David Berman is Ushering in The Silver Age
by Charles Austin, February 18, 1999, from Doliomite magazine.
David Berman may have come to your attention as the singer/ lyricist in
the Silver Jews. He also writes prose and poetry (he's been working on a
long poem called 'Cantos for James Michener' for years). The third and
most recent full-length Silver Jews record, 'American Water', reeks of
substance, humour and intelligence. Berman is getting some serious
attention in both the States and England as a songwriter of the highest
order whose work is outside the 'Smashy Pumpky' zeigeist of self-pity and
cynicism, and he is challenging the status quo depiction of our
generational outlook as bleak and whiny.
When we spoke to him, he was hanging out in Chicago, getting the cover
together for a book of his poetry, 'Actual Air', to be be published by
Open City Press in New York. Berman is especially pleased that the
forthcoming book will appear with glowing reviews on the back cover by
two of his favourite poets, James Tate and Billy Collins. A generous and
witty conversationalist, Berman described his involvement in writing and
music with the same kind of tangential logic and imagination that
characterize his lyrics.
Songwriting
"I was trying to write this song the other day and I really wanted it to
be based on the idea of "Let's not and say we did". Then it turned out
that I had to get rid of that whole structure, but it was the determining
structure. I had to get rid of the title and even take the line out. The
seed that bore the structure was removed later, and it became a
completely different song. What you're trying to do is find something
that works, even if you have to kill your little darlings on the way.
Video Games and the Inner Landscape
"I find in my music I'm not pushing ahead like some other bands whose
process seems to be more vertical, mine is more horizontal. I have found
a territory I am interested in and now I'm moving to the side and looking
around.
"It's almost like when you are a little kid and you get on a video game
and you think if you kept moving to the side that the landscape would
change, but it would be actually be very repetitive, but you'd think that
you could travel infinitely and maybe there would be some kind of
aberration in the landscape, like a lake, that wasn't there in the other
frame. Hopefully you're not just going over the same landscape. It really
is a process for me of moving to the side, and I do feel that you can
keep moving to the left and the right infinitely.
Coincidences
"[One of Berman's own poems], Democratic Vistas, kept surprising me with
coincidences. I took the title of the poem from the title of a Walt
Whitman essay. I always liked the title, then I thought "Isn't it funny",
because in a sense, a sniper on a rooftop has a democratic vista. He has
a view of people on the street and they are all equal potential targets.
And later I realized that when I was thinking of the sniper, I was
thinking of a particular sniper --- one that was on a tower at the
University of Texas in the early 1960's. I think he killed about ten
people. I didn't realize until much later until after the poem was
written that his name was Charles Whitman. Little things like that kept
opening up. I was getting surprised at the same time a reader might be
surprised in the process of reading the poem. That keeps me interested.
On Not Playing Live and Selling Records
"I always want to try to find a medium between not demanding any
attention and not refusing to give it back. I've never turned down an
interview. When people say "Why don't you play live, are you trying to
create this mysterious aura?", I say "No, it's much simpler than that, I
have a life that is separate from the music and I like to keep it that
way". I come around and make record every two years and I hope that
people like it. The idea of playing live to me seems like asking for
more. People pay for the record and I'm not going to ask them to pay for
anything else. I don't think the live shows are going to be good and I
would never sell anything that isn't going to be good. When it happens,
it's got to have a purpose. It's not to sell records.
Permission to be Prolific
"I'm always conscious that I need to keep songs flowing. I'm trying to
write even faster now. I've never had the full-on confidence that gives
me the permission to be prolific. I'm sort of artificially giving it to
myself now.
This is a new strategy. I'm behaving as if what I'm doing is important,
and by that I hope that it will actually become so. I'm trying to get
further away from sense. In the new songs, I'm trying to throw meaning
out the window, and let a new kind of alien meaning come in through the
other window.
One song ('Like like the the the Death') seems to promise sense, but it
has to be constructed in your own mind if it's to be there at all. You
could say that it's phrased and presented as if I was saying something as
logical as the Declaration of Independence. It's stated casually, it's
not announcing itself as "Hey, isn't this weird".
Effortlessness
"I'm definitely not the type who can open up the faucet and let the words
flow out. I struggle to get it out and what may appear to be stream of
consciousness, which is the look of an effortless expelling of words has
a lot of effort behind it. But it doesn't matter if it's known or not. In
fact when something's written well, it has the illusion of
effortlessness. If you read a Raymond Carver story, he went over it with
a fine tooth comb a hundred times to get the illusion of effortlessness.
Aging Rockers
"It's always a question of rock musicians, "Why are their productive
careers so short?". I haven't read a really good explanation of it.
Compared to other careers, it's pretty short, and I'd like to avoid that
trap if I could.
"I think to the degree that your music is dependent on an adolescent
energy, you're probably risking having your career end early because once
that energy is gone, once it's out of your body and out of your mind,
then your source material is gone. That leaves an Iggy Pop or whoever,
bereft of ideas after awhile.
"As for the guys who wrote music for adults, it doesn't seem any more
ridiculous for Charlie Rich or Jerry Lee Lewis or even Nick Cave, when
you see a video of one of them performing at thirty versus fifty, they
seem equally valid, although you can't say the same of Mick Jagger.
Because they never made any bones about that they were making adult
music, they weren't trying to sell it to the kids, or at least that
wasn't their only focus.
It's Getting Better
"When I was in my 20's I used to read a lot of American 80's fiction:
Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, etc. In a lot of ways I felt that it was
preparation for me for my adulthood, for my thirties, my forties; these
novels and short stories about adult men, alcoholism, divorce... I
thought 'At least I'll know what my options are and how to behave, I've
read so much about it.' There's been moments where I felt aging was a
process of decay, but the last few years have been the best of my life,
and it seems to get better.
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