Silver Jews and David Berman

David Berman was born in Williamsburg, Virginia, on January 4, 1967, and raised mostly in Texas. His parents divorced when he was seven, and he later called his childhood “grindingly painful”. At the University of Virginia, from 1985, he met Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich and James McNew, and the four of them formed a band, Ectoslavia. He graduated in English literature in 1989, and he, Malkmus and Nastanovich moved into an apartment together in Hoboken, New Jersey.

There they called themselves Silver Jews and recorded discordant tapes in the living room. Berman and Malkmus worked as security guards at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “We were working at the Whitney with all this conceptual art, and we were learning about it,” Berman said. “And so I thought, ‘Well let’s just make this record that looks like a record, and has song titles and everything, but the songs would be the ones we make at home that sound terrible.’” Though they are often called a Pavement side project, Silver Jews came first. Their EPs, Dime Map of the Reef and The Arizona Record, sold little but were noticed, and Berman went off to study for a master’s in poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Berman, Malkmus, Nastanovich and Steve West recorded Starlite Walker in June 1994 in Memphis, at Doug Easley’s studio, with Easley adding pedal steel. Andrew Earles heard it mix “’70s afternoon rock, Pavement’s indie balladry, Berman’s poignant lyricism, and lone troubadour folk of the ’60s and ’70s”, and in the Guardian Jonathan Romney called Berman’s singing “whiny, archetypally slackerish” with “vaguely country inflections”.

It won Silver Jews respect in indie rock, along with some detractors. The link to Pavement gave them a national audience, and the sales that came with it meant Berman never had to tour.

With Malkmus and Nastanovich busy with Pavement, Berman wrote the second album with Peyton Pinkerton. It took several tries. One version was recorded with the Scud Mountain Boys as his band and scrapped; a 1995 session with Malkmus, Nastanovich and West ended when Berman stormed out, and the others used the paid-for studio time to record Pavement’s Pacific Trim EP. Pavement’s success was hard on him, and he felt somewhat abandoned by his friends.

Making it left him distraught, “haunted by ghosts”, and he was taken to hospital with sleep deprivation. “When the songs were being recorded, things got darker in my life,” he said. The reviews were good, and said he had “established himself as a world-class rock lyricist”, but he would not tour: playing live seemed to him “like some unnecessary post-invention marketing effort”.

Malkmus came back, with Mike Fellows on bass, Tim Barnes on drums and Chris Stroffolino on keyboards and trumpet. Berman was struggling with drugs, and there were plenty in the studio, but he wanted the opposite of The Natural Bridge: “I wanted to make records like other people make records, where you’re having fun when you’re doing it.” The earlier record, he said, was “me finding out that random rules and I can’t handle it”; this one was him saying it again, to someone else, having accepted it.

It was the record on which Silver Jews stepped out of Pavement’s shadow. In Pitchfork, Matthew Strauss called it “the sea change in the Silver Jews catalog, a moment when David Berman gave in to melody and made a warm and inviting record.” A tour planned for late 1998 was called off after a fistfight burst Berman’s eardrum.

Berman thought of himself as more a poet than a songwriter. Robert Bingham, the editor of the New York literary magazine Open City, had printed a few of his poems and urged him to finish a book, then founded Open City Books just to publish it. Actual Air came out in July 1999: new poems alongside pieces of his Amherst master’s thesis, “Ruined Entrances”, written in free verse by a poet who said he “didn’t know anything about form, rhythm or meter”.

It was sold like an album, much of it through Drag City and record shops, and sold over 20,000 copies, unusually high for poetry. James Tate, who had taught him, and Billy Collins praised it. In 2005 the New York Times called it “one of the most highly acclaimed debuts for a poet in recent memory.” Bingham died in 1999, one of several friends Berman lost in those years.

In 1999 Berman woke up after a party in the house of Cassie Marrett and found she owned every Silver Jews album. “I was really depressed and had nothing to lose at that time,” he said. They married, and he later called her the “best thing that ever happened to me”. They made their home in Nashville, a city where he felt a career in music was well accepted, and Bright Flight was the first album she sang on, with William Tyler on guitar, Tony Crow on keyboards and Paul Niehaus on pedal steel.

From here on his songs grew more autobiographical, and he came to see the earlier records as “make-believe”. The record’s darker sound reflected his drug use. Trouser Press heard “an artist increasingly able to get to the emotional heart of a song without relying on the crutches of irony and overt cleverness.”

Berman lived with depression all his life, and later said it had become resistant to treatment. In 1998, in a depressed spell, he began taking hard drugs, and his cocaine use became an addiction; what he had sought as insight ended in isolation and dejection. Twice he overdosed by accident, once after the release party for Bright Flight. In November 2003 he survived a suicide attempt.

About a year later he went into rehab, paid for by his father and urged on by his mother and Cassie, and by August 2005 he was off drugs. In recovery he turned to Judaism and studied the Torah, wanting to be a “better person”, “easier” on Cassie and on the people at Drag City. He said later that he had not been without privilege or prospects, though it had not looked that way to him at the time.

Berman made Tanglewood Numbers as a way of “saving [himself]”. Malkmus came back, and so did Nastanovich, for the first time since Starlite Walker, with Cassie, Will Oldham, Bobby Bare Jr., Paz Lenchantin, William Tyler and others, fifteen players in all. On it he wrote about his addiction, and he meant the album as “instructions” for getting past depression.

It was the record on which he first fully thought of himself as a songwriter. It scored 81 on Metacritic, and AllMusic’s Heather Phares wrote that “there’s no denying that this is a uniquely powerful and moving set of songs.”

After years of refusing, Berman took Silver Jews on tour for the first time after Tanglewood Numbers. They played North America, Europe and Israel in 2006, about 100 shows by 2009. He was older, no longer dependent on drugs, had more songs, and wanted to meet his audience. Having Cassie on stage made it bearable: she was calm where he was electric, and she compared his early showmanship to a child learning to ride a bicycle.

He read the words from a music stand, “like it’s a literary reading”, and a Boston Globe critic thought the stand was a barrier between him and the crowd. The shows in Israel, he said, “were pretty much the most amazing experience of my life”.

The last Silver Jews album was made from March to October 2007 with the touring band, Cassie among them. Berman used a new guitar to put himself in a new frame of mind, wrote every song before going into the studio so that each would take “into account its neighbors”, and recorded the vocals last because he kept changing the words. Even then he wished he’d had more time. His eye operation and the death of the artist Jeremy Blake both bore on the record.

It has been called one of their lightest albums, and it sold better than any other Silver Jews record, but the reviews were lukewarm. Pitchfork gave it 6.7. “That really burned me for a long time,” Berman said in 2019. “I really got the message back that maybe I had peaked.”

On January 22, 2009, Berman wrote on Drag City’s message board that he was retiring from music and that Silver Jews would play one last show, on January 31, for Bluegrass Underground at Cumberland Caverns in McMinnville, Tennessee, 333 feet below ground, for 300 people. “I always said we would stop before we got bad,” he wrote. “If I continue to record I might accidentally write the answer song to ‘Shiny Happy People’.”

In the same post he said, for the first time in public, that his father was Richard Berman, a lobbyist for firearms, alcohol and other industries, whom he loathed and from whom he had been estranged since 2006. He had decided Silver Jews “were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused”, and wrote: “there is the matter of Justice. And I’ll tell you it’s not just a metaphor. The desire for it actually burns.”

Berman went home to Nashville and “buried” himself in books. “I saw no one and did nothing,” he said. He put out a book of cartoons, The Portable February (2009), and a book of poems with paintings by Friedrich Kunath, You Owe Me a Feeling (2012). He worked on a book about his father that HBO nearly adapted, and stopped it because he did not want to glamorise him. He wrote lyrics with Dan Auerbach, and read his poems on records by the Avalanches.

When his mother died in 2014, he picked up a guitar in her house in Wooster, Ohio, a week later; the chords became “I Loved Being My Mother’s Son”, the first song of what would be Purple Mountains. In 2017 he tried recording in Vancouver with Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, but could not finish the words. On February 14, 2018, he and Cassie separated, and that June he moved into a spare room above Drag City’s office in Chicago.

In Chicago Berman emailed Jeremy Earl of Woods early one morning, though they had never spoken, and asked him and Jarvis Taveniere to produce the record. They had listened to Silver Jews together for years and said yes almost at once. They recorded in 2018, mostly live, with Berman in a booth holding pages of alternative lyrics for every song, and often kept his first takes because, Taveniere said, “they were hard to match.” Anna St. Louis sings on four songs.

The songs are about his mother’s death, his years away, his depression and his marriage. He also made it to pay off more than $100,000 of debt, and called the tour that was to follow a “necessity”. Critics welcomed him back: it scored 87 on Metacritic, and in the Wall Street Journal Mark Richardson called it “a Silver Jews record in all but name, and a very good one.”

The Purple Mountains tour was to open in Kingston, New York, on August 10, 2019, and end in Los Angeles in late September. Berman was anxious about it, and warned the band that his depression might get in the way, but he was excited for his “solitude to end”.

David Berman died by suicide on August 7, 2019, aged 52, three days before the first show. Family and friends, with the Jewish community, held a private funeral on August 16. Earlier, the filmmaker Lance Bangs held a memorial at the Met Breuer, the Whitney’s former home.

Malkmus and Nastanovich played shows in his honour, and two months later two albums of covers came out. Fleet Foxes and Mogwai wrote songs in his memory, the Mountain Goats dedicated one to him, and Callahan described his album with Oldham, Blind Date Party, as “all of Drag City coming together for David”. The Avalanches put lines from “Darkness and Cold” on their 2020 album, sung by Karen O.

On his birthday in 2020, January 4, there were tribute concerts in Brooklyn, Portland and Philadelphia; the Brooklyn shows raised money for MusiCares and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, where Berman met Malkmus and Nastanovich, announced that it would collect materials related to him.