David Baerwald

David Baerwald, the son of a political victim of McCarthyism and a former juvenile delinquent, emerged in the tradition of America’s great activist singer-songwriters.

A true poète maudit, Baerwald—who had already released Boomtown (A&M, 1986) in a duo with David Ricketts as David + David in the mid-1980s (shortly after leaving the punk band The Spastics)—sings the moral apocalypse of our century.
After the spectral overture of Welcome To The Boomtown, set among the moral ruins of drug addicts, the duo intones the anthem of the defeated in Swallowed By The Cracks, defining their style as a blend of Springsteen’s hoarse, passionate scream and David Bowie’s melancholic, decadent lament. The journey begins through a “wasteland” shrouded in death, an infernal circle inhabited by decaying beings groping through the darkness among flames of ice. Baerwald’s Heroes are “exhumed bodies,” “dead dreamers,” “adolescent dragon hunters.” Their existence is unbearable to the point that they await the apocalypse with eager anticipation (River's Gonna Rise). The atmosphere of tragedy reaches delirious heights in All Alone In The Big City, enveloped in a shroud of funeral electronics, punctuated by menacing piano chords and made eerie by a jazz trumpet. The band and electronics accompany the two singer-songwriters in their descent into hell, making extensive use of funky riffs (A Rock For The Forgotten) and reggae (Being Alone Together). With a slightly more modern and danceable arrangement, Ain't So Easy touches even the most sentimental chords.
The tableau is as powerful as it is harrowing. The concept never falters, relentlessly probing the underbelly of Reagan’s America and extracting ever more emaciated faces and increasingly humiliated lives from the ruins. In many ways, this is the Tommy of the post-punk generation.

Bedtime Stories (A&M, 1990) is anything but what its title suggests. It is his “courteous” songbook: the songs are dedicated to angelic women. Progress is particularly musical: Baerwald paints All For You with a slightly more country touch, and Dance with a much more pronounced rhythm, halfway between boogie and the Clash. Immersed in one of his dreamlike atmospheres, Sirens In The City summarizes his worldview. Less disconsolate but no less pessimistic, the album draws from the more mundane aspects of Van Morrison, especially Colette, with the ambition of a jazz serenade (open-voiced crooning, counterpoint of trumpets and violins) and The Best Inside You, steeped in melodramatic soul.

Baerwald gained fame in 1992 with Triage (A&M), a cycle of protest songs unlike anything heard since Dylan’s early albums, with scathing invectives like Got No Shotgun HydraHead Octopus Blues, expressing the frustrations of an individual whose fate is controlled by hidden powers. His stories (sometimes in monologue form, in the best tradition of English Romantic poets) are chaotic accumulations of power’s aberrations—from wars to corruption—lampooning the CIA, the White House, marines, and anti-drug agents. In Waiter, the protagonist’s dissatisfaction erupts into a delirium of hallucinations (musically rendered with effects bordering on industrial music and hip hop), while Postman, sung as a lullaby (with minimal accompaniment), contrasts the life of an ordinary man with the vortex of global violence (expressed through a mix of voices and world sounds). The long tirade of A Secret Silken World returns to his favorite themes of depravity and moral decay, with nightmare-like (slightly jazz-infused) arrangements conveying a sense of loneliness and perdition akin to the best film noir. Much more subdued and mature than previous albums, Triage primarily sings of “the pain and shame of surrender” (China Lake), often exorcised through domestic life vignettes like Born For Love (a six-minute tender serenade), yet always shadowed by the awareness and sadness of existential surrender to the world’s evil. Affection, in short, is not the supreme expression of humanity, but a somewhat petty refuge from powers before which one is powerless.
Although his musical resources are limited, Baerwald sings with the ferocity of a divine punisher, arranges with samples of all sorts of “truth-sounds,” borrows the street-shouter’s emphasis from rap and garage rock, and compensates for his shortcomings with a narrative style that is coldly cynical, desperately fatalistic, yet furiously melancholic, rivaling Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. Everyone is amoral; there is no difference between state officials and the wretched outcasts of the slums. The final effect is that of a chilling thriller, in which the killer always gets away, or of a hallucination that never ends. His music overflows with his personal scars: “There's hope for the hopeless if there's hope for me.”

Baerwald also composed Come What May for the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann's film "Moulin Rouge" (2001).

Compared with Baerwald's dense, tense and tragic standards, Here Comes The New Folk Underground (Lost Highway, 2002) is almost a relaxed walk in the park. Not only does he streamline the arrangements, but his vision of life seems to be more optimistic, or at least less paranoid. Touches of Van Morrison's metaphysical rhythm and blues (Love #29, Nothing's Gonna Bring Me Down) and of Bob Dylan's latter-period country-gospel (Why, The Crash) enhance parables that are meditations on the human condition (all the way to If A Boy Whore in a Man's Jail, his ultimate testament).

After a long hiatus, he recorded sporadically EPs such as Hellbound Train 5 song (2016), Hard Times 8 song (2017), Reckless Boy with the Regulators 8 song (2018), Hellbound Train 5 song (2021).