Minnesota-hailing Ber’s day performing at Gloucester festival, Barn On The Farm, took an unexpected turn recently when she ended up joining a singer-songwriter supergroup of sorts, for an impromptu performance. The genre’s best became her bandmates – Holly Humberstone, Maisie Peters, JP Saxe, Dylan Fraser, and Will Taylor from Flyte, to be specific. “Can I start by saying that that was the highlight of my life,” Ber tells us of the experience. “It was so cool to be surrounded by incredible artists that I often reference and consider as my own comfort artists.”

And, the performance was as much a symbolic welcome into the fold of the genre’s upper echelons for the “Superspreader” singer, who with each release increasingly earns her place as a peer of such acts. Latest single “Superspreader”, featuring a lyric video directed by Ber herself, further proves her prowess for songcraft and performing, with her angelic vocals and adept storytelling on show once again, a suitable follow-up for 2021 predecessor, “Meant To Be”, which to date has garnered over 50 million streams.

With a support slot for Sigrid also on the horizon before 2022 is out, we caught up with Ber about the crazy experiences that are becoming her every day, overcoming being ghosted by a partner, that supergroup performance, and her ultimate musical inspirations.

Head below to read our chat and watch the “Superspreader” video now…

You’re on tour with Sigrid this autumn! Congrats! What’s your vibe when touring?
Oh my goodness, thank you. I am so excited. The vibe is definitely cool, calm and caffeinated. If I learned anything from the last tour it’s that you can overpack for a month on the road, you definitely will forget your purse and passports at a sweetgreen in LA and have to turn around two hours into your eight-hour drive, and adrenaline is a super drug. This tour is going to be unlike my last tour, which was very intimate and acoustic. Sigrid’s energy is unmatched, I’ve been a fan of her’s for years, and I look forward to bringing my A-game and some new songs into these shows! I’m bringing my friend Landon along this time too so we’ll have some extra manpower and an elevated set that I’m so excited to perform every night, but after the last tour I have a catalogue of trusty coffee/food/hotel stops that I’m sure will come in handy, and this time I also know how to pack for a month on the road!

We love “Superspreader”. You worked with Now Now and Hot Dennis on this. What was the process in the studio like?
Thank you! I took my time with this song. It’s something I started over Zoom with Geth and Hot Dennis while they were in the UK and I was in Minnesota, and we sat on the demo for about five months before I brought it to Brad and Cacie (now now). I don’t often revisit songs, but “Superspreader” stuck with me. Being able to finish it in Brad’s basement studio in Minneapolis was a luxury to me, because my first EP came together almost entirely over zoom. Brad and Cacie knew exactly where I was coming from and it was a very cathartic day of just taking the song and pumping it full of the right level of emotions that the demo was lacking. I remember us listening back to the bridge for the first time, Cacie looked up at me, she said something like “Yep, it just needed to be way sadder”, and that moment has just stuck with me. I’ve always associated this tune with my rock bottom, and I’d avoided finishing it for so long because I didn’t want to think about those feelings anymore, but there we were, sitting on an orange shag carpet in Brads dewy DIY- South Minneapolis neighborhood basement holding a banjo and petting Crockpot (the dog) while laughing about funny catch phrases for the whole afternoon. And in trying to bring out the level of intense, ridiculous emotion I had felt for so long, I just felt very seen and at peace. I love Brad and Cacie, they inspire me so much. We’ve had a long running joke that a banjo must be present at all times and needless to say the banjo played a starring role in the second verse of superspreader.

The track details what sounds like quite an intense time for you! You were living in a basement and had just been ghosted amidst moving back to Minnesota. Can you go into where your head was at at that time?
Yeah, I mean that was exactly it. I lived in the UK for 4 years and the pandemic brought me home to Minnesota after my visa expired, and the world I had built for myself during university in the UK felt so far away, and home felt so foreign. On top of that I had an absolute doozy of a heartbreak. One that totally lacked closure and has dragged on for years, so I really just felt like my world had turned upside down and I was starting over in every part of my life. I was also so broke. I moved into my uncle’s basement in Minneapolis and took up two part time jobs so I could save up enough money to afford rent, and I didn’t have any friends in Minneapolis so I grew close with my uncle and aunt and their dog and just distracted myself with work and Tinder, and Hinge, and I’ll be honest it was so horrible. When it came to writing, I couldn’t stop writing about this boy that had just dropped off the face of the earth, missing him, hating him, loving him, trying to move on but not wanting to, to a fault. I had the lyric “You still ruin my life even though we don’t talk anymore” sitting in my notes app for months before showing it to Geth over zoom, and that ended up serving as a pretty cool jumping-off point for the very autobiographical verses.

I look back at all of this and laugh now. Writing has always helped me process shit, but this song especially just feels like a very clear time capsule for a version of me that I learned so much from.

You self-directed the “Superspreader” lyric video. How was that experience for you?
I love making lyric videos. I doodle them frame by frame and edit them together in stop motion style, it’s very time-consuming but allows me to provide some additional context to the lyrics and tell the story the way I want to tell it. I hope it feels like a personal touch to those who watch it, but I also just enjoy the process and I make them for me. It makes me feel closer to the song. As if that were possible.

Apart from touring with Sigrid, what would you love to achieve in the next half of the year?
I look forward to finishing up my EP and playing my first headline show in the Twin Cities! Bucket list moments for sure. I also just hope to someday hear one of my songs in public – that hasn’t happened yet. I’ll probably cry.

We love that you were part of a supergroup at Barn On The Farm with Holly Humberstone, Maisie Peters, JP Saxe, Dylan Fraser and Flyte’s Will Taylor. That sounds like a dream! If you ever get in the studio, what type of track would this six-piece make?
Can I start by saying that that was the highlight of my life? It was so cool to be surrounded by incredible artists that I often reference and consider my comfort artists. No one told me when I woke up that morning that that was going to happen and I will remember that for the rest of my life. I think if the six of us were ever to collaborate, it would likely yield something quite wordy, and heartbreaking. I’m thinking acoustic, with a darker, sonic twist in the bridge. Resembling anything by Bon Iver really! Or maybe we’d throw it all out the window and just rap. I’m not opposed, haha!

When you were younger, who were the singers/songwriters, like those mentioned in the last question, that you looked up to?
Marcus Mumford, John Denver, Chris Martin, Joni Mitchell. My brother loved The Beatles. In High School, I only listened to the Blurry Face album by Twentyøne Piløts. Eventually, I fell in love with Maggie Rogers, Sigrid, Taylor Swift, Julia Michaels, and Jeremy Zucker, but those were all college discoveries and they have all definitely helped me find my voice as a writer today.