The United States is so geographically vast, so culturally unaligned, that it’s rare that one sound, one voice, has ever articulated the sum of the nation’s consciousness.
David Berman was not one such voice. He wasn’t Elvis, Jay-Z or Dylan. The late singer of New York’s Silver Jews and Purple Mountains – the band with which he emerged from self-appointed exile, and who released their eponymous debut only last month – wrote songs that were awkward and askew, that either by design but more likely execution were not made for mass appeal. Berman made outsider music: songs to be enjoyed and championed beneath the glass ceiling for voices like his.
And yet there’s a period of the 1990s when a collection of American musicians – disparate, often unknown to each other – were as crucial in understanding the States’ complexity as names who sold records a hundred times over. This is music, often home recorded – as much of Berman’s was – that showcased a refracted vision of Americana, articulated by the likes of Will Oldham, Bill Callahan of Smog, the Handsome Family, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, Daniel Johnston, Vic Chesnutt and more.
Like those artists, Berman’s work suggests he had a deep and complicated love for his country. Purple Mountains even took their name from a mondegreen of the lyrics to America the Beautiful. His best songs articulate a nation that is beguiling, but covered in human grime. When he sings of a “jagged skyline of car keys”, on Black and Brown Blues, a standout of Silver Jews’ 1996 album The Natural Bridge, his dewy voice sounds as if it’s being poured from a throat in which all tendons have been unwound, creating a cinematic American cityscape.
Two years later, on the song Blue Arrangements, taken from Silver Jews’ – the Joos, to their fans – third album American Water, he describes in a languid vocal, duelling with that of then bandmate Stephen Malkmus, “the kids in the corner all covered in dirt,/ caught trespassing under the moon”. It’s hard not to imagine Berman as Huckleberry Finn, wide-eyed, muddy kneed, dressed in plaid. Then he sings: “My father came in from wherever he’d been,/ and kicked my shit all over the room,” Berman had a fractured relationship with his lobbyist father, Richard, once describing him as a demon – the two were estranged at the time of the singer’s death.
Although the Joos were created in New York with his friend Malkmus and fellow future Pavement member Bob Nastanovich (Berman putting together the band while working as a security guard at the city’s Whitney Museum of American Art), the Virginia-born bandleader moved back to the south, to Nashville. He understood the significance of bedding down in a place that proudly proclaims itself Music City. “We’re gonna live in Nashville and I’ll make a career,” he sings on the song Tennessee, “out of writing sad songs and getting paid by the tear.”
The song We Are Real, another from American Water, sees each couplet compete with each other to be the song’s defining take. Not only does he rhyme “Virginia” with “with ya”, which not only works but zings, but he shares the thought, “won’t soul music change, now that our souls have turned strange?” It’s a line that’s very funny, linguistically smart and insufferably sad, as suited to the therapist’s office as it is a lyric book. It’s almost like he’d written his own epitaph: a line that says more about why Berman struggled with the world than anything he ever said in an interview.
Berman’s songs always seemed to be trying to make sense of the landscape changing before him, and within him. His songs suggest that their creator had so many qualities we cherish – empathy, emotional literacy, bravery – and yet what he lacked was the understanding of self that keeps a person shackled and safe: he struggled with substance misuse and had mental health problems.
There’s another line from We Are Real that is perhaps the one that will come to define David Berman: “All my favourite singers couldn’t sing.” Isn’t that so often the case? And yet Berman’s voice is as important to understanding the American – and indeed human – experience as almost anyone’s.
