Poetic Groans and Musical Apprehensions

By Robert L. Doerschuk.

The fine line between poetry and music blurs in the ironic, apocalyptic work of David Berman’s Silver Jews. His biggest concern is that people are too dumb to read and too tired to hear. Steven Wright and Larry David grew up to be writer/comedians. Their humor is deadpan and depressed. Each reports on the absurdities of urban life in a listless monotone. Both hide bits of glittering insight inside enigmatic, vaguely disturbing vignettes. Neither, however, plays a guitar or leads a band. That’s why we have David Berman. As the founder and locus of the Silver Jews, the Virginia-bred bard creates a rare balance between word and sound. His music is understated, if not narcoleptic. The band - which consists largely of whoever can make it to the studio or the gig - sounds like it had just crawled out of bed. It strums and clunks at low volume, perhaps in order to follow Berman’s mumbled vocals. Every now and then it stirs itself into an unconvincing crescendo, only to lose interest after a minute or two. This is perfect accompaniment for Berman’s tunes. God forbid that anyone should rip a sizzling solo through, say, “Random Rules,” the opening cut on the latest Silver Jews album, American Water. Berman moans the opening line - “In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection” - as if stupefied by a migraine headache. The point here, as in all of Berman’s songs, is the lyric. Playing his songs with blazing chops would be like framing a Rembrandt with neon lights. Berman’s relationship with words goes back a long way. Born in 1967 in Williamsburg, the son of a restaurant executive, he felt vague literary aspirations at some point in his youth. These led him into higher education, from which he bailed at age 25 with an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts. With two fellow refugees from academia, guitarist Steve Malkmus and drummer Bob Nastanovich, he recorded a few experimental pieces. Malkmus and Nastanovich were, at this same time, getting nibbles of label interest for their own band, Pavement - which made the Silver Jews’ breakthrough that much more unexpected. “There was no plan,” Berman remembers. “Drag City offered to put out Pavement’s second seven-inch. Right about that same time Dan and Dan (Dan Osborn and Dan Koretzky, co-owners of the label) came down to meet Stephen. I was around, and kind of by accident they heard these tapes I had been making at home. I never had any ideas they were releasable, but they were interested; they wanted to put them out. ” Which they did in 1993, as an EP titled The Arizona Record. One thing led to another, and soon Berman was in the studio with Malkmus and Nastanovich, cutting the first Silver Jews album, Starlite Walker (1994). “That, for me, is where the real band starts,” he says. “Everything before that seems like sketchbooks. The sketches were released before the work. Usually sketches are released after the main body of work, but our education was caught on tape and released before we actually put it into practice. Two years later, Starlite Walker was followed by a second Silver Jews full-length album, The Natural Bridge, with a fresh lineup of players. American Water, with yet another group of Jews and a guest shot from Steve Malkmus, followed. While all this was going on, Berman was pursuing a parallel career as a poet. His was a familiar voice in coffeehouse recitals around New York, and his works were published in high-cred literary magazines, including Open City and The Baffler. In July 1999, he published his own collection of poems, Actual Air (Open City Books, $12.95). The handiwork there is similar to what we’ve heard from the Silver Jews, with an awareness of trivial but revealing detail and a fondness for word juxtapositions that seem bizarre and first but make more sense the longer you chew over them. The similarities that bind Berman’s prose and music work are as intriguing as the differences that separate them. We had this and more in mind when we spoke with Berman shortly after the release of his book. “The Inaudible Groove”At the very beginning, was music your main inspiration? “I don’t know. I’ve thought back on that, but when I was a little kid, I wasn’t really inspired by anything. I don’t think you could look back even to when I was 14 and say, “This person will do something in the arts. ” I wasn’t that way. No one in my family had ever done anything in any kind of creative endeavor, especially not for a living. I wasn’t a big music fan. I didn’t necessarily read a lot. I was kind of like a blank slate. When I got inspired, I think it was more by personality: the people around me, people I worked with, my cousin. I was inspired by social behavior. Then music became talky; it got very social. “You didn’t play music at all as a kid? “Well, I was a music fan. I had a guitar and I would make noise in the basement with my friends. But for the most part, what I like to do is to find blank spots on the map, where I don’t think things have been worked out yet. At that point, I really hadn’t found a place for anything I could do - especially when I was just making noise in the basement, because we don’t need anyone else to make noise in the basement anymore. When I started putting words to songs, I never made any big claims for what I was doing, but I did realize that because it was so word-oriented, it seemed to fill a unique position. In fact, when we started doing songs, it was so lyrically based that we would record on electric guitars without amplifiers, just using them acoustically. The music was always a pedestal to the words. That’s been changing over time; it’s become more musical in the sense that now we have actual passages of music with no words, where for a long time the minute the song started there was singing, and when it ended there was singing, with no solos or anything. “Is the emphasis on the words the reason why textures are so dry on your records? “Yeah. It’s a conversational vibe. There’s always cognizance of the fact that some day this will be for an audience. It’s an implicit sort of an idea; it’s not something that’s ever phrased, that there won’t be any production sleight-of-hand. It’s just a way to have as few intermediaries between the instrument and the eventual output through the speaker in someone’s house. The music tries to be non-deceptive; it gives some respect to the listener. Not that you can’t put grandeur into music, but that’s just not our strong point. We just do what we can do and try to be real. There’s a real discipline to playing very quietly and building dynamics around the flow of words. How hard was it to get the band’s latest incarnation to play within those limits? That happened pretty fast. We practiced for about a week before we started recording (American Water), three hours every day. I listened to some of the tapes from the practice. It’s funny, because each song took about 10 different forms in the rehearsals. A lot of what turned out to be ballads on the record were faster originally, and “Blue Arrangements,” which is a rock song on the record, was more of a ballad. It was mainly contingent on the day we were playing things. I took that into the studio too. We were all keyed personally into each other. We got along very well, and we were partying a lot in and out of the studio. It wasn’t a work situation; it was very organic and easygoing. There wasn’t too much generaling going on; it was more biological, at the tempo we were feeling that day, at the pace of our own speech and the way our bodies felt. There was some fatigue going on, which for us translates into dynamics. An intellectual energy and a physical fatigue - I think we all felt that. “What’s the key to sounding good at low volume? “Well, we all played live. Because we were playing a low volume, we didn’t have to worry too much about bleeding over into each other. None of the vocals were live, of course. We never played more than three takes of a song. Sometimes we would play for 15 minutes because we were enjoying ourselves so much. A lot of the songs that have fadeouts imply the fact that it went on for a long time. It was funny; it was like playing when you know that what you’re playing isn’t practically useful. We would just keep playing because we were having fun, not because we knew that there was a part we were going to use 15 minutes into a song. It’s just that no one wanted to stop. It’s like college football versus pro football. “That’s probably how the longest cut, “Night Society,” came about. “Yeah, that was at least half an hour long. “That was also the only track on American Water that lacked vocals. Were you trying to show that you guys could stretch out instrumentally? “Yeah. It’s also a respite from all the words. I recognize that there’s a barrage of language going on, so these instrumental breaks are to cleanse the palate. Also, we had a different band on this record, and it’s a band I could trust to play their instruments, which hasn’t always been true in the past. “Inside American Water” “Is it part of a conscious strategy to keep the sound of the Silver Jews as low-tech as possible? “I don’t think it’s conscious. It’s more a kind of after-the-fact strategy, in the sense of, “Well, we can get away with this stuff because that’s what we built our music on all along. ” I don’t want to call it laziness, but - and this might be a rationalization - when I was a kid, I can think of so many different songs where I would listen for the mistake. Whether it’s on “The Girl from the North Country,” on Nashville Skyline (by Bob Dylan). Or there’s a Replacements song on Pleased to Meet Me where Paul Westerberg screams, “What are you gonna do with your life? ” and Tommy (Stinson, bassist) says, “Absolutely nothing! ” And you can hear Paul Westerberg laugh, and he drops his tambourine. There’s lots of little mistakes like that, which I liked. That’s charisma, that’s personality. It’s not scripted. There’s enough music that’s choreographed that, again, I can feel like it’s a place where we can work and not too many people are working. “Did you record the guitar parts on American Water direct? “Some of the leads went direct, but mostly it was amplified. “What kind of guitar did you use for those open strummed rhythm parts? “That’s a guitar that everybody I know makes fun of because it’s such an ’80s instrument. It’s an Ibanez Lodestar 2. It’s very tacky, but it’s my main guitar. “It sounds like a hollow-body. “But it’s not. It’s a regular electric guitar. On some songs I would go over the rhythm track with an acoustic guitar, but we’d let ‘em both be there together. “You use the rhythm guitar strum as a unifying device throughout American Water, but the drum part is constantly changing, even from one section of a song to the next. “That’s out of necessity. I write these songs in a very simple way. I try to overcome the simplicity with variety on other levels, like the drums. Percussion on a lot of stuff like that is where we try to get a different coloring to what may be constant and stable, which is generally my tone of voice or the guitar. “Did you arrange those drum parts? “Tim (Barnes) came up with almost everything. Everybody pretty much came up with what they’d play. I would be corrective, in the sense that if I didn’t like a part I’d say, “Try something else. ” The way I instruct someone on how to play is, I’ll illustrate a feeling. I’ll be like, “Play like you just got back from a tour of Vietnam. ” Then I’ll tell a story. In introducing a song to the players in the first practices, I would tell them the story of the song and how I felt the band should be playing. It was more attitudinal instruction, as opposed to more pragmatic ideas. “So on a relatively acerbic track like “Smith & Jones Forever,” you’d ask the band to bring more of an edge to their performance. “Right. I might say, “I want you to play with a certain amount of desperation to go along with the characters, but a kind of desperation whose end point is a kind of peace through exhaustion. ” The characters are exhausted people, so you want to play with an exhausted bite. The band needs to be perceptive enough to think in terms of mood and emotion. That’s why it was important, when I saw the drummer, to read the vibe on his face, and his actual personality and attitude, and his receptiveness to ideas about charisma and things like that, as much as it was that he could actually play. “You hired Tim because of his vibe? “Oh, definitely. Personal contact had to be there. Just about a week before we started to practice, I went to a show in New York, and there was a band playing called Ethics Green. I really liked them, but I particularly liked Tim and his drumming, and I liked the smile on his face. I liked his vibe. I asked him to play, and he said yes. “In addition to altering the drum parts, you distinguish some songs on American Water by adding elements that nudge them one way or another - a trumpet and a flute on “Random Rules,” for example, and a Rhodes electric piano that kicks off “Wild Kindness. ” How do you find the right effects to add? “That’s based mainly on suggestion. After the basic tracks are done, we may go in with an idea of doing that, although going into “Random Rules” I didn’t know what it would be. That’s why I like to have a lot of people in the studio who can come up with ideas. I tell them, “Listen, even if I say no 99 times in a row, I still want you to keep coming up with suggestions. ” A lot of those extra sounds were suggested by Mike (Fellows), the bass player. I would let him have free rein to come up with ideas. A lot of things didn’t make it on: Each song might have had four or five overdubs, and maybe two or three would make it on. It was just a process of doing as much as possible with the time we had and worrying later about what we would leave in. “Was that scratch/wah-wah figure on “People” performed in the basic tracks? “That was afterwards. That song didn’t have an instrumental ending in practice. This was another example of we enjoyed playing the song and we kept going. Then we were like, “What can we do on the end here? ” I asked Steve (Malkmus), and he pulled out the wah-wah and played it, and it sounded good. That was also a case of me being interested in making a kind of dance song out of guitar, bass, and drums, without using any kind of keyboards, because I don’t think that dance music inherently has to have that. This was as disco as we’d ever get. I was happy to do it with just the basic three. ””Send in the Clouds” has some cool backwards synth sounds. “Those were from two different keyboards that Mike used. I can’t exactly remember what they were. That was just a breakdown part. It was like, “Mike, we’re going out for a beer. Put something in here. ” And he did. “On “Like Like The The The Death” several lines in each verse are delivered with a break in the rhythm, leaving just voice and single notes on guitar. Where did that idea come from? “That was a weird one. I wrote that song from three different parts that were glued together. The challenge was to make them cohere. In its initial writing, it was so broken, almost like language/poetry psychedelia, that I became interested in the stop/startedness of the song, and then the chorus seems by comparison to be soaring and broad and muscular. That was an experiment to see how far the song could stretch. It could stretch further because of its origin as a compound of different parts. “The only song on American Water that nods to another genre, as opposed to being intrinsic to your own style, is “Honk If You’re Lonely. ” You could peddle that number all over Nashville. ” That was the idea. A lot of people have said, “Is that a cover of something? ” It was a songwriting exercise on my part, to see if I could write something that sounded like a ’60s country/honky-tonk standard. I have a very distinct idea about what I can do as a songwriter, but I also want to challenge myself to do other things. One of them was to write very simple lyrics and come up with something that could be almost like a standard. It’s enough of a blank slate that it could have been anyone’s song. It doesn’t have a personal imprint. “How did you get the band into this less personal cut? “I just asked for a kind of celebration. The guy who’s singing the song is obviously a lonely loser, but I didn’t want it to be dejected at all. It’s actually uplifting in some way. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just “tears in your beer. ” In most songs, I try to find out as soon as possible what clichés it may be playing to, and then I write away from that. “Vicious Idiocy”Your emphasis on lyrics delivers a pretty clear hint to critics about how to approach what you’re doing. “I guess, but I do feel like there’s been a lot of back-handed praise or negative response to the Silver Jews. “What do you mean? “Well, you know, I was looking on the Internet the other day. I saw some reviews for Sidewalk.com - and they were essentially the same review from different cities. They started out, “Try as you might to hate the Silver Jews, they’re just too damn good to hate… . ” That kind of nailed it on the head: Why would anyone try to hate us from the beginning? There’s a big strain of anti-intellectual sympathy in American pop culture. “If there’s any bastion of pseudo-intellectual criticism in American pop culture, it’s certainly in the realm of music journalism. You’d think these people would be thrilled. “Who knows? Maybe people attack what they hate about themselves. But I’ve been constantly surprised at a lot of these rock critics who like to dabble in extrapolating way out of context of what a music can be. When you open Spin, they’re trying to make a case for Garbage being a really conceptual deal, with all of these intents and purposes and stuff like that. They’re working so hard to make something out of nothing. So when they’re given something where work can actually be put into it, as far as listening, there’s some stubbornness and reluctance. I’ve always found that. Lately I’ve been more unapologetic about the fact that the culture is dumb. The last thing we need right now is more dumbness. There’s nothing wrong with intelligence, even though there’s this reverse snobbery in the magazine world. “Is this a question of the culture being dumb in general or of pop music appealing to a specifically dumb fragment of the culture? “There are different fragments of culture, but it seems like, if you find a fragment of the culture that’s interested in thought and meaning, it’s become commonplace to get your Dumb and Dumber kinds of things as entertainment. Comedy, especially, which a lot of people go for, has kind of come down to - with very few exceptions - laughing at people doing really dumb stuff. Sometimes I feel like you can measure what’s going on in a culture by its comedy, and it seems like a lot of smart people, maybe because everything’s going so well economically and there’s no wars, just want to come home and laugh at people slipping on a banana peel. “People have always laughed at the misfortunes of others. “That’s old, right. “But nowadays there’s a judgmental aspect to that laughter: This guy deserves to slip on a banana peel because he’s too fat, or he’s a Republican, or whatever. “Yeah, for the most part it’s been that way - The Jerk, Steve Martin, things like that. David Letterman added a lot to that: There’s a lot of “at least we’re not that way. ” “What comedians do you consider exceptions to this trend? “I think that Conan O’Brien, what he does on his show, is really remarkable, for the reason that he has been able to bring a kind of benign intelligence into his comedy, where it’s smart and it’s funny, but it’s not imposing and it’s not critical. Letterman made the comedy smart, but it’s almost like meanness was part of the baggage. And he (O’Brien) took the meanness out of it in a way that I wasn’t sure anyone could do. I was like, “Oh, someone can do this and still keep it smart! ” “The assumption is that when there’s an edge to something, that edge could be cruel. “Or a submerged anger that is actually anger at a different variety of meanness that has no point. I mean, when you listen to Bill Hicks, some people are shocked by it. I don’t like everything he does, but he does rail against people buying into the dumbing-down of the culture. It’s so unusual to hear someone say, “Look, this is ridiculous! It’s OK to think about things and talk seriously about things! ” It’s kind of shocking to hear someone say that, because there’s this reverse-snobbery thing, where if you try to talk seriously or fool any character in a movie who’s impassioned, unless it’s a romantic comedy, it’s ridiculous. But if you read a Russian novel, everybody has all that fervor. We’re the exact opposite of a Russian novel now: There’s no fervor. It shouldn’t be one way or another, like people running around and eating their hearts out because life is so painful or there’s so much to be done. But it seems like we’ve gone way over to this other numb, kind of cackling extreme that’s a waste of time for me. “What’s In a Word? ” “What role does humor play in your music and your poetry? “In both of them, it kind of plays the same role, which is as a palliative. I don’t feel that comfortable being heavy all the time. I could, but I’m making concessions to the world I live in. So I use humor as a way to say something to get my horse in through the gates of Troy. Or sometimes it’s the opposite: I may set up a joke with sadness. But I can never seem to work with just one or the other, or very rarely. They seem to be one and the same. That seems to be part of a Jewish tradition too. There’s a nobility to humor, and there’s a strength to sadness. So you form a bridge between things that you can’t normally see a bridge between. “In your lyrics, that often seems to come down to creating short phrases and images that kind of jump off the record. ”I’m fighting with myself, because there’s a natural tendency to go with the cheap shot. “There are plenty of examples on American Water: “Like background singers, they all come in threes. ” And the line about the coda in “Smith & Jones Forever,” which is kind of an inside musician’s joke. Or ”I’ve been lonely since she found Christ,” which is like a country line, but with a sting to it. “It’s turning clichés on their heads. I’m thinking of my line about the “honky-tonk psychiatrist. ” Now, when I take a sad situation, like the cliché of someone crying in his beer in a bar, I don’t feel that I’m trying to dismantle it by then turning the bartender into a psychiatrist or reducing it to the absurdity of there actually being a psychiatrist in a honky-tonk. I feel that I’m trying to reinvigorate the cliché. So it’s not out of a disrespect for these situations; it’s in a sense trying to save them from being deadened. “And when you approach a level of ire, you do so gently enough to make your point without getting too snarly about it. “Yeah. I don’t feel comfortable with extremes, and I don’t feel comfortable with the middle of the road. So I tend to set extremes next to each other. The title of the record, for instance, with “American,” which is maybe as abstract a concept as you can envision, and “Water,” maybe the most concrete image you can envision, put together is basically nothing. There’s no such thing as “American water,” but I like to put two extremes together like that, extremes of humor or extremes of sadness, and see if they can interlock and create a continuity rather than create a friction. “Is it really as simple as just juxtaposing unrelated things? “Sometimes I do that, and it’s kind of a cheap comic effect or a cheap aesthetic effect. But I don’t feel like I’m putting them in juxtapositions; I feel like I’m putting things together that have a true natural relationship that’s under the radar. It’s not an artificial relationship. “What do you mean by “under the radar”? “Well, people classify and categorize elements of life. Like, I have my book here. I’ll open it up to any page, and here’s a line about “scars on a toymaker’s hand,” right? “Toys” and “scars” are put into different categories really easily by people’s minds. An old toymaker would most definitely have scars on his hands, but when you look at a toy you’re not going to make the bridge back to that. So it’s not a weird juxtaposition; it’s a true juxtaposition. It’s just weird because your mind isn’t gonna travel the whole way every time you look at an object, to find all the points that it’s a nexus for. “Which poem is that? “That’s in the “Cantos for James Michener. ” … There, again: “Cantos” and “Michener. ” An easy cheap shot. But it was more than that. At first it kind of was a cheap shot, when I wrote it down. But then I started to learn more about James Michener. First he was just the guy with the ridiculous Reader’s Digest books on my grandfather’s shelves. But then I learned that he had donated his art collection to the University of Texas, and I was living in Austin then, so every week I’d go hang out in that gallery and look at those paintings. Then I started to see that he was a benefactor to the writing program at UT. So it stopped becoming such a joke, and after a while it really was for him, because he was really doing these things. “Although the use of the word “cantos” … “Yeah, it’s still gonna retain that tease. But you can tease someone lovingly. “Poetry vs. Music” “There are parallels in your lyric and poetic writing. “In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection,” from “Random Rules,” kind of mirrors “She was destroyed when they were busted for operating a private judicial system within U.S. borders,” from your poem “Classic Water. ””Oh, yeah. Everyone gets one weapon, or two weapons if they’re lucky. Certainly, if you meet someone who has a method to their fiction writing, you’d find that they use some of those methods in their socializing at a party. As much as artists want you to think they leave their work behind when they leave the desk, it can’t be true. “So what are the differences between writing for music and writing for the page? Is it just a question of structure? “It goes beyond that. There’s a certain Charlie Rich-ian emotion that’s simple and simplistic, which you can go for in music. That’s sometimes achievable in poetry, but it’s more difficult, because music plays on the heart. Poetry can play on the heart too, but it takes longer and it’s much harder. The real difference is that it’s easier to write a song but it’s harder to write a good song. “Because you can rely on things other than words when writing a song. “Right. That’s why I have a double relationship with it. I’d rather sit down and write a poem: I know what the materials are. There aren’t many variable factors you have to control, like you do in a studio, so there’s less anxiety in sitting down to write. But I’ll never get as much pleasure out of any poem as I get when a song all comes together, because that’s miraculous. “Do you sit down with the intention of writing either a poem or a song? “Yeah. “So ideas come to you in different packages. If you’re working on a song, you want to fit everything into eight-bar structures. “Yeah, and usually I’ll use a more limited palette, in the sense that usually it’s gonna be about a man and a woman, or a man alone. I’m not gonna write a song about Isaac Asimov or James Michener; that’s too far-flung, and you’re asking too much of an audience. And music like that doesn’t appeal to me. That’s like They Might Be Giants, where everything is a subject. To me, that’s goofy. Music requires … I won’t say more dignity, but it’s a different kind of dignity, and a different kind of concession to your audience. “Can we assume, then, that audiences for your poetry are more open to elevated ideas than those who might buy Silver Jews CDs? “Yeah, I think you can. I mean, I think that if it’s the type of person who reads books, by this time in their life they’ve decided that they’re going to a book for a reason. They’re not going because they want to hum a song in their head. I mean, there are multiple reasons why someone buys a CD. Some may not be interested in any meaning in the CD; they’ll be like, “Well, I don’t listen to words! ” But no one reads a book and goes, “I don’t read the words. ” The words are there. They have one purpose. Music can be other things. “Who exactly is your audience? “No one really knows anymore. It’s so divided, diffused. I’ve always been amused by the idea of a Book of the Month Club - like, who are the other people in your club? No one really knows. Many times you’ll meet a friend of yours and they’ve read some of the same books, but it took months before you realized they’re readers. It’s almost like a secret society, except in New York, where it’s not so uncommon. But you never really know who reads and who doesn’t. I often ask myself that question. I got a box of my books the other day, and I went down to this bar where I know a lot of people, and I was just handing them out. I figured no one was gonna go buy it themselves. But before I would give one to someone, I would say, “Do you read? I’m not gonna give this to you if you don’t read. ” It wasn’t a dumb question. It should be a dumb question, but it isn’t. A lot of people would be like, “Uh, no, not really. ” “When was the last time you read a book? ” “A couple years ago. In college. It’s boring! ” Not to make fun of people like that … but, you know, I’m not gonna apologize for making fun of people like that. I’m not talking about people who’ve never had the chance, who’ve never been led by the nose to books. These are people who’ve been to college and have turned their backs on books in the same way that they’ve turned their backs on the news and turned their backs on other people’s suffering. It’s like that old William Carlos Williams line, which I can paraphrase: It’s hard to find the news in poetry, but men die every day for lack of what is found there. I really believe that. “Maybe a project such as the Silver Jews takes that into consideration. You’re still addressing serious messages to people, even if it’s not an active literary audience. ” Certainly. I’m glad that my book is coming out, because there will be a lot of Silver Jews fans who don’t go to books but who may, for the first time, be convinced that it’s not all just John Dryden and Alfred Lord Tennyson. I kind of feel like I’m operating a ministry, like one of those guys on the street corner everyone’s laughing at and no one’s listening to. Not that my message is religious, but in general, especially for a lot of people today who don’t have a spiritual life, you can find one in secular books. That’s a kind of modern spirituality. Modernism definitely made that true, or at least tried to make that claim. I still think that’s a possibility. ””Why Don’t You Play Live? ”” “When you began playing gigs with the Silver Jews, did you have to adjust your concepts of what to expect from the audience, compared to the receptions you’d already gotten at poetry readings? “Not really. In fact, we’ve only played shows for captive audiences - like we played last month at a wedding, or at a Drag City event. We’ve played maybe 10 shows, ever. I feel like what we do is different, almost in a different medium. I feel like I’m in the wrong place, almost like I had accidentally been shoved onstage at a theater where they’re expecting a play or something. People may say they want it, and there are Silver Jews fans who say, “No, we want you to play live. ” But I know the music isn’t being served or improved. In fact, nothing is really being done when we play live, except you can see what we look like when we play the music. It sounds either just like the records or not as good. For the most part, when I guess I’m down to the brass tacks, it’s to sell records. I know that we could sell probably 50 percent more records if we toured the last three albums, but even though I like to make the records, I’m not interested in selling the records. I want people to buy them, but the record company can sell them, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not gonna play live shows just to sell records. “It’s probably easier to reproduce the sound of U2 in a stadium than it is to recreate the simple nuances of your records in a club. “Exactly, because there’s so much moment in it. Sometimes there are mistakes. There’s a vibe in the room, that’s for sure, that carries a lot of the music, because technique isn’t carrying it. So a lot of it is personality or things that you can’t just turn on and off on a stage every night, 40 nights in a row. “Does the “anti-showmanship” riff in your “Cassette County” poem reflect this attitude toward performing? “Yeah, I was kind of thinking about that. I mean, it’s kind of a present thing in my life, whether it’s Drag City or people writing letters. Or when I go out at night, if I meet somebody, quite often he’s a fan, and he’s definitely gonna say, “Why don’t you play live? ” I’m always answering that question, and I’m always coming up with new answers. I don’t necessarily know if I can tell them exactly why I don’t, but I try to give them a bunch of reasons why I shouldn’t. “Maybe mystique plays a role here. “Exactly. I don’t want to ruin it by actually playing live (laughs). “The Anti-Message Era”How important are lyrics in music today? “I really think we’re in a time where you can look at the rise of instrumental music, of dance music, of music even in foreign languages - basically, music where no one has to listen to anyone tell a story or make a point. There seems to be a lot of that. My pet theory is that people go to entertainment that really speaks to them, that really answers their questions or even poses questions, in times of trouble - music that makes them think, makes them feel that there’s a search. During the Depression in the 1930s, when people didn’t have enough money for heating oil or food, you’d think that the first thing that would go would be money for movies and records. But that was a great boom time for entertainment in America. And now we have an opposite time, where people have never been so financially comfortable, especially in the middle and upper-middle classes. There’s very few public issues that are dividing people. You really have to go to the talk TV shows to see people suffering, and it’s over interpersonal stuff. I really think that people right now don’t want to distract themselves from the fact that they’re on this bubble. And what’s better for that than some instrumental dance music? You can play it in your brand new car on your way to shop. If you put on, you know, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” you might start to look around outside of your brand new VW bug parked outside of the Gap and start to worry, like, “Wait a second. Is this all really gonna last this way? ” I mean, at no time in history have we ever gone this long without a war! Any music that comes on and makes you ask if life can really be this way is gonna make you fucking anxious. So why not turn off the words? That’s what the music and the TV does now. “During the Depression, you had both “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? ” and “We’re in the Money. ” Both confrontation and denial. “But we don’t even have a “We’re in the Money” in the sense that people will explicitly say that, even though they are (in the money). People are trying to hide that. It’s kind of like, no one’s into conspicuous consumption, like in the ’80s. But really, it’s so conspicuous: Instead of big Cadillacs, it’s SUVs. They’re practical! So nobody’s saying “We’re in the Money,” and nobody’s saying “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? ” either. It’s just the music. “What does that mean to you as a musician? “Well, I keep wondering, should I be making music? Or should I just dump it and say it as clearly as I can through the page? It really comes down to how can I get the message out, because I want people to hear it! I’m not here just to bounce words off the walls. That’s a decision I’ll probably make over the next couple of years: Am I gonna keep making records? Is anyone really listening to this? Or should I just go for a smaller audience that I know is listening? “Which of your songs works best as a vehicle for your message? “The song on American Water, “We Are Real,” is one of those songs where, if you’re not listening, it’s not gonna be clear. But it’s all there. What I mean is, you can be fooled by how quiet and folky and gentle it is, but the lyrics are actually extremely angry. It’s kind of about a lot of what we’re talking about: feeling like the world is trying to make you into a consumer when you know you’re a human. To me, that was the most political song I ever did, in the sense that I really felt like what I was saying to anyone who was listening was, “Come on, stop putting your faith in people who, above all, keep you shopping. ” People put their faith in people like that, whether it’s government officials who need you to keep shopping, or business people who need you to keep shopping, or entertainers who need the commercials to keep going. So that was one where at least I knew what I was saying. When I was younger, I never would have said anything political like that in a song. I would have felt embarrassed.

“How do such lyrics come about? Do you sit down with the intention of writing something political?”

No, the beginnings are more stream-of-consciousness. I may have written down the words “we are real” somewhere, not knowing what I meant by it. Then I’ll try to figure out what I meant by that… . Well, not what I meant by that, but what it could mean. I’m kind of in reverse, reading my own song and trying to figure it out.

“Are any projects being planned for the Silver Jews?”

We’re gonna try to make a record in the fall. Me and Malkmus are going to Cambodia for a month at the end of December, so we’ll try to do it before then. “Why Cambodia? “Well, a friend of mine has an apartment in Phnom Penh, and I’ve never been in such a place. It just seemed like a crazy idea to be there in 2000.

“You may in fact be there for several months, depending on how Y2K plays out.”

Who knows? I may be there for the rest of my life.