Bernie and The Believers - Feat. essence - In Your Shoes

From The Album, Connection

By Bernie and The Believers Feat. essence

www.BernieAndTheBelievers.com

PLEASE DONATE NOW TO SEND BERNIE HOME! https://www.gofundme.com/bernies-song

Music Video Performers:

• Daniel Berkman: Drums, banjo, harmonica

• Roger Rocha: Dobro, upright bass

• Essence Goldman: Vocals

• Roger Rocha: Director

• Essence Goldman: Producer

• Kirk Goldberg: Editor

• Cameras: Thayer Walker, Mira Liang, Peter Booth

Recorded with:

• Daniel Berkman: Drums, banjo

• Roger Rocha: Dobro, bass

• Essence Goldman: Vocals

• Jonathan Korty: Harmonica

• David Simon-Baker: Engineer

• William Chason: Engineer

From The Album, Connection

By Bernie and The Believers

www.BernieAndTheBelievers.com

PLEASE DONATE NOW TO SEND BERNIE HOME! https://www.gofundme.com/bernies-song

Lyrics by: Bernie Dalton In Your Shoes Copyright 2017 Bernie Dalton, essence, Roger Rocha

My thoughts fragmented
Oh the vastness of you
Naivity scares me
Mine shines through
Oh life circumctances
Little choices of words
Ease my pain
I’m willing this silence to end

A connection felt
A refuge of trust
The comfort of you
In your shoes
That’s the best part

Tiny written victories
Of a memory uninvited
Fallen for the fallen
Everytime
Lord knows you’re not the one
I always buy in
I always believe
Love is mine eternally

A connection felt
A refuge of trust
The comfort of you
In your shoes
That’s the best part

Ahh the walks of life
Always get in the way
Waitied too long, this time
And this time, time is terminal
Honesty finds love
Opening ends those demons
Backward, awkward, all out of place
re-arranged it makes perfect sense

A connection felt
A refuge of trust
The comfort of you
In your shoes
That’s the best part

Giving a voice to my friend’s songs

Bernie Dalton always wanted to record an album of his songs. But when he lost his voice as a result of motor neurone disease - also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - singer Essence Goldman stepped in.

Bernie And The Believers FeatURING Essence: Tiny Desk Concert

Nov. 12, 2018 | Bob Boilen -- The story of Bernie and the Believers is the most powerful I've ever come across at the Tiny Desk. It's about a beautiful act of compassion that ultimately led to this performance, and left me and my coworkers in tears.

I discovered the music of Bernie Dalton among the thousands of Tiny Desk Contest entries we received earlier this year. The band's singer, Essence Goldman, had submitted the entry and shared Bernie's story. You should hear her tell it in her own words at the Tiny Desk (and I choke up every time I hear it). In summary she said that a few years ago, Bernie — a father, a songwriter and a musician in his mid-forties, and an avid surfer with a day job as a pool cleaner — answered an ad she had posted offering voice lessons. Essence was a performer trying to manage her own career as a single mom, and Bernie was trying to improve his talents.

Bernie drove 90-minutes from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, eagerly showing up early to his voice lessons with Essence. But not long after they started working together, Bernie lost his voice. They didn't think much of a it at first, but then things got worse. He had trouble swallowing and eating. Essence encouraged Bernie to see a doctor and after some tests Bernie Dalton was diagnosed with bulbar-onset ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. He began to lose the use of his hands and, along with it, the ability to play guitar.

With a prognosis of only one-to-three years left to live, Essence offered to raise money so that Bernie and his daughter could travel together. But what Bernie wanted more than anything was to make a record. So he asked Essence to not just be his voice teacher, but his voice. From there, they got to business. Essence pulled together a team of producers, engineers and musicians, while Bernie guided the creative direction through gestures and a dry-erase board. They wrote and recorded a new song every day. Their first single, "Unusual Boy," was the one they included in their 2018 Tiny Desk Contest entry.

Now Bernie's friends have gathered here in Washington, D.C. to perform his songs. All the while, Bernie watched and listened from his hospital bed on the West coast, communicating with us in a live video feed through his eye-gaze device. What you are about to witness is the ultimate act of love: Essence sacrificing her own musical ambitions to fulfill the dreams of Bernie Dalton. Through tragedy there was beauty.

Set List

• "Unusual Boy"

• "In Your Shoes"

• "Simon's Hero"

Credits

Producers: Bob Boilen, Morgan Noelle Smith; Creative Director: Bob Boilen; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Morgan Noelle Smith, Kaylee Domzalski, Beck Harlan; Editor: Production Assistant: Brie Martin; Photo: Cameron Pollack/NPR

Bernie And The Believers Feat. Essence

Tiny Desk Concert

The story of Bernie and the Believers is the most powerful I’ve ever come across at the Tiny Desk. It’s about a beautiful act of compassion that ultimately led to this performance, and left me and my coworkers in tears.

I discovered the music of Bernie Dalton among the thousands of Tiny Desk Contest entries we received earlier this year. The band’s singer, Essence Goldman, had submitted the entry and shared Bernie’s story. You should hear her tell it in her own words at the Tiny Desk (and I choke up every time I hear it). In summary she said that a few years ago, Bernie — a father, a songwriter and a musician in his mid-forties, and an avid surfer with a day job as a pool cleaner — answered an ad she had posted offering voice lessons. Essence was a performer trying to manage her own career as a single mom, and Bernie was trying to improve his talents.

Bernie drove 90-minutes from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, eagerly showing up early to his voice lessons with Essence. But not long after they started working together, Bernie lost his voice. They didn’t think much of a it at first, but then things got worse. He had trouble swallowing and eating. Essence encouraged Bernie to see a doctor and after some tests Bernie Dalton was diagnosed with bulbar-onset ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He began to lose the use of his hands and, along with it, the ability to play guitar.

With a prognosis of only one-to-three years left to live, Essence offered to raise money so that Bernie and his daughter could travel together. But what Bernie wanted more than anything was to make a record. So he asked Essence to not just be his voice teacher, but his voice. From there, they got to business. Essence pulled together a team of producers, engineers and musicians, while Bernie guided the creative direction through gestures and a dry-erase board. They wrote and recorded a new song every day. Their first single, “Unusual Boy,” was the one they included in their 2018 Tiny Desk Contest entry.

Now Bernie’s friends have gathered here in Washington, D.C. to perform his songs. All the while, Bernie watched and listened from his hospital bed on the West coast, communicating with us in a live video feed through his eye-gaze device. What you are about to witness is the ultimate act of love: Essence sacrificing her own musical ambitions to fulfill the dreams of Bernie Dalton. Through tragedy there was beauty.

Set List “Unusual Boy” “In Your Shoes” “Simon’s Hero”

Sung from the heart

When Bernie Dalton was struck down by disease, Essence Goldman became his voice

By Aidin Vaziri | May 11, 2018

Bernie Dalton hoped to fulfill a lifelong dream of making an album when he replied to a Craigslist ad for vocal lessons.

A surfer living in Santa Cruz, he was helping raise his teenage daughter, Nicole, after a tough divorce. He told Essence Goldman, the voice teacher who posted the ad, that he wanted to learn to sing the blues. He would drive up to her home studio in San Francisco every week for the sessions.

Goldman, a longtime fixture on the city’s singer-songwriter scene, was working as an instructor to help support her young family while she was going through her own separation.

It may sound like a setup for a “Missed Connections” romance, but what would transpire over the next few years goes far deeper.

Shortly after Dalton first showed up in Essence’s bohemian-style flat in the city’s Inner Richmond neighborhood in 2015, he began slurring his words and his voice started to get progressively raspy. At first they dismissed it as a symptom of laryngitis or the cold, maybe even an aftereffect from chlorine exposure from his day job as a pool cleaner.

Two months later, in January 2016, with Dalton hoping to learn the nuances of Freddie King’s “Tore Down,” his voice disappeared.

He couldn’t sing. He couldn’t talk.

And yet Dalton kept showing up for his weekly lessons, and they attempted to press on. Goldman would offer feedback on Dalton’s lyrics and guitar chord structures. Dalton would scribble his handwritten responses to her on a yellow legal pad.

As time passed, Dalton started having difficulty swallowing, eating and drinking. In a few short weeks, he lost a significant amount of weight. On the yellow pad, he wrote and underlined, “30 pounds!”

Then one day during a lesson, he started drooling all over the guitar he was playing.

“It was like, ‘OK, something is really wrong here,’” Goldman recalled, sitting on the couch where together they would pore over Dalton’s lyrics and riffs.

In April 2016, after putting it off, Dalton went to see a neurologist.

He was diagnosed with bulbar-onset amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — an aggressive form of ALS, the incurable motor-neuron illness better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It seizes the voice and throat before rapidly destroying the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord responsible for controlling muscles in the arms, legs, diaphragm and chest wall. It is always terminal.

The doctors gave him a prognosis of one to three years. He was 47 years old.

Two years later, Dalton can still smile, raise his eyebrows and lift his left thumb, but now he’s bedridden and must use a device called the EyeGaze for most of his communication needs.

“Even though he’s in that bed, he’s alive,” Goldman said. “You can see it in his eyes. He’s very much present. Everything is working upstairs. He feels everything as if he’s not sick. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like for him to not be able to fully express himself with his body.”

With the urgency of his situation becoming clear, Dalton asked Goldman a favor: She needed to become his voice. Even though he stopped going to lessons he still wanted to make an album, only now there was a higher purpose. He wanted to leave a set of songs for his daughter and her future children, the grandchildren he would most likely not live long enough to meet.

He kept sending Goldman sheets of handwritten lyrics — songs about longing, frustration and death — and she kept stashing them away.

“I put them in a pile under my bills,” she said. “I wanted to help him, but I didn’t know how it would manifest.”

Dalton persisted.

“I wanted to get my music out of my living room and show my daughter anything is possible,” he said.

Goldman was hesitant. At the time, she was in the middle of producing her own album — a follow-up to her 2016 release, “Black Wings” — and trying to rediscover her own voice after two decades of modest success.

Then one night, while he still had enough strength to drive, Dalton showed up unannounced at her house with the lyrics for a song called “Simon’s Hero.” Goldman pulled out her guitar “and the song came straight through me,” she said.

From that point on, Goldman said, she couldn’t stop thinking about Dalton’s situation.

“I remember I was on a trip to the Grand Canyon with my family not long afterward, and I felt really guilty that I was enjoying this time with them and he couldn’t do the same thing,” she said. “I wanted to launch a GoFundMe so he could take a trip with his daughter.”

But Dalton didn’t want a vacation. He wanted to make an album.

Goldman’s manager tried to talk her out of the project. He wanted her to shop for a label deal for the album she was already working on. But, she said, “I couldn’t stop.”

So she dove in. Goldman had lost her own father to pancreatic cancer 10 years earlier. She wanted to do it for Nicole.

“This took precedence,” Goldman said. “He’s dying. There wasn’t an opportunity to wait.”

Shortly after starting voice lessons with Goldman, Dalton had signed Nicole up as well. Over time, Goldman became like a member of the family, offering a musical bond between father and daughter.

Goldman was there when, in her living room, Dalton talked about his diagnosis to Nicole. She has become his primary advocate as Dalton’s family navigates the complicated world of skilled nursing facilities and home care.

“It grew to love,” Dalton said. “Only way to describe it.”

With her large green eyes welling up with tears, Goldman added that they have connected on another level too.

“Mostly, it was his relationship with his daughter,” she said. “I can’t help it. It struck a chord. Watching him tell his daughter about the disease, I was unearthed. It felt like losing my dad all over again. ... I wanted to give Bernie and Nicole the closure I didn’t get.”

With Goldman reaching out to her network of friends, support for Dalton’s project came pouring in. Goldman found a band, dubbing them Bernie and the Believers, that included guitarist Roger Rocha, drummer Daniel Berkman and engineer David Simon-Baker.

“Essence asked me if I would help out recording some songs with her vocal student who had ALS,” Rocha said. “Because my uncle and stepfather had passed away from it, I had firsthand experience.”

Making the album, a passionate blend of folk and blues bearing the influence of everyone from Lucinda Williams to Otis Redding, wasn’t easy.

By the time Goldman raised enough money to get everyone into the studio, Dalton was losing his mobility. They started recording in June 2017, with Goldman, Dalton and the band, and Nicole. They would start each session with a lyric sheet and finish with a fully formed song.

“In the beginning, he was able to write on a dry-erase board and hold court on the couch and direct us,” Goldman said. “Two thumbs up and huge smiles from someone who can’t speak means a lot.”

Dalton was involved at every step as the album, titled “Connection,” came together. Goldman’s voice carried the music. Nicole sang backing vocals. Dalton’s voice even makes an appearance via an old iPhone recording Goldman made at one of their early lessons.

Working on the album, Dalton said, was “magic.”

But as his condition deteriorated, he lost the ability to move his arms, to walk or to stand. Dalton now lives in a care facility in Cupertino, with nursing staff providing him with around-the-clock care.

“It’s been very much an emotional roller coaster,” said his dad, Bernie Dalton Sr., who put his life on hold in Pennsylvania to come out in late October to be at his son’s bedside.

In February, Goldman and her bandmates hosted a record release party at Slim’s in San Francisco, playing the songs Dalton wrote for him and a packed house of friends, family and his supporters. It was the last time he’s been out in public.

A month earlier, Goldman launched a second GoFundMe campaign, this one dubbed simply “Send Bernie Home.” The goal now: to support ALS-specific home care for Dalton, so he can live out the rest of his days in his own space with his family and dedicated care. The cost is an estimated $8,000 a week.

So far, they have raised a little over half of the $150,000 goal.

“Essence was an advocate for Bernie right from the start,” said his sister Lena Dalton Sutcliffe, who with her twin, Lisa, is five years older than Bernie. “She’s been instrumental in a lot of ways, from making sure Bernie got the right formula to looking into experimental treatments. It’s way more than just the music.”

Goldman has also helped get Dalton’s story told.

With the band, she recorded a video for the song “Unusual Boy” in Dalton’s room at the Cupertino Healthcare and Wellness Center to submit to NPR’s Tiny Desk Concertcontest, which has launched the careers of so many musicians including Oakland’s Fantastic Negrito. Goldman didn’t win, but the exposure led to a feature on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Local news stations have also showed up with camera crews, and letters of support have arrived from all over the world. There are even plans for the band to take Dalton’s songs on tour.

The release of the Bernie and the Believers album and the local attention has kept Dalton’s spirits up despite his grim prognosis.

“Bernie is over the moon that people are taking notice of this story,” Goldman said. “But I would be sad if it was just a human interest story. That’s patronizing to him. He’s actually a good songwriter, not just some guy with ALS. He has a unique and honest perspective that I think this world needs to hear.”

Because the music has become such a life force for Dalton, Goldman has remained deeply committed. But their relationship went from being professional to personal a long time ago.

“It’s upsetting because I lost my dad,” she said. “I saw the love between Bernie and Nicole. I couldn’t help but draw a parallel. ... I wanted them to have a special thing while he was still alive.”

Having Goldman there for Dalton has been invaluable. He calls her “my soul mate.”

At some point, however, Goldman, who has a long-term boyfriend, will have to move on. She’s put countless hours into producing and promoting the Bernie and the Believers album without financial compensation.

She has about 20 other voice students demanding her time — one who was recently diagnosed with stage three lung cancer, and he too would like to make an album. And then there’s the family. And the divorce. And her house that is undergoing renovations, with workers pounding away every time she sits down with her guitar.

When will she be ready to walk away?

“I don’t know how,” she said. “I can’t. I love Bernie. It’s not a romantic love. It’s a spirit love, and it’s deep. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

Aidin Vaziri is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop music critic. E-mail: avaziri@sfchronicle.comTwitter: @MusicSF

Online resources

To purchase the Bernie and the Believers album “Connection” (a limited amount of CDs feature Dalton’s inked thumbprint on the sleeve): www.bernieandthebelievers.com

GoFundMe page for “Send Bernie Home” campaign: www.gofundme.com/sendberniehome

Watch Bernie and the Believers’ NPR Tiny Desk Contest 2018 entry, “Unusual Boy”: https://youtu.be/8Gv6FHEmbhY

Bernie And The Believers NPR Tiny Desk Contest 2018

Bernie & The Believers "Unusual Boy"

Featuring essence

From the album "Connection"

AVAILABLE NOW on iTUNES, Amazon, Spotify, and Google Play!

Lyrics written by Bernie Dalton

Music composed by Essence Goldman and Roger Rocha

Musicians:

• Essence Golman: voice

• Roger Rocha: guitar

• Daniel Berkman: cello

• Adrienne Biggs: violin

www.BernieAndTheBelievers.com

Video Credits:

• Directed by: Ari Gold - http://www.AriGoldFilms.com

• Follow @AriGold on Instagram & Twitter

• Subscribe to: http://www.youtube.com/AriGoldFilms

• Director of Photography: Will Truettner

• Cameras: Will Truettner, Thayer Walker, Ari Gold

• Live on Location Sound Recording

• Engineer: David Simon-Baker

• Lighting: Joe Mullen

• Editor: Kirk Goldberg

• Make-up: Elizabeth Chang

Lyrics:

Unusual Boy Copyright Bernie Dalton, essence, Roger Rocha 2018

Always a boy loves me
When I start to open
Always a boy leaves me
When it’s not enough

Never the right boy
Can understand me
Never the right boy
To own my heart

Only an unusual boy
Could love and understand me
If only an unusual boy
Could love me tonight

I need an unusual boy
To continue to believe in me
I need this unusual boy
To convince me to believe too

Such an unusual boy
Not look I need attention
Such an unusual boy
We’re cut from the same cloth

Only an unusual boy
Could love and understand me
If only an unusual boy
Could hold me tonight

Longing to tell him
I have feelings for him
Longing to say
I can’t hold back anymore
Afraid that I’ll that I’ll lose him
But equally afraid
Afraid that he’ll say
I just don’t see you that way

Only an unusual boy
Could love and understand me
And only an unusual boy
Could love and understand me
And I know an unusual boy
And I think that he can handle me
And I know an unusual boy
Cause I am the unusual girl
I’m moving to the real me
And I am the unusual girl
Who feels, I feel so much more
If only an unusual boy
Would choose to embrace me
I know that my unusual boy
He could be Mr. Right.

‘He Wants To Be Remembered’

Tiny Desk Contestant Finds His Voice While Fighting ALS

A couple of years ago, Bernie Dalton was a strong, physically fit, 40-something-year-old surfer. Every morning, he would get up at 4 A.M. to watch the sunrise in Santa Cruz, Calif. Bernie wasn’t a musician at the time, but he was passionate about music. His lifelong dream was to record an album.

Bernie had just started voice lessons with his teacher, Essence Goldman, when he received the diagnosis that he had bulbar-onset ALS, an aggressive form of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Doctors told him he had maybe a few years to live, and that he would lose most of his bodily functions well before that.

“It was time to get my butt in gear,” he says through an Eye Gaze Device at the beginning of his Tiny Desk Contest entry video, complete with an ultra-tiny desk and a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time on it. “I could no longer speak or sing, so I asked my singing teacher, Essence, to become my voice.”

Bernie formed the band Bernie And The Believers with friends. Together, along with Essence, they recorded an album called Connection. The songs were written by Bernie and sung by Essence and the band. Essence, who appears in the Tiny Desk entry video, was working on her own album when Bernie asked her to sing on his.

“I wanted to help him, but you know, I didn’t quite know how this would manifest,” Essence says. She said yes because, as she explains, Bernie’s music and his story have a rare urgency.
“What could be more important than this man’s mission to convey his values and his advice for living for future generations when he doesn’t have much time left?”

They sat down in Essence’s living room one evening and within a few minutes, they had a song. “It just poured right out,” she says. The track, “Simon’s Hero,” is what Essence calls a kind of sermon due to its lack of pop-mold rhyme. She says she had to step outside of herself to inhabit the words meant for Bernie’s grandchildren.

“The song talks about taking a step back and resonating with what really matters: each moment and the people who you care about,” Essence explains. “That faster is not always better. More is not the answer.”

Bernie’s lyrics reach a hopeful conclusion: “Know every situation / and all probable outcomes / hold love at the center of it all,” he writes.

“Bernie is the eternal optimist,” Essence laughs. “I have never met somebody who has more hope than Bernie Dalton. He is laying in a bed. He can only move his eyes. And he’s planning his next move.”

For his next immediate move, Bernie wants to move from the nursing home he’s in now, where he doesn’t receive the proper ALS-specific care, to his home. And he wants to be remembered.

“He wants to be remembered as a creative person and an artist, not as a sick guy,” Essence says, “He just wants people to hear the music.”

Bernie And The Believers Feat. Essence

Tiny Desk Concert

The story of Bernie and the Believers is the most powerful I’ve ever come across at the Tiny Desk. It’s about a beautiful act of compassion that ultimately led to this performance, and left me and my coworkers in tears.

I discovered the music of Bernie Dalton among the thousands of Tiny Desk Contest entries we received earlier this year. The band’s singer, Essence Goldman, had submitted the entry and shared Bernie’s story. You should hear her tell it in her own words at the Tiny Desk (and I choke up every time I hear it). In summary she said that a few years ago, Bernie — a father, a songwriter and a musician in his mid-forties, and an avid surfer with a day job as a pool cleaner — answered an ad she had posted offering voice lessons. Essence was a performer trying to manage her own career as a single mom, and Bernie was trying to improve his talents.

Bernie drove 90-minutes from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, eagerly showing up early to his voice lessons with Essence. But not long after they started working together, Bernie lost his voice. They didn’t think much of a it at first, but then things got worse. He had trouble swallowing and eating. Essence encouraged Bernie to see a doctor and after some tests Bernie Dalton was diagnosed with bulbar-onset ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He began to lose the use of his hands and, along with it, the ability to play guitar.

With a prognosis of only one-to-three years left to live, Essence offered to raise money so that Bernie and his daughter could travel together. But what Bernie wanted more than anything was to make a record. So he asked Essence to not just be his voice teacher, but his voice. From there, they got to business. Essence pulled together a team of producers, engineers and musicians, while Bernie guided the creative direction through gestures and a dry-erase board. They wrote and recorded a new song every day. Their first single, “Unusual Boy,” was the one they included in their 2018 Tiny Desk Contest entry.

Now Bernie’s friends have gathered here in Washington, D.C. to perform his songs. All the while, Bernie watched and listened from his hospital bed on the West coast, communicating with us in a live video feed through his eye-gaze device. What you are about to witness is the ultimate act of love: Essence sacrificing her own musical ambitions to fulfill the dreams of Bernie Dalton. Through tragedy there was beauty.

Set List “Unusual Boy” “In Your Shoes” “Simon’s Hero”

GoFundMe: Bernie's Song

Bernie was a pool guy and a single father—your average joe. But Bernie also had creative aspirations to be a singer-songwriter.

When Bernie began taking singing lessons with renowned Bay Area vocal coach and songwriter Essence Goldman, a deep friendship was formed.

Just months later, however, Bernie’s dream of becoming a singer-songwriter was tragically cut short when he was diagnosed with ALS. But Bernie was undaunted. With just months left to live, he and Essence set out to record an album of Bernie’s original music.

Wry, soulful, and heart-wrenching, these songs are a testament to his love for life—and his teenage daughter, Nicole.

'Bernie’s Song’ follows Bernie, now only able to communicate by blinking, as he travels to the recording studio where he, Essence, and their musicians put the finishing touches on the album, and as Bernie shares his musical legacy with Nicole.

Now, Bernie needs our help. He is currently in a nursing home, separated from his community of support, where he is struggling emotionally and physically. We need to bring Bernie home to his loved ones to spend the time he does have left with his family and friends.

Heartache fuels Essence’s new album’s dark beauty

November 17, 2016 - By PAUL LIBERATORE | p.liberatore@comcast.net | IJ correspondent

For musicians and songwriters, heartache and pain can sometimes be the inspiration they need to get their creative juices flowing again. She probably wouldn’t have wished it on herself, but, for Essence Goldman, the breakup of her 10-year marriage gave rise to the dark Americana songs on her new album, “Black Wings.”

Essence (she goes by that one name), a familiar performer at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley and on other Marin stages, found catharsis and healing in writing songs like “Over My Head,” an expression of the dread she felt when she dialed a suspicious number on her husband’s cell phone, realizing her worst fears. On the gut bucket blues “She Said,” she sings about a wise old woman telling her, “You should have left that man a long time ago. You’re strong enough, honey, to go it alone.”

The first single, “Headed North,” is about what’s sometimes known as “pulling a geographic,” trying to find escape and relief by getting in a car with a full tank of gas, lighting an American Spirit and driving away from trouble, “following the broken yellow line, nothing behind me.”

All her anger comes out in the album’s final track, a ticked-off tune that calls out her cheating spouse, labeling his lies and deceit for what they are. She titled it “B.S.,” but without the abbreviation.

After her divorce, and with her subsequent return to songwriting and recording, she found a support system in her co-writers, including Ira Marlowe, Rhys Williams, Alec McChesney, Merkley and Jeffrey Pease. A crew of top-notch musicians and producers, among them Roger Rocha, Danny Leuhring,

Daniel Berkman, Jackie Greene Greg Ramirez, Ari Gorman and David Simon-Baker, played guitars, banjo, keyboards, ukulele, glockenspiel, bass and programmed drums, giving Essence’s heartfelt and heartbreaking songs an authentic Americana instrumentation that lifts them above the slick and superficial.

Ironically enough, Goldman’s previous album, “A Dog Named Moo and his Friend Roo,” was a collection of children’s songs. Looking back on it, she has jokingly said the experience made her want to shoot herself. But it led her to the spare, mostly acoustic and ultra-modern sound that’s so special about “Black Wings,” a record by a grown-up woman dealing with the kind of personal sorrow that can either ruin a person or do what it did for her. It turned her into a real artist writing real songs about real life.

Essence gives heartache flight on ‘Black Wings’

Aidin Vaziri is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop music critic. E-mail: avaziri@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MusicSF

People will hear the songs of heartbreak and betrayal on Essence Goldman’s new album, “Black Wings,” and think they have it all figured out: marriage, children, midlife crisis, discontent, the usual. They have no idea.

“All of that is totally natural,” she says. “That is not what happened in my situation.”

It’s a foggy summer morning in the Inner Richmond, and having ditched the coffee shop blasting Maroon 5, the San Francisco singer-songwriter ducks into one of her neighborhood’s typically eclectic shopping arcades. where a furniture reupholstering business operates alongside a Chinese travel agent and acupuncture clinic.

With a paper cup of tea in hand to ward off the chill outside, she finds a pair of plastic chairs in the back and lays out the inventory that went into the making of the album: two marriages. Two children. One house fire. Four record deals. One producer who fell victim to addiction. Another stuck in the throes of alcoholism. The death of her father. Years of emotional abuse. And innumerable scars.

“I was paralyzed by my life,” she says, explaining the seven-year gap between her latest and previous release, “Feels Like the Future.”

“I was deeply grief-stricken, and I became isolated. I went into survival mode.”

Goldman, who headlines a record release party at the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley on Thursday, Aug. 25, spares no details recounting the traumas that turned her life upside down but reignited her passion for making music. The important thing is, with the support of a few key collaborators and confidantes, she came out of it with a career-defining album.

“I had to flat-line creatively to find myself,” says Goldman.

A San Francisco native born to a bohemian family in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood (“my dad always had a parrot on his shoulder and was smoking a joint,” she recalls), Goldman grew up listening to Bob Dylan and watching family friends like the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company come and go.

“My parents were awesome artists, but they were not cookie-cutter people in any way,” she says. “I went to 14 schools before the fifth grade.”

She wrote her first song when she was 15, shortly after her dad took her to see Prince’s “Purple Rain” tour at the Cow Palace in Daly City.

“It was like a lightning bolt went through my body,” Goldman says. “I could feel his honesty in the songs, and it changed me. I knew I wanted to do that, whatever my version of that would be.”

She made her name playing coffeehouses around the city and released her first album, “Conception,” in 1997, which led to an ill-fated deal with MCA.

A year later she won a national Lilith Fair Songwriting Contest (after losing the local competition), scoring the opportunity to tour with Sarah McLachlan and other major female artists. At the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, she performed alongside Natalie Merchant and Joan Baez in front of 80,000 people.

A subsequent deal with RCA Records also fell through, killing the momentum she had built by performing regularly at local venues like Slim’s and the Fillmore.

Goldman then released her second album, “Mariposa,” independently in 2003, which led to yet another contract. This time it was with Or Music, who signed her at the same time as Los Lonely Boys. While the company dealt with the success of that group’s breakout hit “Heaven,” Goldman was again cast adrift.

Feeling dejected, she turned her attention to starting a family. Goldman left her first marriage and entered into a tumultuous second marriage. Within a week of coming across some emails that suggested that her new husband was being unfaithful, she discovered she was pregnant with the first of their two children. A month later her father, whom she described as her rock, died.

“When I fell in love, I fell really hard,” she says. “I really wanted to have the family that I never had myself growing up because I was the child of divorce. I was going to do everything to make it work. I turned myself into June Cleaver. I was all about cooking, cleaning, keeping myself trim. I put my career aside.”

During that time, Goldman released just one album, a collection of children’s songs in 2013 called “A Dog Named Moo and His Friend Roo.”

“I wanted to shoot myself,” she says now of the experience. Then their house burned down.

Goldman took it as a clear sign that it was time to move on. After several rounds of therapy — together and alone — she separated from her husband and set out to reconnect with her muse.

Egged on by her support system — a stable of co-writers including Jeffrey Pease, Ira Marlowe, Alec McChesney and Merkley, who developed a system called Ping Song where they collaborated on material via text message; and producers like Roger Rocha, Dave Simon-Baker and Daniel Berkman — she came up with a set of songs that candidly retraced the failings of her relationship.

“By putting my experiences into songs, I don’t have to carry them anymore,” she says. “It was a very healing process, but I’m still going through the thick of it.”

The first single from the album, “Headed North,” has amassed more than 650,000 views on YouTube. Others, like “Camels and Diesel” and “Honeyed Out,” reveal a shift in her songwriting, moving away from an electronic-leaning folk sound to relatively spare and raw arrangements. The transformation had an unlikely source.

“The kids’ album was instrumental in creating my sonic development,” she says. “That was the first album where I let go of this notion of electronics. It was this organic sound and I loved it, but it was kids’ music. I decided what I wanted to do is take that palette and give it some teeth. That’s ‘Black Wings.’”

Through all her ups and downs and, well, more downs, Goldman never gave up on music.

“It was the thing that nobody could take away from me,” she says. “I think this record is the record I’ve been wanting to make all along. But I guess I couldn’t have made it if I hadn’t been through it — all of it.”

Duo finds an audience and each other in the music of Johnny Cash and June Carter

By PAUL LIBERATORE | p.liberatore@comcast.net | IJ correspondent

Danny Uzilevsky and Essence Goldman were on stage at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley recently shooting a promotional video for a Johnny Cash-June Carter tribute show they’re developing called “Johnny & June Forever: The Greatest Love Story Ever Sung.”

Coincidentally, Madison Flach, Sweetwater’s general manager and special events coordinator, had been searching for a live music act that she could pair with the Mill Valley Film Festival screening of the new documentary “The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash.”

When she overheard these two local musicians twining voices on “Ring of Fire,” “I Walk the Line,” “Folsom Prison Blues” and other classic Johnny Cash songs, she knew she’d found what she was looking for right in her own backyard.

“I thought it was kind of serendipitous,” she says. “We looked at some national acts for the show, but we thought it was awesome that these two are local. They’re super charismatic with each other on stage. And they sounded great. We loved them, so we asked if they were available.”

They certainly were. As a matter of fact, the duo will be premiering their “Johnny & June Forever” show at Sweetwater on Oct. 4 after the Sequoia Theater screening of the Cash documentary.

“This whole thing popped up very much without us trying,” Goldman says. “It fell right out of the sky.”

Although they had been working in the same Marin-San Francisco musical circles for years, they hadn’t really connected until Goldman, who goes by her first name, Essence, in her professional career, went into Uzilevsky’s Allegiant Records studio in San Anselmo in 2018 to begin recording a new album of her originaClOcNouTAntCryTsINonFgOs/HbaEcAkDeEdRby Uzilevsky’s roots rock band, Koolerator.

“The spark of our collaboration occurred during the recording of that album,” she recalls, sitting across from her new singing and songwriting partner on a leather coach in the studio where it all began. “It was a leap of faith. I’d never recorded a record with a live band before. But I was moved by the way Danny played ‘Father’s Daughter,’ a song I wrote for my dad. I was floored. It stole my breath.”

Rehearsing for a Hank Williams tribute show at Sweetwater with a cast of other local musicians, the pair discovered that, like Johnny and June, they had something going for them vocally and energetically.

“That was the first time we really started singing,” he remembers, sitting in his studio’s control room,
a big black acoustic guitar in his lap. “I came over to her house to rehearse and we just started harmonizing. I have a pretty low voice, she has a pretty high voice and we started meeting somewhere in the middle.”

Along the way, they wrote a killer country duet, “Quit You,” that will be on Goldman’s upcoming album. With its ear candy hook and airtight harmonies, it sounds like it could be a hit for any number of country duos.

“We wrote that song, and once we got started, we got the feel of where we’re going,” she says. “And it just kept going.”

Performing at the Papermill Creek Saloon in Forest Knolls and other local clubs, they added a humorous Loretta Lynn-Conway Twitty duet, “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly” to their growing repertoire of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and original tunes. After a set one night at San Francisco’s El Rio, a longtime Mission Street bar and club, a fan in the audience presented them with a pen and ink sketch he’d drawn of them as Johnny Cash and June Carter, writing “Johnny and June together again.”

“He was the first of a whole slew of people who made that comparison,” Uzilevsky says.

“Whenever we would play out, people would say, ‘You’re the reincarnated Johnny and June,’”
Goldman adds.

Same sensibility

They don’t look exactly like Johnny and June, but they share
the same rockabilly sensibilities and style. On the day of this interview, they were both wearing blue jeans, matching western belts and buckles, and pointy-toe, fence-climber cowboy boots. Her long dark hair fell over her shoulders in a cascade of country girl curls, and he rocked a classic pompadour that would look right at home in the Grand Ole Opry.

As these things go, Uzilevsky is more experienced and qualified than most to play and sing the Johnny Cash oeuvre. For nearly 20 years, he was lead guitarist and music director for his late father, artist and musician Marcus Uzilevsky, a Marin singer, songwriter and guitarist who performed a Johnny Cash tribute act, calling himself Rusty Evans. In a nod to his dad, who died in 2015, Uzilevsky sometimes goes by the stage name Danny Evans.

“After my dad’s thing ended, I was very relieved to be done with that,” he confesses. “But, you know, I don’t think I would have pursued anything like this if it was just about Johnny Cash. Having a June to bounce off of makes all the difference.”

Feeling that they may have inadvertently hit on a hot concept,

Goldman floated the idea of a Johnny and June act to her manager, thinking it could land them lucrative gigs at casinos and theaters. Her manager agreed,

showing some videos fans had posted to an East Coast booking agent, who was so impressed that he asked for a professional video he could use to promote their fledgling act.

That’s what they were shooting at Sweetwater when they were discovered and booked to be part of the Mill Valley Film Festival concert series. And, in January, they’ll perform as Johnny and June in a New York City showcase for talent buyers who book regional arts centers across the country.

Back to their Roots

In her career, the 47-year-old Goldman, a single mother of two school-age children, has made a series of solo albums, the last being 2016’s “Black Wings,” a heart-wrenching collection of spare Americana songs about the painful breakup of her marriage. In my IJ review, I called it “a record by a grown-up woman dealing with the kind of personal sorrow that can either ruin a person or do what it did for her — turn her into a real artist writing real songs about real life.” Last year, she gained national recognition when she was featured in an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, singing songs by Bernie Dalton, a former vocal student of hers who lost his voice to ALS and died in May.

“I don’t think I would have pursued anything like this if it was just about Johnny Cash. Having a June to bounce off of makes all the difference,” says Danny Uzilevsky about the pair’s Johnny Cash-June Carter

tribute show.

At this mature point in her career, Goldman has happily found her métier in roots music, a genre the 50-year-old Uzilevsky has been listening to and playing all his life, saying it “just flows through my veins.” One of Marin’s top guitar-playing singer-songwriters, he’s honed his talents in a series of local bands — Chrome Johnson, Honey Dust, Elephant Listening Project, his dad’s Johnny Cash act — and now sees a chance to break out of the pack with what feels, at least at this early point, like a charmed partnership.

How charmed? The real Johnny and June had one of the most storied and tumultuous love affairs in country music history. Uzilevsky and Goldman, though, are coy about any romantic inclinations they may have, saying only, “It’s complicated.”

But they can’t hide how stoked they are about the music they’re making together. While neither of them sees themselves doing their Johnny and June act forever, they’re betting on it becoming a springboard to their ultimate goal: making a name for themselves with their own original songs.

“I feel like it’s one of those situations where we make each other stronger,” he says. “Neither one of us is lacking without the other, but when we get together it transcends. We make each other better. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s inspiring.”