Premiere: Dan Bern scrawls jubilant letter on new song, ‘Dear Tiger Woods’

Tiger Woods’ victory at the 2019 Masters was nothing short of a redemptive strike. Deseret News reporter Jennifer Graham situates the fall from grace and eventual saga as “a modern-day morality play with a hallelujah ending,” also noting the view that Woods was able to regain his “mantle of hero in part because he suffered publicly for so long.” He pulled himself out of the soil, tearing way his infidelities and rough-edged flaws, and so, such an exhibit of absolution is undeniable. Folk legend Dan Bern pays appropriate poetic tribute to the golf icon on a new song aptly called “Dear Tiger Woods,” premiering today, not to be confused with his 1998 song (also called “Tiger Woods,” from his second album Fifty Eggs). Here, in eloquent and wide-brushing fashion, he stages a monstrous moral epic that further hammers home the noble arc.

“Dear Tiger Woods, do you remember when you first came along / And how you’re dad said you’d change the world / And how you’d be a leader, maybe like Gandhi,” he rolls his tongue. His musings tumble along, quite briskly, yet his words seem to hang in the air long after he’s pierced the horizon. The ethical implications lace the images, and in confronting the very real headlines, Bern then discards them to make way for the equally profound conquest. “You proved you could come back and be competitive / You even won another major / It was awesome,” he sings, a gleam in his eye.

The music, too, chews up the past and spits it right back out. “So, yeah, Tiger Woods, remember what your daddy groomed you for / And when you do assemble that team, I got a lot of friends who want to be on it / And certainly, you’re going to need songwriters,” he sings. The guitars and other production work quickly ascends into a euphoric cleansing, as a starship kicking off the earth’s crust and right into orbit.

On the song, Bern writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email: “I was painting a large portrait of Tiger Woods. Suddenly, this song demanded I write it down. ‘Not now!’ I said. ‘I’m busy!’ I went back to the painting, but the song wouldn’t let go. So, I wrote it down, exactly as I heard it,” he says. “I recorded it soon after. But then, after over a decade without a major title, he won the Masters! So, I drove six hours to LA, changed one line in the studio, and drove six more back home. Tiger got the last laugh!”

“Dear Tiger Woods” is the latest sampling from Bern’s new album, Regent Street, expected later this year.

Listen below:

https://soundcloud.com/user-384379266/dear-tiger-woods/s-7OeI4

Photo Credit: Danielle Tait

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