Today, The Natvral (Kip Berman, former frontperson of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) exclusively shares the video for ‘A Glass of Laughter’‘ the second single from his new solo album, Summer of No Light, due 1st September on Dirty Bingo Records.
A strum of swelling glory ‘A Glass of Laughter‘ finds Berman with a voice of experience frayed at the edges like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, it journies across this addictive almost honky-tonk tune, vividly capturing the allure and limits of a lover who, “could not buy you winter gloves, but always took your hand.”
Berman says of the song:
“In love, there are times after the good times— when sweet nothings give way to sour somethings, and what once passed for charming is viewed in a less forgiving light. Noble poverty may reveal itself as mere privation. The impulsive gestures of youth are now recast as irresponsibility.“
“But let’s raise a glass, shall we – not to drown these sorrows, but to throw ‘em a lifeline. Heraclitus might’ve been right about the river. But it need not be a meditation on corruption or irretrievable loss. Time changes us, and not always for the worse. What was once can’t be again, or at least not exactly. But maybe it can be something else worth our time, a new good time waiting for us on the other side. Here’s to finding out.“
On his second album as The Natvral, he was eyeing the past while dealing with an inescapable present. In 2020, in the early stages of lockdown, Berman began writing songs that reflected on a world that had seemingly ended – while contending with the needs of his young family seeking solace in the familiar. “After putting my children to bed, I spent many a late night in the basement with my guitar and let my mind wander to the places where I could no longer go,” he says. “Initially, a lot of the songs were about getting as far away from the reality of my moment as possible.”
He drew parallels with another tumultuous summer. “The record’s title, Summer of No Light, is taken from the climate crisis of 1816,” he says. Often referred to as The Year Without a Summer, that year a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia darkened much of the world’s sky. The resulting ash brought dramatic global cooling and widespread famine, hitting Western Europe especially hard.
But it was during the present climate crisis – this one very much of humanity’s design – that he began to think about the people who were holed up during those times while creating their own form of escapist art. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written that same summer,” he says. “Like me, she was among the relatively fortunate who could take shelter,” famously riding out the foul weather in Switzerland on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Claire Clairmont (Mary’s half-sister and Byron’s paramour) embarking on a ghost story contest (she won), as well as many less cerebral ways to pass the time. “I found the idea of these people sustaining themselves through art while fucking and getting fucked up, both familiar and foreign.
Album preorder: https://lnk.to/G7ZAul
