David Berman

The American singer-songwriter David Berman, best known for his band Silver Jews, committed suicide last Wednesday (7^th August). John Darnielle of Mountain Goats called him the greatest of their generation. He occupied a slightly odd place in my consciousness.

I heard one Silver Jews song, around the turn of the century, called ‘Random Rules’. It was on a free Uncut CD. I liked it a lot, put it on a couple of compilation tapes I listened to regularly, got to know it well. However, I didn’t investigate Silver Jews further.

Yet, whenever, in my head or out loud, I got to thinking about pop music lyricism as an art form - the very height of it - that song, and its opening couplet “In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection, Slowly screwing my way across Europe, they had to make a correction” flashed into my head, before I’d move on, prosaically, to artists and songs I was better acquainted with.

Yet, as I say, I didn’t dig deeper into Silver Jews. Perhaps I worried nothing else of his would live up to that brilliance (something I was clearly wrong to worry about).

Anyway, I was on holiday last month/this month. At the start of the fortnight’s holiday, in late July, I saw that David Berman had a highly acclaimed new album under the moniker Purple Mountains, and I was excited by this, and determined it would be the first new music I would listen to when I got the chance (I don’t have as much time for listening to music in holiday as when working).

Eventually, I listened to the Purple Mountains album on the train up to London last Tuesday, and on the way back. It was brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, everything I could have possibly hoped – droll, heartbreaking, full of tunes and memorable lines. After waiting so long to allow myself to properly discover Berman’s catalogue, I was ready to dive right in.

On Thursday morning, the first thing I saw on Twitter was that he’d died on Wednesday. It seemed surreal and pointed in that moment, notwithstanding how terribly sad it is. I’ve listened to the album several times since, as well as a couple of the Silver Jews albums I'd previously foregone – he is clearly one of the great songwriters, someone whose lines leap out at you and make you want to quote them straight back.

I have another thought to attach to that, prompted somewhat by Darnielle’s tribute. My own tastes have become far more diverse in the last decade or two, as, it seems, has music taste and criticism in general. Hip-hop, dance and experimental music, female artists and bands fill up the end of year lists far more than they used to.

People mock the old orthodoxies of Best of British, or All Time, lists which contain no women, no grime etc, people are changing the pantheon of greats as we speak (apart from good old Rolling Stone magazine). All of that is as it should be. But best to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There was/is a great, great generation of male North American traditional guitar-based singer-songwriters, ages roughly 45-55 (Worth adding that this is the generation which starts with Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley) ... It’s not dull and old-fashioned to mark it, it feels important at times like this to note it and celebrate it – Berman, Darnielle, Marks Eitzel, Kozelek, Mulcahy, Jeff Tweedy, Damien Jurado, Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, Sam Beam, Joe Pernice, Kurt Wagner, John Grant, Wayne Coyne, Jason Lytle, Willy Vlautin, Beck, Sufjan Stevens, Matt Berninger, Craig Finn, the list goes on … guys who wrote/write beautiful, literate, meaningful, elegant songs to lose yourself in. 

Maybe who cares? Do middle-aged white American men really need someone to stick up for them? Am I going to write a heartfelt defence of the virtues of 1990s Ryder Cup golfers next? ... But still, writers like Berman didn’t belong in a box, defined by operating within a supposedly outdated genre, and don’t deserve obscurity.