INTERVIEW: Ber releases new EP ‘Halfway': “I really dove into the weird things that I've experienced in this halfway space of heartbreak where you're not quite over someone but you really want to be.”
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Lauren Kim
US singer-songwriter Ber (full name Berit Dybing) grew up immersed in musical theatre in Minnesota, but it wasn’t until she moved to the UK as a young adult that she hit upon the idea of pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter. After studying vocal performance at the Leeds Conservatoire, she moved back to Minnesota and began writing songs via Zoom with writers and producers she met in the UK. Although initially thinking she would work as a songwriter as opposed to a performer, after building up an impressive portfolio of songs she decided to launch her own project.
After releasing her first music in 2021, success came quickly when the single ‘Meant To Be’ went viral, with over 64 million streams on Spotify to date. Her debut EP And I’m Still Thinking About That followed in 2022 and gained streams in the tens of millions.
Today Ber releases her second EP, Halfway. A collection of six tracks, it encapsulates everything Ber is as an artist. Warm and inviting indie pop, with lyrics that are wry, humorous, heartbreaking and completely relatable. The songs focus on all the emotions we go through when recovering from a breakup.
“I wrote this 6-song EP about not being over a boy that ghosted me (but really trying to be),” Ber says. “They all come from that funny and uncomfortable place in between heartbreak/happy and paint a picture of how I felt when I finally felt like I was Halfway through my breakup.”
Title track ‘Halfway’ shows off the tender side of Ber. A moving, powerful ballad driven by guitar and the subtlest brushes of electronica, it focuses on the haunting, directionless, broken phase of a breakup. “Halfway me, halfway you / Halfway trying to undo / Halfway scared that I'll forget all the good things we went through,” she sings.
‘Your Internet Sucks’ is the other side of the coin, a more upbeat track with a beat that increasingly ramps up and perfectly conveys the anger and hurt once the heartbreak ends. “I don't think that I wish you the best / In fact, I wish you the worst,” she sings before giving in to her rage: ‘if you're drinking coffee I hope you burn your lips on the cup / And when you're playing Fortnite I hope that your internet sucks.” It’s an absolute blast of a song that sweeps you away in a grime-y-electronic rush.
‘Boys Who Kiss You in Their Car’ has a rockier, drum and guitar sound and is another brilliantly witty, sly eye-roll of a track about dating a cliché. “Even when they show up with a sexy accent / You still don't wanna hear them ask to lean your seat back / And no, I still don't wanna hear about your band…it’s always the boys with the beanies.”
‘Superspreader’ is possibly the EP highlight. A surprisingly lush, almost orchestral track with sweeping instrumentation and stirring vocals, it is probably the most vulnerable moment on the EP. “You still ruin my life even though we don’t talk anymore,” she sings with heartbreaking rawness.
Halfway is Ber at her absolute best and in many ways is a breakthrough moment for her. Traversing a number of sounds and emotions, there is a real maturity to her music and brilliance to her lyrics which is impressive in someone so young. Everything is there for Ber to become a major star, and we recently caught up with her to chat more about the creation of Halfway.
Hi Ber. How fabulous are you?! How are things in your world?
I'm good. It's been a good day, busy busy week. I feel like I'm working hard, but it's good work right now. So, it's not so scary.
That's positive and very go get ‘em. I like that.
That's my 2023 mood… we're going for positive and go get ‘em.
Awkwardly funny, flipping it on its head and equally beautiful, that kind of describe your new EP Halfway and it’s definitely go get ‘em.
Yeah, it feels go get ‘em. Thank you. I'm glad you think so, that's awesome.
It’s such a great EP. I don't want to discredit feelings, because there's clearly that heartbreak in there and dodgy dudes that have done me wrong, but at the same time, you see the funny side of it with time.
The whole goal of mine was to laugh at myself with this EP, and not take it too seriously. I realised that I was taking myself really seriously in my emotions all the time, and so having the opportunity to look back at these things and call myself out for all of these behaviours I was endorsing… and just being present and looking at it and seeing how messy things are and accepting that that's what they are and having it be funny. I really dove into all the weird things that I've definitely experienced in this halfway voidy space of heartbreak where you're not quite over someone, but you really want to be. You're trying, and you're doing things, and you're going on dates, and it's weird and awkward and horrible, and you're still mourning the boy who played Fortnite. It's a really weird dichotomy roller coaster of emotions, but they're all very valid. It’s fun to write them down and then read them back and be like… ‘okay, we can do better, come on.’
It's so good, your, recent single ‘Your Internet Sucks’ in which we have the boy who plays Fortnite, is wonderful because it really hammers home that duality, that frustrating complexity between love and hate. Clearly in your soul, you come to a point where you realise that hate is really just a sidestep from love. It's kind of like self-preservation.
I'm so happy we wrote that song and put it out. Those emotions, that anger, that pettiness, that's something I avoid at all costs. I was in denial for probably a year up until the point where we wrote that song. I just constantly remember being like ‘I'm gonna take the high road. I'm not gonna think bad things about this person. If someone asks me how they're doing, I'll just say I don't know but I wish them the best’. I did that for so long and then it really built up, like no, I don’t actually, I'm really angry. I was talking to my therapist at one point and she was like, ‘you should just like write down all the things you actually feel and just throw it away. Do the thing where you write it all down and then you burn it. Just do that.’
One hundred percent.
I was writing all of these things about how I was so annoyed. I was so annoyed about all of these times he would just consistently prioritise video games, or there were just these dumb little things that I was equating to being the end of the world in my head. I was telling my friends that I wrote the song with the story about this time my boyfriend at the time was gonna come over and meet my housemates for the first time and he drove an hour to get there, and I was really excited. I hadn't seen him in like a month because it was during COVID and the lockdowns were so spaced out. He was finally going to come over and meet my housemates and I was gonna make a big dinner from scratch, and we were going to have wine and a nice time, and it was going to be great. And when he got there, he was like ‘hey, good to see you, I'm really tired, can I go lay down in your room for a little bit?’ Two hours flew by, and I'd made this huge dinner and he didn't come down. I got really worried. I was like, he really isn't feeling good. So I brought these big portions of the sweet potato gnocchi that I just made from scratch, up to him and he was laying in my bed playing Fortnite on an iPad and his PS4 controller that he brought from home. He'd been doing that for two hours.
Wow!
My housemates and I were so concerned about him. But no, he had just been ignoring us for so long and immediately I was like ‘that kind of sucks, but I'm here now’. I kind of brushed past it. A year and a half passed, and he'd broken my heart and I was telling that story to my friend Landon and he was like, ‘That's fucked up, we should write a song about it. I was like, ‘alright, let's write it and then burn it. I'm gonna do the thing my therapist told me and no one's ever gonna hear it’. I did have to send it to my manager and he was like, ‘Berit, we're doing it. I'm sorry. We’re putting it out.’
Oh, this song needed to be heard because if this song doesn't get heard, everyone continues to go, ‘oh, well, maybe it's just my arsehole’. You also have ‘Boys Who Kiss You in Their Car’ and there's that beautiful lyric ‘I still don’t want to hear about your band’. I was thinking, 20 years on for me and those boys still haven't changed. They've just taught it to their sons.
But it's so real. I am consistently surprised by anyone who comes to me and is not the type of person that you probably expect to relate to this song, but here they are relating to this song because this is so real. It's like a reality for so many people. It's really quite funny..
It’s beautiful. On this EP, I was also blown away by ‘Over You’. This is like your soliloquy. I see this stage and all the muted supporting casts in the background and there's this beautiful theatrical spot. You were a child music theatre kid, who then went into a bit of jazz and folk. Please tell me that you're aware that this song on the EP is your theatrical closer?
You’ve just made my life. It's so fun because the whole EP is so nonsensical and I'm not taking it seriously. But with ‘Over You’ I was like alright, I better write something that is simple and comes from the heart. it was not until after I wrote it I was like, ‘this should be in a musical’. It's definitely my musical theatre background shining through, which I think is really fun. I usually avoid it because it takes two seconds for me to sound like I'm impersonating Glinda if I'm singing. When I was in college, and just learning how to write I remember producers being ‘just sing it more pop’, so I really had to train myself into this pop world. But four years have passed, and it comes through every once in a while. You can take the girl out of musical theatre, but you can't take musical theatre out of the girl!
You’ve picked up all the other stuff as well, because you studied jazz and folk in Norway, and then you went to the UK and and became a singer songwriter, and you’ve put all these three things into ‘Over You’.
I have not thought about it that way, that's so funny. It feels really authentic to me and when I wrote it, I was like ‘this is the song for the closing moment of the EP’. The thing I love about the way the EP flows is that the first line you hear is, ‘is it a Slut Phase or is it a band aid?’ And then by the end of ‘Over You’, you're like, oh, it was a band aid. And that's not a bad thing. You get back to the actual emotions that fuel the humour and fuel the healing and fuel the hard stuff that I was talking about in the rest of the songs. The messy bits of the awkward dating and trying to find yourself in a place that's supposed to feel like home, but doesn't. I don't know, it's kind of weird.
It's wonderful. I think the takeaway I get from your music is, apart from the theatrical and the comedy, you really sing for the girl, and in that I mean quite often when young women are soloists, they're encouraged to be sexed up, or they're encouraged to be tomboys. Or they're encouraged to be everything that's not girl because we're told that although girls listen, girls don't sell. But your music really celebrates girlhood with such respect, and even when you're looking back and you’re going ‘oh, I shouldn't have done that’, it's done with kindness as opposed to self-loathing, which is really beautiful.
Thank you. I'm so honoured that that's how it reads and how you hear it. I’m not really writing these songs for anybody other than myself if I'm completely honest. I find myself looking back and being like ‘okay, well, if I was in this situation again, what would I tell my past self?’ They're very internalised songs, and they're not for anybody other than me, so I'm honoured every time someone's like, ‘I get it’. I'm very drawn to music that just makes me feel seen as a human. If I hear a song and I get it, then it's immediately added to my favourite songs playlist, just because it validates an emotion that I didn't even know existed. Things are being explained to me through music all the time and when we're writing, it's very much a processing process. It's how I explain my emotions to me by putting them into sentences and then being ‘no, that doesn't make sense, that's not what I'm trying to say. What am I actually trying to say is…’and really like diving into it.
I feel like this EP and my last EP are both time capsules for this moment in my life and that moment in my life. I really like to write about the stuff that's right in front of me. Something that TikTok taught me, weirdly, is that you can write a song about anything and someone will find it and be like ‘yeah, I get that’. As much as we want to think that we're all really special, we're not. We all share so many more experiences than we give ourselves credit for. The people walking down the street are all living in their own world, and having their own reality. No one’s actually the main character. So, it's really cool to lower those boundaries and be like anything is game. I don't have to write about love. I don't have to write about parents. I don't have to write about anything specific. I can write about how weird the Fortnite thing was. I never thought in a million years someone would be like ‘that's happened to me too’, getting comments on my music video like, ‘how did you know?’ I can't believe this is real, it's quite funny.Anything is fair play, and I think that makes it really fun.
Absolutely, and not everyone's singing about it because there's that risk of losing the possibility of ‘the cool.’
Absolutely. That's terrifying as well. I was really nervous the day that song came out if I'm honest, because I knew it could go one of two ways. I'm very happy it's gone the way it has, and people are not taking it too seriously, and they just get it and it's fun. But I was definitely nervous that it was going to come off as a petty thing that I really wasn't going for. I'm just really happy that it was received the way it's been received. I was very nervous the night before it came out!
It's a good testament when you know you're pushing yourself as well. When you're like, ‘this is totally how I feel and this is my heart on my sleeve.’
What you were saying about women and what it means to be a woman in music and a female and a girl and selling myself as a girl instead of something that you maybe an industry is creating. When girls sing about boys, period, people are like, ‘it's always girls whining about boys. Everything's so whiny now because girls are hard to please’. I was like, here I am whining about a boy. But when boys do it…
It’s different, right?
There are a lot of obstacles that I individually am also overcoming. Every time I release a new song, everything's a learning experience and I feel really empowered by just putting out this funny song I wrote about this crazy moment, I had. It's so vivid, those feelings were really real and it was more of an empowering moment for me. I felt like I was like reclaiming that a little bit and not throwing anybody in front of a bus. The whole EP feels like those types of songs where I'm just being really honest with myself for once and I love it. I’m really proud of it, and I'm really excited for it to be out. I'm really excited for people to hear ‘Slut Phase’.
Oh, absolutely. It's a killer opener.
Thank you. I haven’t teased it yet, but I've announced the track list and of course with a title like ‘Slut Phase’ people are like what's happening? So I'm really excited.
A songwriter with a folk, school musical theatre background talking about a Slut Phase, along with a beautiful picture of her head in the toilet. Where's this going?!
Where’s this going? It's funny, because it's not about slutty things. It's not ‘WAP’, I’m not being Nicki Minaj, I'm not doing anything cool. But it's a funny song just about how messy life can be when you're really not over something and when you're in your slut phase. I stole the title from my friend Isaac, who, when I got my heart broken, the literal first thing he said to me was ‘thank God, so now you can enter your slut phase’. I was like, ‘that's exactly what I needed to hear, thank you!’
That’s where we need to go from here and I need to think about it and celebrate other people doing it.
I had it in my notes for so long and when we got to that session, I was going through potential titles. I said ‘Slut Phase’ out loud and both the people I wrote it with just looked at me. And I was like ‘what?’ Then we all just did it, and it was pretty funny.
Also you did it because, you were sticking true. This is your most honest depiction and you understand yourself and all those little avenues you've been through both as a creator and just as a human all come together create this wonderful song. It is one hell of an EP. You are an amazing songwriter and I just love everything you've put into it. So, congratulations.
Thank you.
Before I leave you, what else is coming up for you in this wonderful, exciting year?
It’s a big year. I have my first headline tour coming up in March and I'm shitting myself. There are some big impostor syndrome things I have to get over! And then I'm playing a lot of festivals and a few headline dates in the UK and the EU as well. I'm really excited because I love playing over there and festivals are really fun. It's just going to be a really great time. I'm expanding my live set a little bit, we have a drummer now and it's just a little bit of a bigger production. I feel like I'm like moving forward, which is really cool.
Halfway is out now. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Ber, you can follow her on Instagram and TikTok.
