“Rolling Over Me” by Eddie Berman

It’s been a pretty good era for folk-rock all things considered, and this is certainly true for rising star recording artist Eddie Berman. His last couple of cuts have been getting a nice response from critics and fans around the country, and in his new single “Rolling Over Me,” he tackles traditional folk balladry with an even deeper soul connection to the music than many of his supporters had expected from him.

This song is the first single from Eddie’s upcoming album ‘Signal Fire,” release date 1/19 by Nettwerk.

There are no big frilly guitar parts in “Rolling Over Me,” any swollen harmonies, nods to the alternative Americana movement, nor the sense that we’re listening to something that has been derived from a more well-known source in the game today. Contrarily, this is all original content that bleeds organic melodicism from one verse to the next, and as much as I would like to compare it to some of the other feel-good folk-rock ballads I’ve had the chance to spin in the latter half of 2023, it’s too unique a release from its creator to juxtapose with the competition. Eddie Berman is a humble yet quite enterprising musician, and if that wasn’t well known before this single’s release, it’s going to be part of his journey now.

There are different methods an artist will employ when trying to produce some resilience in a verse, but I strongly prefer what this player is doing in the build-up to the chorus in “Rolling Over Me” to what a lot of the other rising stars in his scene would do in their own work.

You can’t overstate how much love this singer is putting forth in the material just through his delicate vocals alone, and though he’s got every reason to keep our attention and focus on the forefront of the mix; where he’s dominant in every potential way, he spreads out the charm well into the bucolic backdrop we find. Berman isn’t withholding anything at the microphone; everything is paced around his voice and what he’s able to do with it, and provided he sticks with this present formula, it’s going to bring him a lot of fame and fortune soon.

“Mine All Mine” really wowed me not just as a music critic but as a lifelong fan of the folk-rock genre, and I think that with the arrival of “Rolling Over Me,” Eddie Berman adds much more definition to his artistic profile than he was already working with. He’s got a laid-back attitude in this single that grabbed my attention right from the get-go, and besides his talent as a singer, he’s a rather powerful creative mind, inviting different tiers of expressiveness into this performance than he ever had to just to make it more immersive for the audience.

Berman might not be your parents’ singer/songwriter, but someone who wants to evolve the folk-rock genre as much as he wants to keep its best attributes as holy as history will stand for, and he’s worthy of a lot of accolades this September and beyond as far as I am concerned.

Trace Whittaker