Word: baerwald
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Picture this. A small, comfortable apartment in Los Angeles. Three people, all trying to work, trying to write and make music, but not necessarily together. In the living room: David Baerwald and David Ricketts, trying to come up with an appropriate follow-up to Boomtown. Pressure enough right there; not only the normal, friendly collaborative pressure but the burden of trying to equal or even top one of the best albums of the 1980s. In the bedroom: Toni Childs, who was living with Ricketts and laboring over her own lyrics besides...
...year," Baerwald remembers, "she'd been working with one line of a song: 'Where's the ocean?' We would be working, and she'd be in the bedroom singing this one line, 'Where's the ocean?' After a year, I answered her, 'Take a right on Sunset.' She never spoke to me again...
...story is so typically Baerwald that it could almost be one of his lyrics: rueful, nasty, funny. The collaboration with Ricketts collapsed shortly after this incident, and it took Baerwald two years to get himself back in working order. But then -- and here life takes a sharp left away from art -- things started to come around. In 1988 Childs made a smash debut album, co-produced by Ricketts and featuring a beautiful, spooky ballad called Where's the Ocean. And Baerwald finished a solo project, his just released Bedtime Stories, that makes a worthy companion piece to Boomtown. That...
...Baerwald has a knack for eccentric rhythms (rock-based, with sudden jazzy inflections) and a knowing turn of phrase. (Examples: "I got stopped by a cop for oblivious driving"; "Instead of Nero/ We got Madonna/ She's fiddling with herself.") The son of a UCLA political science professor, Baerwald was born in Ohio and at the age of five trailed his father's academic career to Japan. When he was eleven, the family returned to Los Angeles, where he eventually drifted into the music slipstream and decided that "the only way to play rock music was to live." That meant...
Childs' collaborator in much of the writing and production of the album was David Ricketts, who with David Baerwald created one of the seminal albums of the '80s, 1986's Boomtown. Ricketts and Childs lived together and worked together, and Union has much to do with their affair. Childs signed with A&M records and moved in with Ricketts on the same day. She moved out 16 months later, with memories enough for an album and with a professional relationship that endures. "We couldn't live together," she says now. "We both push too many buttons in each other...