Key changes, harmonica vests, saxophone solos, giddy love songs, hometown catharsis, and learning to let happiness stay – Ber opens up about the warm, country-kissed, singer/songwriter world of her radiant debut album, ‘Good, Like It Should Be.’

Stream: ‘Good, Like It Should Be’ – Ber

Have you ever spoken to someone while they are living out their dreams?

There is nothing as inspiring. When someone is doing what they are meant to be doing and has so much gratitude while doing it, isn’t that what life is all about?

With artists, this happens when they are fully themselves. The art that comes from that place is as unique as the person making it. It’s what resonates.

Berit Dybing (aka Ber) is living in this moment with her debut album Good, Like It Should Be. With several singles and EPs under her belt, this album feels like the culmination of years of work, arriving here as a fully realized, timeless, cohesive body of work.

Released in April via Nettwerk Music Group, Good, Like It Should Be is a portrait of life rooted in singer/songwriter and country, with pop flair and a touch of funk woven through. The Minnesota-born, London-based indie pop artist colors it with instinct and care, building something that feels alive, but also something you can return to again and again.

From visceral pop punk odes to hometown life in “Who’s This?” to the cool, funk-laced ease of “Cool, Boy,” to the heartbreaking, lyrically gutting “Hey, Bluebird,” Ber moves through the record making it impossible to not move with her. It is a journey about learning to be kinder to yourself, about letting good things exist without question. Sometimes, when you are happy, you can just be happy.

Atwood Magazine sat down with Ber to talk about making this album.

We dive into writing songs while being happy, giddy, and in love, and how strange it can feel to hold a mirror up to that and recognize yourself in it. We talk about our shared love of key changes. She tells me about a dream day in the studio working with Rob Milton (Holly Humberstone, The 1975, etc.), and how that day led to her dream of a saxophone solo coming to fruition. She shares the magic of recording “Hey, Bluebird” live, no click track, nothing to hold it still, and how that kind of rawness could never be recreated.

Finally, we talk about the closing and title track “Good, Like It Should Be.” I tell her they do not make songs like this anymore, and she tells me about harmonica vests and how even now, the lyrics still catch her off guard emotionally. In many ways, those lyrics hold the album’s heart:

But do I deserve this? Am I even worthy?
Let it be good, good like it should be
I know it’s a choice, I can be sturdy
Lеt it be good, good like it should be

Lovе’s a mirror, if that I’m sure
I’m still scared
but I’m not as scared as I was before

– “Good, Like It Should Be,” Ber

Enjoy our conversation below, and get lost in the warm, wondrous world of Good, Like It Should Be – a radiant debut album and tender love letter to choosing yourself.

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:: stream/purchase Good, Like It Should Be here ::

:: connect with Ber here ::

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A CONVERSATION WITH BER

Ber: Of course, thank you!

Ber: We are in Toronto, actually staying right near the CN Tower. So I’m like, Drake is in the house, it’s really funny. But yeah, we love Toronto. My friend Allie is with me and we’re doing the last leg of this tour run, stripped back and solo, which has been really fun. It’s just the two of us. This is the sixth show I’ve played here.

Ber: We were actually laughing about it at the airport yesterday. We started doing shows in a city that’s not Minneapolis four years ago. And now we’ve done this a lot. It’s really weird to actually be able to clock that and appreciate and recognize that it’s not our first time anymore.

Ber: It’s weird to have a couple routines too. I think specifically with Canada, I mean, Canada was the first stop we ever went on a tour ever. We went to Vancouver on the first show of my first tour ever, and then Toronto was in that same window. But we know where to go in the airport for what we need to do. We know that we’re going to go to Tim Hortons for a coffee. We know where we’re staying. We love to go to the mall that’s downtown. We have restaurants saved. We feel like we kind of are a little bit more in the know than we were at first, at least.

Ber: It’s funny. It’s nice to have a little bit of familiarity this time.

Ber: Yeah. But it’s strange. It’s cool. It’s definitely a treat and I love touring. So this has been really fun. I’ll be sad when these shows kind of expire. They’ve been really fun so far.

Ber: Well, okay. I played Minneapolis on Friday and I’m kind of convinced that nothing will ever top it. It was so fun. So I would be wrong to say anything other than that.

Ber: Yeah. I’m excited for London. That’s going to be really fun. It’s been a while since I’ve played a show there. I have some British friends that are going to come and be in the band and stuff. We’re shaking it up a little bit with that.

Ber: Ooh, was it always song one? It was, once it was written. But for a while there was an iteration of a track list where, and half of those songs didn’t even make the album, but there was a different song one at one point. The second “Good, Real” came into the picture that was going to be it.

I remember being like, “Oh, no, this is the album and it’s going to start with ‘Good, Real’ and it’s going to end with ‘Good Like It Should Be.'” That’s kind of like a full circle moment there lyrically. They couldn’t be more opposite songs really, even though they’re in the same chord progression and they’re both six-eight.

We didn’t even start writing that song for me, which I think is really something interesting. Brad (Hale) and I did that one just together. We were writing to a brief for something. I had just kind of fallen in love, and I had just booked a plane ticket to go see my British man. I was so giddy and happy. Brad was like, “What do you want to write about? We need to do something upbeat and happy, so what’s up?” We just sat there and giggled like little girls writing the lyrics. That song is so fun to me. There are so many bits of my love story hidden in the lyrics, especially in those verses. It’s all very geared at what I was thinking in the moment.

It lived in many iterations. It wasn’t like the Shania thing until it was. Brad’s great at the synth thing. We had a lot of fun playing with different versions of that song. It had three different versions, very piano driven, and very synth driven, and just a guitar song, but we landed on the synth one and it’s really fun.

Ber: Oh, it’s a full key change.

Ber: That’s what I’ve been saying! Genuinely, we need to bring them back. They still exist, but they used to be more blatant and obvious and loud in all sorts of pop music. I hear a lot of cool sneaky key changes in pop music now, in Sabrina Carpenter’s stuff, for example. It does exist and you always go, “Yay.” But this one, I wanted it to be like, “Nope, we’re going there.”

Ber: Yeah, that’s really cool to hear, honestly. I love that song. I still put it on when I need to get in the zone and get a grip. I love it. It’ll fix a bad day.

Ber: Oh my gosh. I wrote this song, I did two of the tracks on the album with Rob Milton, who is so talented. I’m such a fan. He works on all of the Holly Humberstone stuff, he’s worked with The 1975 and so many talented UK-based and American-based artists.

I fell in love with pop music while I was living in England listening to songs that Rob was writing. So it was very fun to have met him now and to have this working relationship.

Rob had just gotten back from holiday, it’s literally that simple. I had a day with him and he’s kind of hard to pin down, I mean, we laugh about that. But I was like, “I really want to be the best version of myself today so that I can give Rob a good version of me and I want to get something from this.” I did not in a million years expect to walk out of that room with the song that we wrote, because it stretched me a lot. He’s really great at being like, “Oh, let’s just try it. Let’s just do it.”

At the time we were both so obsessed (still are) with Clairo. We were listening to Charm a lot. The piano decision was led by the fact that that’s all we were listening to at the time. It molded itself really well into this pad for what the song is. I wrote it about a situationship and a guy that did not care if I existed or not. It’s funny to kind of reflect on. We wanted to just poke fun at myself within it and then also be like, “Wait, why am I poking fun of myself? He’s the one being weird.”

Ber: Yeah. Rob really grabbed onto that part of the story and was like, “That’s it. We just have to write it.” I will give him full credit because I never would’ve written this, but he was like, “What if it’s just like, ‘Don’t act so cool, boy, get your ass up and dance.'” And I was like, “What if?” It just ended up locking itself into place. I love that he was able to dig this piece of me out and make me confident enough to do that. I love that song. It changed the way I looked at writing a lot too, after that.

Also, something I have always said as a joke is like, if I ever put out an album, it has to have a saxophone solo on it. I grew up listening in the kitchen with my mom to Spandau Ballet. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the song “True”?

Ber: Literally, you’ll have heard it in a movie. It’s a song everyone knows but they don’t know that they know it. It’s seven minutes long and I can sing the entire saxophone solo just off memory. It’s brilliant. For “Cool, Boy” Rob was like, “Hey, my friend Trav moved in next door, he’s across the street, he plays sax, should I get him in?” I was like, “Yes, absolutely.” So he just came over and ripped a sax solo.

It made my day. Writing that song was a really fun reminder that writing songs could just be fun.

Ber: I know. I smile really big when I think about it. He’s great.

Ber: Oh my gosh. That’s another one we did in the basement, we did all these songs in a basement. Do you know Martin Luke Brown? He’s an artist. He’s brilliant.

Ber: He’s so good. He was on tour in America, and he messaged me just being like, “Hey, do you know anyone in Minneapolis?” And I go, “I am in Minneapolis.” So he came and stayed with my family while he was on his little four-day off days of tour, which was really fun. We ended up spending a day writing together and that was “Who’s This?” I don’t even know how it happened. It happened really fast.

Brad and Martin were a dream team. Martin’s writing style is so honest and open. He just wants to say whatever it is that needs to be said in the way that is obvious and makes sense, but is also a way you would never think to say anything. I hear a lot of his fun conversational style, especially that second verse. That verse was a joke, it was never meant to be the verse, but we were just throwing things around, laughing about how funny it would be if we made this the verse. And lo and behold..

But yeah, with this one I was a thousand percent very fresh in the new love. I remember being like, “Wait, I do get to write love songs now?” Martin was really great at being like, “Do you recognize yourself in this? How do you feel kind of taking a step back from some of these sadder things you’ve done? Do you feel like yourself right now?” And I remember being like, “Yes, but it’s crazy that I do” I definitely had written in my notes a while ago just being like, “Well, who’s this bitch?” Never in a million years thinking I would take that into a writing room. It was really just me being baffled by how giddy I felt.

I wanted that song to feel like a time capsule for this era of life. I remember feeling like I was supposed to be depressed based on just, it’s January in Minnesota. Every January rolls around and it’s the same thing. My roommate and I go to this one dive bar called Bullshorn. We have this routine. I was supposed to be feeling depressed, but I wasn’t. Anything that would come my way would just bounce off.

Lyrically we really wanted to lean on all of the Minneapolis tropes and exactly what I was experiencing day in, day out, and the perspective of “who is she?” That came from Martin being like, “It’s okay to put a mirror to yourself and not recognize her. That’s a good thing.” I love how accidentally profound that song is, because it’s super silly and it’s meant to take the piss out of me and the place that I was in. But it is fun to turn a mirror to yourself and be like, “Hey, okay. I like her. She’s good.”

Ber: Definitely. Oh my gosh. I think we wrote it in an hour and a half of just goofing around and playing three guitars at the same time, which landed in the final version of the album. Brad played those drums in there, and that’s what you hear. He’s brilliant that way. I just wanted to do something with a little yeehaw.

Ber: There’s a lot of yeehaw in the album.

Ber: For my first three EPs and for the first four years of me writing for Ber stuff, I was always writing about the same guy and the same thing that hurt me. That was such a treat, it healed me a lot. When it came to the album, I was like, “I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want to write anything about that.” I think I’m over it. I think I’m done. I think I’ve got nothing left to say. For once in my life, I want to write about this new wave stuff.

But with “Hey, Bluebird,” I think I was writing to my 20-year-old self that was going through all of that, and just wanting to … I don’t have an older sister, I am an older sister, but if I were able to look at me as if I just needed to give her some big sisterly advice, what does she need to hear that she won’t listen to until she’s 28 and finally herself?

I wrote that song with my friends Austin (Sherman) and Brad on this trip where we did “Good, Like It Should Be,” “Forget Me Not,” “Give It All Away” and a bunch of other songs. I finally let myself be really honest and kind of laugh this situation off. Austin and Brad are safe people for me so I felt like I could do it with them.

It’s my little Snow White moment. I think it’s my favorite song I’ve ever written, to be honest. It genuinely just feels so like it’s mine and no one else’s. I love that it’s not a song about a boy per se, or about these other things I’ve been writing about for the last few years, but it’s about me and it’s for me. It’s really cool seeing the response to it, which has been amazing, because it wasn’t ever really going to be a single. I’m playing these shows and people are singing back every word. And also the “la la la la las” at the end are infectious.

Ber: Yeah. I don’t know. It also feels like I could only have written that song if I was in the exact moment in life where I was.

Ber: Yeah. It’s cool. I’m glad that that’s how it reads too. I think we wanted it to be like, “Oh, you could be talking to anyone who just needs to hear something.” But for me, it was like, “I need to hear this.” Of course, it was such a collective feat. I mean, those boys are two of my favorite collaborators ever and they are so clever and so fun. I felt like they were being my friends and telling me what I needed to hear, so that I could actually hear it and tell myself what I needed to hear. So yeah, it was really fun. I love that song.

My other favorite thing about it is that we did a demo on the day where we recorded, just my vocal and three guitars, nothing else, and we did a one-take, and halfway through the first verse, you can hear a train go by. We were like, “Oh, we won’t be able to use that.” But we tried and tried and tried to recreate, I mean, rerecord the song and recreate the energy that was in the room in that recording, and I just couldn’t do it. It was really hard. So we ended up just using it and gating the train down a little bit, but you can hear it.

Ber: It’s like halfway through, it’s just this little rumble, but it was really loud in the demo. I’ll post it on Instagram someday or something. And then we produced around it, which I think is really cool. It’s not to a click. It’s very organic. All the percussion is human percussion or shakers. So yeah, I don’t know. It feels very real.

Ber: Ooh, I’m glad. Yeah. That’s another one that when it came to choosing what singles were, we were like, “It’s not going to be this.” But I’m so excited for people to hear it. It feels like a nugget. Brad produced this unbelievably well. I wrote that one with Austin and Katelyn Tarver. Do you know her?

Ber: I just adore her. We wrote that the day we met. Lyrically, I was exploring so much of what it took to get to this place I was in. There are a lot of songs on the album that aren’t necessarily about the love that I found and have, but the little hints at it that I experienced leading up to it. This is one of those songs where I just remember being like, “Well, this is going to be what we make of it, and we have to decide what we’re going to make of it, so we can know how it ends, or we can bend and find out.” And “Bend” was never … I don’t even remember how we came up with that, but we were like, “Yeah, that’s kind of cool.”

After that, the whole song sits in this tension space that also exists in what we were writing about, this will-they-won’t-they moment. That was really fun and completely accidental. Once I started really looking at that and thinking about it, the outro came to mind. I remember being like, “I just have this idea and you’re going to have to trust me.” Brad just went with it. Austin had done this great demo and it ended on a cool fade out. But then after listening to it and holding onto it for about a year, when it came to producing it for the album, Brad was like, “Okay, what are we doing?” I wanted it to be something cool and weird and pull some more production and pop and all elements into the album, in the way that the rest of the album is super country and kind of indie inspired. This is still a very indie, bandy song, but that outro is a little bit of a standout. I wanted to have something that would also be really cool to translate for live.

Ber: So I’m really excited to be able to play that with a full band someday, which we did in Minneapolis and that was really fun. But yeah, a thousand percent, there’s no answer hidden within it. It’s an extension of the lyric, in that things could go one way or another and that’s up in the air, and that’s fun, and that’s for you to decide. So, I don’t know if that makes any sense, but…

Ber: Well, and to have it drop to the piano too was something that Brad had thought of and he just did it without me prompting him. And it made me cry. I was like, yeah, there it is. He always surprises me like that and always knows where to take something. His taste level is so brilliant. I am in awe of what he does. So it was a treat to be able to do that one with him as well.

I don’t know. I love that song. It’s a sneaky fave of mine. It feels like a proper album track. And it’s been really fun hearing that people are really liking it and digging it as much.

Ber: That was all Austin on the record, but I’ve learned it since.

Ber: I’ve been doing it the last two shows and it’s been going well. I was so nervous the first time. Oh my God. It’s really scary for no reason, because the other thing is that it’s kind of hard to make it sound really bad, because it’s in the key that it’s in, so you could make any noise and it would kind of work.

Ber: Yeah. You don’t know until you know. There was this amazing man in my hometown, I cannot remember his name to save my life. I was like 14 the last time I saw him probably, but he would come to the open mic nights at our pub, and he would have a vest. You know those vests that people open up to sell things? He would have harmonicas in them. Incredible. And so I just have this really vivid memory of him showing up and playing the harmonica in whatever key you’re in.

Ber: You’re so right. I should honor it that way. I totally should do that. Catch me. You’ll see.

But yeah, that song was just it. There’s that line in it, I might even cry thinking about it, but there’s that line in the second chorus before the harmonica comes in, that’s like, “I know it’s a choice. I can be sturdy.”

Yeah. I don’t know. I think that song, we wrote it in late November. I definitely was so in love and feeling that, but it was also like, well, if I’m going to do this, Duncan is my boyfriend, he lives in England, I was like, “Do I have to move to England?”

Ber: Twist my arm. But is my life about to change? Do I have to choose this? I have to choose this if I want it. And not only do I have to choose the lifestyle that might change for me, but I also have to choose myself in it, and I have to choose the safety of it.

It was such an epiphany moment that I was like, I have to choose to be this in love and I can feel it and I can accept that I feel it, but I also have to choose it. And I don’t know, I didn’t know that until that moment when we were writing it.

It honestly wrote itself, I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t remember writing it because I was blacked out. Austin and Brad were there. We all just entered this flow state and had this beautiful conversation and wrote this song. It’s the last one we did on that trip. And I was like, “Hey guys, I think I’m done.”

Ber: It made such a difference and it contextualized the whole album as well. All of a sudden I was like, “Okay, actually, this is a full album and start to finish, this is what it’s about. I know what it is I’m chasing and what it is I’m trying to say.” That song is what I’m trying to say, essentially. So it was a no-brainer to put it at the end.

I’m really glad you like it. It feels really special to me. And I’m just excited I get to sing it for the rest of my life.

Ber: Yeah. That’s really sweet. It’s so wild that all these songs are out now. I can’t get over it.

Ber: Well, it’s been done on my laptop for at least eight months. I wrote all of them over the course of about a year, bar “Smooth Ride.” I wrote that three years ago. It’s really fun having it out and the response has been amazing.

Ber: Thank you. Yeah. It feels good. Terrified for the next one because I know it’s going to rip me open again.

Ber: I chose this.

Ber: Oh, I can’t play the harmonica solo by myself tonight, I’m sad because I don’t have one of those Bob Dylan neck holder things. I need to get one of those if I’m going to be doing acoustic gigs. So I’m just going to have to mumble it or see if someone in the audience tonight …

Ber: Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me. And thanks for listening to the album and wanting to chat about it. It’s really cool.

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:: stream/purchase Good, Like It Should Be here ::

:: connect with Ber here ::

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 © Daniela Shella

Good, Like It Should Be

an album by Ber