DAVID BERMAN: SILVER DUES
WHEN news of David Berman’s death broke on August 7, a deep sadness resonated through the indie music world. Not least because his first album under his new Purple Mountains moniker, released just a month previously, was an obvious career highpoint. Who knows what Berman was going through when he wound up his Silver Jews project at the end of the previous decade to write an exposé of his “despicable” rightwing lobbyist father? Or when, as he told Uncut in May, he spent months of self-imposed isolation living in seedy motels or in the Californian desert? But Purple Mountains seemed to suggest he was over the worst, able to process his anguish and despair with the usual meandering wit and wry self-awareness.
Admittedly, the album documented his daily struggle to keep going with disarming frankness (“I confess I’m barely hanging on,” he sang, on a number called “All My Happiness Is Gone”). And yet the dread was always leavened with his trademark self-deprecating humour, both in the lyrics themselves, and the way – with the aid of Woods’ Jeremy Earl and Jarvis Taveniere – they were set to agreeably swinging bar-room hoedowns.
It sounded like a fun record to make, and you hoped that would be enough to pull him through. Alas, sadly not. And so Berman left us, just at the time when he was beginning to be recognised as one of our most important contemporary songwriters. For much of Silver Jews’ career, his music was marginalised by the gatekeepers of cool – deemed too slipshod or unrealised, too wordy, too depressing, his voice too astringent. The same was often said of Bill Callahan and Will Oldham, and as a result these three lugubrious, difficult artists, finding themselves bracketed together, formed a kind of fraternityr: “The world is and will always be a David Berman lyric,” wrote Callahan on Twitter, mourning the death of his friend.
Yet despite their apparent unsuitably for the rock game, this trio all carved out long and fruitful careers, culminating in three of 2019’s finest albums; not only that, but they have emboldened a new generation of singer-songwriters to address the world honestly and without artifice while bending various roots forms to their idiosyncratic ends; Joan Shelley and Angel Olsen are two significant new talents to have received patronage from Oldham, while Kurt Vile, Deerhunter and Aaron Dessner of The National were among many who acknowledged a debt to Berman in the wake of his passing. He will be missed, but his wayward legacy endures.