Pulled this bio for DB off their Artist Page. Written by Dave DiMartino. Boomtown, Bedtime Stories, and Triage in Yahoo's album catalog. Seems Springsteen loved Bedtime Stories. Bet it reminded him of Tunnel of Love.

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An extremely underrated Los Angeles-based songwriter, David Baerwald (b. July 11, 1960, Oxford, Ohio) has chronicled '90s American life more profoundly than most of his contemporaries; the result, particularly evident on his 1993 album Triage, has been a repertoire of vivid, sometimes painful songs that personalize characters and situations other writers have generally preferred to ignore. Just as the best rap music has typically presented viewpoints and scenarios in an almost journalistic fashion--documenting both an attitude for the converted and an inaccessible lifestyle for unknowing, middle-class suburbia--Baerwald too reports on what he sees. And perhaps because he lives in L.A., where gang warfare, drug commerce and drive-by shootings are normal facts of life, what he sees is a society collapsing into itself in fear, hatred and helplessness.

Drawing inspiration from such writers as Paul Bowles, Raymond Carver, Tennessee Williams and Raymond Chandler, Baerwald first gained national attention as one-half of David + David, an L.A. duo featuring the singer with partner David Ricketts; generally, Baerwald sang and provided lyrics to music mostly supplied by multi-instrumentalist Ricketts. The pair's A&M album Boomtown was a critical sensation upon its arrival in 1986, largely for its unique portrayal of Los Angeles as a land of shattered dreams. "Welcome to the boomtown," sang Baerwald on the album's opening track, "Pick a habit/We got plenty to go around/And all that money/Makes such a succulent sound." The song's mixture of lyrical resignation and its near-hypnotic drone instantly drew in listeners and made the song a top 40 hit, pushing Boomtown to No. 39 on the album charts.

When Ricketts became involved in the production of friend Toni Childs' 1988 album Union, Baerwald eventually went his own way. After an initial album project with producer Steve Berlin fell by the wayside ("It was just too crazy, it was too unmusical, and it was too personal," the singer later said), Baerwald returned in 1990 with Bedtime Stories, an even more mature and focused statement about urban alienation and loneliness. Produced mostly by Larry Klein, who collaborated with Baerwald on six songs, the album contains one of the singer's most memorable works, "Young Anymore," a vignette wherein a father secretly watches his ex-wife wait in her car outside their daughter's ballet class. "And I am her daddy," he sings, "and I'm a cold hearted man." Baerwald's skill as a storyteller, in recounting a large tale with very few words, is exceptional. One of Bedtime Stories' biggest fans, in fact, was fellow storyteller Bruce Springsteen, who told many journalists at the time that the album was one of his favorites.

Baerwald's next album, 1993's stunning Triage, was in many ways an overload, sonically, lyrically and even visually: Its gruesome cover, which depicted two bloodied hands extended before an American flag, may be one reason the record never even entered the charts. Loosely based around the political ramifications of the album title--"triage" is an emergency medical term roughly meaning "save the wounded who can be saved, and abandon the rest"--the disc was a further refinement of the subject matter Baerwald had already explored, and a very powerful one. Using vocal samples of Jim Jones, George Bush and Congressional testimony that "Jonestown was a CIA mind-control experiment," Triage was an elaborate aural montage of moral decay--Baerwald's ambitious statement that the American government had wholly gone awry. Most memorable was the album's sinister opening cut, "A Secret Silken World," the lyrics of which perfectly set Triage's tone: "Don't you love to hurt the weak/When they refuse to fight/When there's no need to be judgmental/No need to be polite/All you need to know is that/Might equals right/On a lazy kind of night." In case the album didn't make its point succinctly enough--and it certainly did--Baerwald further dedicated it to Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, John J. McCloy, John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, Henry Kissinger, James Baker III and George Bush, "in the sincere hope that there is a God and that He is vengeful beyond all comprehension."

Soon afterward, Baerwald played a pivotal role in the making of Sheryl Crow's massive best-selling solo debut, 1993's Tuesday Night Music Club.

This Biography was written by Dave DiMartino