Steve Bertrand 'Pain Is a Megaphone' album

“I’d love to say that this album comes from the most joyful period of my life, but that would be a lie.” So says Steve Bertrand, looking back on the 12 weeks he spent behind closed doors at home, guitar in hand, writing the extraordinary songs of Pain Is a Megaphone.

There were good reasons why Bertrand, already known for the edgy yet finely crafted songs he wrote and sang with the Tories and Avion, began his productive isolation.

But what matters more than what brought him there was what he brings from it, which is nothing less than the finest work he’s ever done – and that makes it some of the most contradictory music of our time.

“Contradictory” is the word, because Pain Is a Megaphone is poetically elusive yet emotionally direct, dark yet uplifting, broken and assertive. Working with players associated with the Wallflowers, Vertical Horizon, Lifehouse, Avion, and the Tories, Bertrand achieved a perfect combination of polish and energy, ideal for bringing these turbulent tunes to life.

Begin with the first single, “The Last Mile Is the Longest,” a confession of confusion nurtured through a crescendo of dramatic chord and key changes. Follow with “In the Dreaming,” a hymn to restless despair tethered to an irresistible chorus … “Megaphone,” whose yearnings for light open into a shadowy, dreamy bloom … “Glorious Collision,” a tribal beat and wordless vocal hook that drive this image of explosive release …

A rainbow of influences spills through Pain Is a Megaphone: Beatles, Cars, Cheap Trick, U2, even a little Rundgren in the chords that launch “Sell Out.” Yet in the end they illuminate Bertrand alone, an artist who has made his mark as a bandleader and emerges now as a soloist with lots to say and his own way of saying it.

In some ways the roots of Pain Is a Megaphone go back to when Bertrand, at age ten, attended his first concert – a Beach Boys show. He had previously discovered music through the lifeline of radio, but this experience confirmed the path that he would follow from that point.

“It was a revelation,” he remembers. “I knew immediately that I was built to write and play my own songs.”

This epiphany drew him, right after high school, to L.A. There he founded the Tories, fronted their shows, and filled their sets with originals strong enough to lure Phil Ramone onboard to produce their debut and sign them to his label. Their first single, “Gladys Kravitz,” broke onto Top 10 video rotation on MTV2 and helped open another door for Bertrand as a composer for film and TV, where his scoring for the Christina Applegate series Jesse would earn two ASCAP Film and Television Awards for him and his band.

After the Tories split, Bertrand put together Avion, who booted one single, “Seven Days without You,” into the top twenty and another, “Beautiful,” into the top thirty and stirred up plenty of critical support. But then their major-label deal evaporated in the midst of corporate mergers and maneuvers. The blood was still fresh in the water as Bertrand withdrew into his studio and started to write Pain Is a Megaphone.

“I wanted to clear the slate,” he explains. “And because I’d never done a solo album, it seemed to make sense to try doing one now.”

For all the diversity reflected in its lyrics, Pain Is a Megaphone rose on the foundation of one line from C. S. Lewis, which defined pain as “God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” “That pretty much encapsulated where I was at the time,” Bertrand says. “I’ve certainly felt deaf at different moments in my life, and that was definitely on my mind as I began to write. Good or bad, people will always know where I am, based on the records I make, because I can only write about things I know and believe. I’ve always written only songs that have meaning to me.”

The first single, for example, suggests that the dualities of love were on Bertrand’s mind. “I’ve had way too many conversations where people have told me, ‘My girlfriend and I are either going to get married or break up,’” Bertrand explains. “What fascinates me is how these outcomes are so different, yet they coincide and coexist. That’s how I came to write ‘The Last Mile Is the Longest.’”

These ideas took shape through songs whose sophistication and passion are hallmarks of Bertrand’s approach, which he dismisses jokingly as evidence that “ignorance is bliss. I can’t read music, and I don’t know what I can’t do as a writer, so I’ll just try anything through trial and error, with no idea if it’s musically right or wrong. Where some people might say, ‘Okay, I’m in this key, so I can go to these three chords up to this bridge,’ I’ll just play what pleases my ear because I don’t have that mechanism inside me.”

Performance was the last piece of this puzzle, and here Bertrand knew exactly what he wanted. “Even if you’re a singer/songwriter, I believe you should always sound like you’re playing in a band,” he insists. “I’ve heard so many boring records where someone plays his stuff on an acoustic guitar, and they sprinkle some other instruments on top. Well, I wasn’t interested in just getting everybody into the studio and saying, ‘Read these notes.’ I wanted their flavor on the record, uncommon as that might be.”

Pain Is a Megaphone, then, is uncommon by any measure. Its sound recalls the garage appeal of classic band-bred albums while keeping the spotlight on Bertrand’s writing and delivery. This isn’t music slotted to one demographic; it’s artful rock & roll, neither pretentious nor pandering. It is both a window into a unique creative personality and an echo of the fears and hopes that haunt our private thoughts.

More than that, Pain Is a Megaphone opens the most compelling chapter of Steve Bertrand’s story – and the beginning of a soundtrack for the lives we lead as well.

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Steve Bertrand - Pain Is a Megaphone