Ushering in The Silver Age

By Charles Austin. Originally appeared in Dolomite Magazine. 18th February 1999.

David Berman may have come to your attention as the singer/lyricist in the Silver Jews. He also writes prose and poetry (he’s been working on a long poem called ‘Cantos for James Michener’ for years). The third and most recent full-length Silver Jews record, ‘American Water’, reeks of substance, humour and intelligence. Berman is getting some serious attention in both the States and England as a songwriter of the highest order whose work is outside the ‘Smashy Pumpky’ zeigeist of self-pity and cynicism, and he is challenging the status quo depiction of our generational outlook as bleak and whiny. When we spoke to him, he was hanging out in Chicago, getting the cover together for a book of his poetry, ‘Actual Air’, to be be published by Open City Press in New York. Berman is especially pleased that the forthcoming book will appear with glowing reviews on the back cover by two of his favourite poets, James Tate and Billy Collins. A generous and witty conversationalist, Berman described his involvement in writing and music with the same kind of tangential logic and imagination that characterize his lyrics.

Songwriting

“I was trying to write this song the other day and I really wanted it to be based on the idea of “Let’s not and say we did”. Then it turned out that I had to get rid of that whole structure, but it was the determining structure. I had to get rid of the title and even take the line out. The seed that bore the structure was removed later, and it became a completely different song. What you’re trying to do is find something that works, even if you have to kill your little darlings on the way.

Video Games and the Inner Landscape

“I find in my music I’m not pushing ahead like some other bands whose process seems to be more vertical, mine is more horizontal. I have found a territory I am interested in and now I’m moving to the side and looking around. “It’s almost like when you are a little kid and you get on a video game and you think if you kept moving to the side that the landscape would change, but it would be actually be very repetitive, but you’d think that you could travel infinitely and maybe there would be some kind of aberration in the landscape, like a lake, that wasn’t there in the other frame. Hopefully you’re not just going over the same landscape. It really is a process for me of moving to the side, and I do feel that you can keep moving to the left and the right infinitely.

Coincidences

“(One of Berman’s own poems), Democratic Vistas, kept surprising me with coincidences. I took the title of the poem from the title of a Walt Whitman essay. I always liked the title, then I thought “Isn’t it funny”, because in a sense, a sniper on a rooftop has a democratic vista. He has a view of people on the street and they are all equal potential targets. And later I realized that when I was thinking of the sniper, I was thinking of a particular sniper - one that was on a tower at the University of Texas in the early 1960’s. I think he killed about ten people. I didn’t realize until much later until after the poem was written that his name was Charles Whitman. Little things like that kept opening up. I was getting surprised at the same time a reader might be surprised in the process of reading the poem. That keeps me interested.

On Not Playing Live and Selling Records

“I always want to try to find a medium between not demanding any attention and not refusing to give it back. I’ve never turned down an interview. When people say “Why don’t you play live, are you trying to create this mysterious aura? “, I say “No, it’s much simpler than that, I have a life that is separate from the music and I like to keep it that way”. I come around and make record every two years and I hope that people like it. The idea of playing live to me seems like asking for more. People pay for the record and I’m not going to ask them to pay for anything else. I don’t think the live shows are going to be good and I would never sell anything that isn’t going to be good. When it happens, it’s got to have a purpose. It’s not to sell records.

Permission to be Prolific

”I’m always conscious that I need to keep songs flowing. I’m trying to write even faster now. I’ve never had the full-on confidence that gives me the permission to be prolific. I’m sort of artificially giving it to myself now. This is a new strategy. I’m behaving as if what I’m doing is important, and by that I hope that it will actually become so. I’m trying to get further away from sense. In the new songs, I’m trying to throw meaning out the window, and let a new kind of alien meaning come in through the other window. One song (‘Like like the the the Death’) seems to promise sense, but it has to be constructed in your own mind if it’s to be there at all. You could say that it’s phrased and presented as if I was saying something as logical as the Declaration of Independence. It’s stated casually, it’s not announcing itself as “Hey, isn’t this weird”.

Effortlessness

”I’m definitely not the type who can open up the faucet and let the words flow out. I struggle to get it out and what may appear to be stream of consciousness, which is the look of an effortless expelling of words has a lot of effort behind it. But it doesn’t matter if it’s known or not. In fact when something’s written well, it has the illusion of effortlessness. If you read a Raymond Carver story, he went over it with a fine tooth comb a hundred times to get the illusion of effortlessness.

Aging Rockers

“It’s always a question of rock musicians, “Why are their productive careers so short? “. I haven’t read a really good explanation of it. Compared to other careers, it’s pretty short, and I’d like to avoid that trap if I could. “I think to the degree that your music is dependent on an adolescent energy, you’re probably risking having your career end early because once that energy is gone, once it’s out of your body and out of your mind, then your source material is gone. That leaves an Iggy Pop or whoever, bereft of ideas after awhile.”

“As for the guys who wrote music for adults, it doesn’t seem any more ridiculous for Charlie Rich or Jerry Lee Lewis or even Nick Cave, when you see a video of one of them performing at thirty versus fifty, they seem equally valid, although you can’t say the same of Mick Jagger. Because they never made any bones about that they were making adult music, they weren’t trying to sell it to the kids, or at least that wasn’t their only focus. ”

It’s Getting Better

“When I was in my 20’s I used to read a lot of American 80’s fiction: Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, etc. In a lot of ways I felt that it was preparation for me for my adulthood, for my thirties, my forties; these novels and short stories about adult men, alcoholism, divorce… I thought ‘At least I’ll know what my options are and how to behave, I’ve read so much about it.’ There’s been moments where I felt aging was a process of decay, but the last few years have been the best of my life, and it seems to get better.