“It’s a weird time to be away,” Berit Dybing tells us by phone. The singer-songwriter, better and more simply known as Ber, is currently hunkered down in the U.K., collaborating with a number of other songwriters on what will become her first full-length album after multiple EPs and a smattering of loose singles. She’s already missed Minnesota’s first snowfall; tomorrow we’ll pick a new president. “I think I needed the time away before we settle into winter,” she says. “I’m not feeling emotionally or physically prepared for this dark.”
Besides, she has work to do—though as work goes, her songwriting process sounds like a real pleasure.
“It usually, like, starts off with, like, gossip, yapping,” Dybing says of these collaborations. “A lot of the songs have been coming from conversations that I've been having with people. It's good to level with someone first, and then sit down and play like a couple chords in a round and just see what feels right. Then you get to poetically sum up this thing that you can relate to someone about.”
By now, Ber’s lore is familiar to many local music fans. She grew up in Walker, Minnesota, kicked around in Norway for a bit, then went to school in Leeds. She moved into an aunt and uncle's south Minneapolis basement in late 2020 and, according to her heavily cited Wikipedia page, "with no friends in the area, she began using Tinder and Hinge"—which is a truly rude thing to put on someone's Wikipedia page! But her songs began to have some success on social media, and by 2023 once Minnesota noticed her music, it fully accepted her as its own. The final seal of local approval? In January, she’ll headline the First Avenue Mainroom.
The new album won't be finished by then. After Ber finishes overseas, she's still got a few writing sessions planned stateside. Then she'll begin recording, with longtime friend and collaborator Brad Hale from the band Now, Now serving as executive producer. Expect it to have a lot in common with 2023's Room for You EP, which was a more mature set of songs from the singer who first caught our attention with bratty blasts like “Your Internet Sucks” and “Slutphase.”
"I've really landed in a space, musically, that I feel really happy with, and that feels true to true to me. we're kind of playing," Ber says. "We're going to build this little world around it, and I think it's gonna be really special."
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