David Berman Changed the Way So Many of Us See the World
“I wonder how David Berman is doing?” It’s a question every serious Silver Jews fan asked themselves from time to time. To be a fan of his work was to worry about him. He’d had serious problems with dangerous drugs and he’d attempted suicide, and in 2009, when he ended Silver Jews, he wrote an open letter in which he revealed, with shame, that his father was Richard Berman, a lobbyist who David said “led campaigns against animal rights, trade unions, and even opposed anti-drunk-driving groups.” In interviews, he talked about how he often had little money. More recently, he described himself as someone suffering from “treatment-resistant depression,” and he mentioned that he and his wife Cassie no longer lived together. It was a lot for anyone to handle. Even if we didn’t know him personally, we worried.
Yesterday David Berman died, at the age of 52. If he had passed a year ago it would have been equally horrible but somehow different, since he hadn’t been heard from in so long. But after almost a decade of near-silence, Berman returned in 2019 with a new project name and a new album and plans for a tour. The record, Purple Mountains, was one of his best, filled with his richest production and lyrics as sharp as any he’d written. He seemed unsteady in the small amount of press he did to promote the project, but it sounded like he was hanging in there. The sheer amount of activity around Berman this year suggested he was coming out of something, as if we might set the worrying aside for a little while.
David Berman wrote songs. He also wrote poems, truly great ones, but most people who know his name know him because of his music. His tunes were basic, but he wrote melodies you could hum. When I think of lyrics from his songs I hear them in his voice, his chesty croak rising and falling along the handful of notes he could reliably hit. It feels important to note that his lyrics, which seemed to be beamed in from another dimension, were used in service of songs that were generally sturdy and sounded good wherever they were needed.
Still, though, those words. Jazz critic Gary Giddins, writing about the work of Ornette Coleman, once noted “the music hits me in unprotected areas of the brain, areas that remain raw and impressionable,” and Berman’s words functioned like that too. He had a gift for writing that, ironically, and in a very Berman-esque way, is hard to talk about. His use of language is so specific, it’s hard to find some of your own to describe it in a way that doesn’t diminish what you’re trying to convey. “The meaning of the world lies outside the world” is how he put a related idea, in another context, in his song “People.” But the way I’m describing it now makes it sound like something heady and tangled and complicated. It was the opposite. Berman had a knack for representing what was right in front of you in a way that made you see it as if for the first time.
Last night and into this morning, my Twitter timeline was alight with quotes from Berman songs and poems (his 1999 book Actual Air, recently reissued by his longtime label Drag City, is as powerful as his songwriting). People were sharing lines not just because they are funny and clever and moving, though they are that, too. They shared them, I’m betting, because in each case the lines in question lit something inside of them, and the warmth and illumination from that moment never went out. Berman’s writing could be so evocative, and often in such a simple way, that when the listener or reader took it in and felt that spark of recognition ignited, it became part of them. “It was the light in things that made them last,” he wrote in his poem “Governors on Sominex.”
Berman altered my perception, permanently. Because I’ve listened to and read him, I see city skylines as jagged rows of car keys, the ground sometimes seems to wobble in the moonlight, and I know that they build corduroy suits from gutters. When I drive by a yard filled with broken stuff I imagine the crumbled objects getting cold after nightfall, lonely as piles of misfit toys stranded on an uncharted island. Airport bars look like submarines, and when I turn the handle on the faucet too quickly and a blast of water comes out, I see jewelry. Because of David Berman, I know in my heart, as sure as I’m sitting here now, that all water is classic water.
Sometimes I’ll see things that aren’t from his songs and think of how they could be: a “Get Well Soon” balloon stuck in a power line, a carpet rolled up on a street that looks like it has a body inside, naked mannequins standing in some abandoned store’s window. These are fragments of lyrics that might have been, if only he’d been there to see what I’m seeing. Berman could seem like an alien who’d landed on Earth and was wandering the world looking for clues about human behavior; if you connected with his work, you started to see those clues yourself.
I never met David Berman, but I interviewed him in 2002. In those days, he mostly did email interviews, if he did them at all. I sent my questions over, including a more abstract one involving a strange, maybe-true anecdote I’d heard: Apparently there were Germans who thought, since the word “hut” means “hat” in German, that the restaurant was actually named “Pizza Hat.” I needed to know what Berman thought about this, since it sounded like something out of a Silver Jews song. When I didn’t hear back for a while, I emailed him to check in and he sent me an apology. He’d been consumed with watching the NFL playoffs and drinking what he said were many cases of beer. His answers came in a day later and of course they were great. A few minutes after the piece published, Berman emailed me to say that I’d identified one song incorrectly, and he didn’t care, but he assumed the rabid “Joos” fans would be all over me on the message boards. He was joking about it, but he also seemed genuinely concerned about my embarrassment. I made the change quickly and emerged unscathed.
Purple Mountains was a brilliant album, and it came as such a relief, because so often when an artist returns after an extended hiatus, they come back in a lower gear. But it was also a sad album, because Berman shared the circumstances of his life in his songs, and it seemed grim. In “Darkness and Cold,” he laid out a scene where someone he loves deeply has moved on, but he cannot. “The light of my life is going out tonight/In a pink champagne Corvette/I sleep three feet above the street/In a Band-Aid pink Chevette.” It’s such a beautiful tumble of images, rhythm, sounds and meaning; sleep, three, feet, street; the Corvette next to the Chevette. He’s not quite on the ground yet, but sleeping in that car is pretty close. And it’s the color of something that covers wounds.
He filled the album with lines like this, lines that seemed hopeless. But he was funny, and his delivery was so warm, it made it easy to overlook the deep sadness dripping from every word. Even so, you can’t mourn the loss of David Berman without cracking a few jokes. There’s another new song that I’ve played over and over, and this one isn’t so funny. It’s called “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” and in it, Berman imagines himself, the songwriter, as a person whose work functions as a kind of sanctuary, welcoming people and comforting them when they need it. I listen to it and think about how he is exactly right, and how his work is something I entered because I needed to be in a place where my craziness made sense. I wish so badly that he could have found a similar comfort on this Earth.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
