a fair amount of the music while living on the island of Corsica with my wife and our then-1-year-old son Jackson. We lived there for a year and about half to three quarters of the songs were written there and the rest we sort of finished there. I recorded it all back in America, but a lot of the inspiration came from there as I was trying to adjust to the culture shock and alienation there and take in the amazing beauty.

It’s a multimedia effort, too, isn’t it? You also have a book ["140 Goats and a Guitar"] that’s sort of a compendium to the album.

That’s right. Partly because of Corsica, a lot of these songs came out of these rich experiences for me and partly because I enjoy telling stories on stage to set up songs, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to actually write down some of these stories and try to give people the experience of reading the story and then listen to the song that came out of that story. It comes with a digital download code, and the hope is that people will read a piece and then listen to the song that was inspired by that situation.

Are you satisfied with the result?

I love the record. I’m trying to remember whether every one I finished I thought was my best one. That may be the case. You always like the newer stuff. But this is my fourth studio record. It’s the first one that I believe adequately captures my voice. It’s a different thing. It’s like being photogenic. It’s different than what you look like in real life. Singing for me is very much about the interaction of space in the room and with people that are there listening. The studio is the opposite of that. You take away the room, you take away the people and it’s just you and a booth and it’s very hard for me to capture the emotion that I want in the studio setting. This record, I think I got it.