Dean Friedman Sings an American Lullaby
The singer-songwriter broke onto the scene in 1977 with the hit "Ariel" and is still going strong with his latest album serving as an audio time capsule of the last six years.
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. I appreciate your time, and because of this, I try to present a good mixture of stories about artists who are brand new, well-known, and not-as-well-known-as-they-should-be.
Singer-songwriter Dean Friedman fits into that latter category. Despite having had a Top 30 hit in 1977, Friedman never ascended to the heights to some of his contemporaries and has been largely pigeonholed as a “one-hit wonder,” which is a term I don’t like, because I don’t think I’ve ever purchased an album on which I only liked one song. If an artist writes something as good as Friedman’s hit “Ariel,” his catalog is worthy of a deeper exploration and indeed his 1977 self-titled debut album produced several songs of sufficient quality that they could have been hits if they’d had appropriate record label / management backing.
Dean is still writing and recording interesting music four and a half decades after his biggest U.S. hit. His latest release is 2021’s American Lullaby, a musical time capsule of life in this country over the last six years. If you don’t like politics in your protest music, you may want to skip the new one, but Friedman’s back catalog is full of music that you can enjoy regardless of any party affiliations.
I spoke to Dean via Zoom to discuss the albums that bookend his career (so far), 1977’s Dean Friedman and 2021’s American Lullaby. Here’s that story.
Yesterday — Dean Friedman
Don’t call Dean Friedman a “one-hit wonder.” It’s both disrespectful and untrue. While it is true that his primary U.S. hit, “Ariel,” reached no. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977, he’s had other songs chart well in Australia, the UK, and New Zealand. Further, it’s mainly a lack of deserved backing and promotion that other songs from his first few albums didn’t follow the domestic success of “Ariel.”
As someone with grandparents who lived in Bergen County, New Jersey, while I was growing up, it’s possible that I was predisposed to become a fan of “Ariel” upon its 1977 release. The song’s narrator is a musician who met the titular love interest at the Paramus Park Mall. It’s a sweet song about young love that blends pop, a funk groove that echoes KC & the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes” (only using piano instead of a horn section), some doo-wop, and a hint of folk rock.
“Ariel” isn’t the only great song on Friedman’s self-titled album, but it is the most immediately accessible. The lyrics are humorous, relatable, earnest, and full of wonderfully specific details. The groove is infectious and the melody is an instant earworm.
But…was there a real Ariel?
“Truthfully it was a composite of all these teenage girls I had a crush on in the suburbs in Paramus,” Friedman said. “I sort of combined them into one idealized Ariel. It’s true of most of my songs that they’re based on my true-life experiences of the world around me and then I make ample use of my poetic license, which is a nice way to say that I get to lie and make things up.”
Many of the actions that take place in the lyrics to “Ariel” were things experienced by Friedman or members of his family. He used those to add color and detail, building a world that invites listeners into the song. The high, soaring chorus harmony vocals were a product of experimenting with both his voice — which, being young, he was exploring the top end of his range — and a four-track TEAC tape machine. He used that machine to stack his vocals, creating a Four Seasons-esque chorus that worked beautifully in 1977 and still holds up today.
That hit song was the subject of a controversy imagined by his record label, but which never fully materialized. “Ariel” was a story about falling for a pot-smoking vegetarian, hippie girl, but Friedman’s label was concerned that identifying her as Jewish would cause the song to be banned in parts of the country.
“They were convinced that stations in the South would refuse to play the single if it made reference to how I had characterized the girl, Ariel, as a Jewish girl,” Friedman said. “And that was just another descriptive element in addition to her being vegetarian, and wearing a peasant blouse, and smoking pot. All those things were a part of who she was. But the record label was afraid of how people would react to it.”
Not having any leverage with his record company, as a new artist just recording his first album, Friedman recorded an alternate version for the single, replacing the line “she was a Jewish girl” with “her name was Ariel.” But in the end, the southern radio stations actually refused to play the edited single edition and generally stuck to the original album version that identified Ariel as Jewish.
While some artists feel handcuffed by their most successful songs, Friedman feels just the opposite about “Ariel.”
“I love it, and I’m real proud of it, and I’m glad people have embraced it and continue to do so,” he said. “I had sort of mainstream music business success for such a short, infinitesimally brief period of time that I’m still surprised when people know that material.”
As much as I love “Ariel,” the Dean Friedman album has much more to offer than just the artist’s biggest domestic hit song. The beautiful, folky opener, “Company,” should appeal to fans of Harry Chapin, Jim Croce, and Bread, as it sounds simultaneously both like and unlike all of those artists. “Solitaire” sounds like equal parts Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell — two of Friedman’s biggest influences — to my ears.
Among my favorites on Dean Friedman are two of the more somber-sounding numbers on the album — “Song for My Mother” and “The Letter.”
The sober “Song for My Mother” is a darkly beautiful song with just Friedman’s voice and acoustic guitar. Lyrically, it’s about becoming aware (and taking ownership) of one’s own fallibility and identifying the humanity and flaws in one’s parents.
“At some point, as you approach some kind of maturity, everyone needs to stop blaming their parents for everything that they feel is wrong about their life,” Friedman said. “And it’s that sense of sort of acknowledging that yeah, your parents might have been messed up, but you’ve got to forgive them at some point. Like a lot of folks, my parents had some issues that made for a colorful childhood. The song tries to grapple with those issues and tries to put it in some perspective.”
One of the better choruses on the record is the sweeping refrain in “The Letter,” a song that serves, as the title suggests, as a missive to a loved one.
“‘The Letter’ is a song that I wrote for my baby sister when she spent a year on a kibbutz in Israel,” Friedman said. “I hadn’t written her an actual letter in a long time, so I figured I’d write a song, forgetting of course that the postage on sending a quarter-inch, reel-to-reel tape to Israel was going to be a lot more than an airmail letter. But it was specific and autobiographical, referencing things that we’d all done as kids — going to Tice’s Farms and picking out penny candy in the country store, watching the doughnut machine, and eating doughnuts.”
Friedman’s appeal for me throughout the record is the realism he brought to his songs by introducing details to his lyrics that fleshed out his imagery and characters.
“A part of my personal style that I can’t deny is that I do tend to populate my songs with a lot of detail,” Friedman said. “I think of what I do as writing short stories and setting them to music. And for me, all that detail helps to create a scene. The intent is to invite the listener, to invite the audience, into the song and to make them almost a participant in the song. So, if someone’s listening to one of my songs and can picture that scene and that vivid imagery, almost as if they’re stepping into a movie, for me that’s half my job, because it makes the listener a co-conspirator, because they fill in the gaps with all their own life experience and memories and imagination, and they become part of the song.”
The musicianship throughout the album does fantastic justice to Friedman’s songs. Legendary bass and stick man Tony Levin and veteran studio drummer Rick Marotta are among the players that bring the album to life.
The album is well worth exploring for anyone who likes good music presented in a variety of styles. It’s a record that should be in a lot more collections.
Tracklist:
Company
Ariel
Solitaire
Woman of Mine
Song for My Mother
The Letter
I May Be Young
Humor Me
Funny Papers
Love Is Not Enough
Today — American Lullaby
In 2021, Friedman released an album that was intended to capture what the last six years of American life have been like — a period that began with the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president. While any political messages in music might send some people running and screaming, and certainly those who align with the former president may feel differently than Friedman, he researches his topics thoroughly and presents his unvarnished and sincere view of the world.
“American Lullaby was initially inspired by waking up over six years ago, one morning, to discover, along with my fellow countrymen and women, to our shock and amazement, that a bankrupt real estate developer from New York and known money launderer for the Russian mafia had become president of the United States,” Friedman said. “And there is no overstating how mindblowing that event was, and continues to be, and how world-altering it was, and all the impending doom that it foreshadowed in the minds of particularly New Yorkers, who knew him better than the rest of the country.”
The songs on the album tackle a variety of issues, including climate change, polarized politics, the pandemic, the 2016 and 2020 elections, and more. Friedman goes about it not in a preachy way, but by adding humor and light to some dark, heavy subject matter, striking a balance through the 12 songs on the album.
If it helps assuage any fears readers may have that they’ll be exposed to actual political opinion in music (perish the thought!), Friedman said the intent was not to make the album “political,” per se.
“It’s not really so much a political album as…I see it as a gossip album,” Friedman said. “It’s really talking about the stuff that people talk about when they see friends or sit around the table at dinner. It was the first time I really was trying to understand what was happening in the world because it was really frightening — and continues to be.”
American Lullaby mixes pop, jazz, beat poetry, folk, and probably a few other styles I’m forgetting, into an eclectic mixture of songs. And there are lyrics — lots of lyrics. This is particularly true in the second track, “Too Much Stuff,” which has so many lines and difficult syllables crammed together that Friedman’s vocal delivery is full of the same kind of anxiety that one might feel when they realize how much stuff they actually have.
“In order to cover the material that I’m trying to build a world around, I find myself with more lyrics than I’ve ever written before,” he said. “They are chock full of lyrics. And I don’t think they’re superfluous. I think they’re necessary to tell some of these complex tales that I’m relaying in American Lullaby. It’s just more of a challenge to perform these live, because I have enough trouble remembering the lyrics for songs that I wrote 40 years ago. But it’s meant to serve the song and to serve the story that it is that I’m telling.”
The album’s opening statement is probably my favorite song on American Lullaby. The title track is a six-minute walk through 400 years of the country’s history and how it has been informed by violence, starting with what Friedman calls the country’s “two original sins” — the massacre of the indigenous population and slavery.
“Both (were) abetted by our inexplicable love affair with guns,” Friedman explained. “‘American Lullaby’ is my attempt modestly to tell that story of 400 years of violence in a pop song.”
Friedman arrived at the idea of a lullaby because it’s a construct used to deliver difficult or scary information in a manner that is more reassuring than frightening.
“If you listen to the lyrics to almost every lullaby, they’re terrifying,” Friedman said. “It has to be a universal yearning on the part of parents everywhere to instill crucial, critical, life-saving information into the minds of their children, into the next generation, but to do it in a soothing way that doesn’t terrify the kids. So I said ‘A-ha, the idea of a lullaby is a way to express these terrible themes but in a way that might make it accessible.’ So that’s how I approached the whole album — all the songs and the structure of the album — as a lullaby telling these perilous tales.”
Both “American Lullaby” and the frantic second track, “Too Much Stuff,” have unusual structures and neither has a traditional chorus. However, they are both anchored by recurring lyrical phrases that give them a discernible musical shape.
The first song that includes a traditional chorus is “Halfway Normal World,” one of the better songs on the record to my ears. It takes its subject matter from the pandemic lockdown period and how the narrator wants things to get back to some semblance of normalcy. Friedman’s intentional use of “halfway normal” in the title refers to the social disparities the pandemic exposed and that a new “normal” should take those into account and address them in a way that improves society moving forward.
“It occurred to me that it wouldn’t make sense to aspire to get back to a 100% normal world, because we can certainly do better,” Friedman said. “And that it might make sense to aspire to at least a halfway normal world, in the hope that we can learn from that experience and find a way to make the world a little more equitable and fair.”
Friedman wrote the jazzy/folky/swingy “The Swing of Things” on a ukulele, which lends some whimsy to the heavy subject matter of getting life back on track after the lockdown. Accompanying the ukulele is trumpet and tuba, and Friedman’s lyrics have his familiar tinge of humor and lightness.
“The Russians are Coming” is a sprawling centerpiece about the 2016 Trump election campaign. He said that he took great care to use only verifiable information as the basis for his lyrics.
“There’s not a line in that song that there’s not documentary evidence from, and at the same time I tried to make it as funny as it could be,” Friedman said. “But it tells a terrifying tale. It tells the tale of a successful intelligence campaign on the part of Vladimir Putin to affect the American election.”
Friedman adopts an exaggerated Russian accent to add an element of Boris Badenov-esque humor to the song, which is nearly as lyrically dense as “Too Much Stuff.”
“That was an ambitious choice,” Friedman said with a laugh about the decision to narrate it with a Russian accent.
“Sorry Bout That” is a jazzy apology to the children of the world about humanity’s failure to act as proper stewards of the planet they’re leaving behind for the next generation. Again Friedman tried to balance the heavy messaging with lighter lyrical content.
We didn’t mean to be so mean
All we had to do was keep the forests green
And the air and water clean
And use a little less polyethylene
“It’s an earnest, sincere apology to my kids and everybody’s kids and the next generation of young, asking their forgiveness for the horrible mess we left,” Friedman said. “The song tries to depict this terrible tragedy that is still unfolding, but in a wry way, kind of shoulders shrugged, ‘sorry about that, we messed up your world.’”
“Welcome to Stupid Town” practically leaps out of a musical and tackles the subject of political polarization. That gives way to the funky “Ridin’ with Biden,” which discusses the 2020 election.
Friedman’s ukulele playing returns on the song “Wear a Mask,” which was in consideration to be left off the album due to the shared feeling most people have of wanting to forget about having to do that. But Friedman said he felt it was important to remember what that time was like as part of his time capsule. The various pandemic-themed songs were a critical component of documenting this period in history.
“There’s so much about the pandemic that I know we’d all prefer to forget but it was such a profound change, an impact that resonates still and will for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives that we can’t completely forget about it. So, I tried to describe what it felt like to be afraid to embrace your family that lived in another town or another household and that constant undertow of anxiety that made it frightening to go to the store and get a quart of milk.”
The inclusion of the humorous “Just Another Birthday Song” — another Friedman ukulele composition — doesn’t seem to fit initially with the subject matter until you get to the mention of social distancing in the lyrics. The song was included to provide more light among the darker surrounding subject matter.
On American Lullaby, Friedman has wonderfully captured the angst, anger, fear, surprise, and wonder of the past six years of American life. As is typical of his albums, he visits disparate musical styles and moods throughout the record and adds his sense of humor to keep the darkness from overwhelming the proceedings.
“The whole album, I see it almost as a time capsule of this very weird couple of years we’ve gone through, to document it,” he said.
Tracklist:
American Lullaby
Too Much Stuff
Halfway Normal World
The Swing of Things
The Russians are Coming
Sorry Bout That
Welcome to Stupid Town
Ridin’ With Biden
Wear a Mask
I Wish You Joy
Just Another Birthday Song
On a Summer’s Night
You can find out more about Dean’s work and order his music directly from him at deanfriedman.com.
For my full interview with Dean Friedman, please check out the video below. In addition to his first and most recent albums, we spoke about his musical beginnings, his influences, his accomplishments as an author, his desire to balance out doom and gloom in some songs with lighter and more hopeful moments, the music industry, his songwriting process, and yes…there is a little political talk, which is unavoidable as it is inextricably intertwined with both American Lullaby and his philosophy on writing his truth as an artist.
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