The Late, Great Silver Jews
Staff Writer Chris Nelson reports
Silver Jews leader/poet David Berman understands that
there's a risk in naming his upcoming album of pensive, literate, country-tinged rock The Late, Great Silver Jews.
Still, he doesn't want fans to think that he's hanging
up his guns
just yet.
In fact, he wouldn't have chosen the title if he
didn't think that
the Jews -- including recently returned guitarist Steve
Malkmus of lo-fi alt-rockers Pavement -- still had a few
more records up their sleeves.
"It's only good if it's, like, the third record of
five," Berman
said Thursday, phoning from Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Rare Book Room
studio. There, he and his collaborators were wrapping up 22
straight days of rehearsal and recording for the album, the
Jews' fourth.
"I guess there's a certain amount of 'Well,
no one else is gonna to say it, so we're
gonna say it,' " Berman said of the album
title. "We're gonna canonize ourselves.
We're not gonna wait around for anyone
else to say we're great. It's a little
funny,
it's a little sad, it's a little arrogant."
The album, due out this fall on Chicago's Drag City
label, marks
the homecoming of Malkmus to the Jews clan. Fans will
recall
that for 1996's The Natural Bridge album, songwriter Berman
amicably parted company with collaborators Malkmus and
drummer Bob Nastanovich, also of Pavement, in favor of
working with the New Radiant Storm Kings' guitarist Matt
Hunter and bassist Peyton Pinkerton.
Now both Berman and Malkmus describe their reignited
collaboration as a mutually beneficial venture between best
friends.
"I wanted a really professional-sounding band, and Steve
[Malkmus] is a really good guitarist," the 30-year-old
Berman said. "The leads he's playing on this record
are to me
the best things he's ever done, by far. Very soulful.
He's not
doing the anti-solos he does with Pavement. They're very
beautiful, very talky."
"The songs are pretty traditional arrangements and tunings,
and I'm just playing along with it," Malkmus said
humbly on a
break from the studio. "Pavement songs call for something
different. If you played a traditional solo in a
Pavement song, it
would stick out. But in these songs, there's totally
room for it.
It's fun to do it tasteful and straight-up, without
sounding too
much like new country."
That said, Malkmus explained that three or four "really
heartbreaking country numbers" form the backbone of the
11-song album. He and Berman have developed a symbiotic
creativity, he added, whereby Malkmus brings musical and
recording experience to Berman's songwriting expertise.
"It's a lyrical record in the end," the 30-year-old Malkmus
said. "It's a record you sing along to. In that way,
it's kind-of
country. You expect maybe the next melody, but you
don't know
what [Berman is] going to say. There's a cleverness to
do that
in a way that's not hacked or generic."
During a brief pause in conversation, the delicate sound of
ringing guitar from a song called "Self-Ignition" escaped
through a studio door. Berman described the song as a
future
B-side, explaining that the band had run through the
track too
quickly for it to make the final cut for the album.
"We've never sounded tight like this," Berman said.
"There's
hard-rocking songs where we've never had that level of
intensity before. They're really charged songs."
In addition to Malkmus, Berman also recruited Mike Fellows
(ex-Rites of Spring, ex-Royal Trux bass), Tim Barnes
(drums) and Chris Stroffolino (piano, keyboards) to
help out
with the disc, which he intends to issue on Oct. 14.
That would
be two years to the day after the release of The
Natural Bridge,
which came exactly two years after 1994's acclaimed
Starlite
Walker album. Berman added that he hopes the Silver Jews
will set out for a rare tour of the U.S. and Europe
following the
release of the new recording.
Work on the Silver Jews album has precluded Berman from
editing his forthcoming collection of poetry -- tentatively
titled "Governors On Sominex" -- which he hopes to have out
on Open City Press by Christmas. Despite the fact that
the book
has languished on the back-burner, Berman has said
that he's
happy to push through the recording process.
"I never worked this hard in my fucking life," he
said. "It's
really gratifying, because I'm such a lazy lay-about
at home,
just reading, lying around. So I've had something to do
everyday. It's good. It's labor."
Among the songs to be included on The Late, Great
Silver Jews
are: "Buckingham Rabbit," "Random Rules," "Police
Conversation, 1783," "The Wild Kindness," "Blue
Arrangements," "Like Like, The The The Death," "People,"
"Send In The Clouds," "Smith And Jones Forever!" and
"Honk If
You're Lonely Tonight."
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