Band: Silver Jews
From: Nashville, TN
Sound: Profoundly literate, wry sketches and tales delivered with laid-back swagger and bittersweet grace
Similar Artists: Sebadoh, Will Oldham, Stephen Malkmus, Beck
Listen Now: “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat”

For almost 20 years now, David Berman has been writing the kinds of albums that people obsessively connect with. Almost unfailingly, Silver Jews records elicit that rare sensation that they were explicitly created for your own personal enjoyment.

How does Berman continue to do this? It’s in his ability to turn a familiar phrase on its head and appear exotic as much as in his gift to make a strange and foreign situation intimate and knowable. It’s also the conviction that every character and setting ever given life in a Silver Jews song seems to exist beyond the three-and-a-half minute world in which it was created. And it’s the unshakable impulse to go back and change your high school yearbook quote to any of the thousands of Berman’s lyrical gems that express a direct truth you never knew existed.

The man’s got a way with words, and his continued mastery is evident on the Jews’ sixth full-length album Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (out tomorrow on Drag City). EAR FARM was honored to converse via email with Berman (his preferred interview format) a week before the album’s release and gain a bit of insight about Nashville’s optimism, the allure of To Catch a Predator, and why lyrics are like free refills at McDonald’s (among many other topics). Ladies and gentlemen, David Berman…

EF: You’ve suggested before that words and lyrics are often perceived as an afterthought, regularly demoted by critics in favor of assessing things like instrumentation, performance and arrangement. Do you invite a critical eye to be trained upon your lyrics then, or do you feel like such intense scrutiny and parsing of each line might restrict individual interpretations of your characters and stories?

DB: No I invite it. Pretty much every rock musician ever asked this question in an interview has said some form of “I like to leave it up to the listener”. Year in, year out, they want to leave it up to the listener. This is like McDonald’s convincing you to pour your own cokes. It costs them less to get you to drink more because they get to phase out a whole full-time job from each of their stores.

All those private few seconds a counter employee once got to stare off into space while filling up a cup - eliminated.

But I do think the critical perspective that devalues good lyric writing and okays or praises mediocrity is degrading all our situations but lowering the bar to where there is no reason for anyone starting out to try anymore when okay is good enough. I think this attitude really came into fruition in the eighties as an ironic carefreeness counterposed to the stridency and militancy of underground music that attacked fluff as endemic and wrong. A new more realistic embrace of formerly disgraced music like AC/DC and Led Zep seemed so refreshing in the nineties. Meaning didn’t matter anymore. Now it’s gone to the point where meaning doesn’t happen anymore. It’s needs to swing back. I think the corrections that art has made in the last years to incorporate low culture is just slavish participation in it. It’s been a wild overcorrection that has blanded out the talent base.

EF: The passing of time seems to reverberate throughout your work -­ the title of the song “Time Will Break The World”, passages like “time is a game only children play well” (from “How Can I Love You (If You Won’t Lie Down)”) and “these seconds turn these minutes into hours of the day” (from “Suffering Jukebox”) etc­ - it seems that it’s regularly on your mind. What do you attribute this to?

DB: I think what makes a song fuller than a painting is the added factor of time which gives it so many stations to go through. For me it’s like pumping oxygen into the songs. It’s funny because I don’t like to do “Time Will Break The World” anymore basically because I no longer believe the sentiment and am not interested in the idea’s propagation. A character could sing it within a show filled with characters, but if I sing it I’m just preaching doom to other people..

EF: What about your relationship with technology? In poems such as “Self-Portrait at 28” you express ambivalence about new technologies, and you recently said something (in the Drowned in Sound interview) about wanting to sit out this era of downloading music. Why?

DB: I think people have forgotten all suspicion of technology. Has everyone forgotten how insane Doctor Smith was on Lost in Space. And they kept forgiving him?

As far as sitting out the next phase. It happened when they started making the talkies way back when. How many silent stars just stopped showing up at auditions where there was going to be talk-acting required. I’d rather be an artist or a businessman than what they’re going to make the musicmakers of the future into.

EF: Related to that, and I may be reading into it too much, but I feel like “Suffering Jukebox” uses something very concrete (jukebox) to touch on the subject of digital music and decline of tangible forms of music. How far off am I?

DB: I think that because it’s written in 2007 it has to have that as subtext. Consciously I think digital music lowers the value of the individual song. By not demarcating it off from other songs it loses its autonomy and value. Being a function of rarity is naturally degraded. The people in the bar are associated with the “cranes on the downtown skyline.” They are the affluent people who live in echo chambers and gated communities and can no longer commiserate with suffering. They are the makers and users of Wal-Mart country music crap.

EF: Where did the title Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea come from?

DB: It was something that I wrote down one day. Soundwise, I think it is a pun on “Lookout Mountain, Tennessee” that I didn’t know I was making at the time.

EF: You often anchor your lyrics with a definite sense of place, and in particular gravitate towards Tennessee. How have the surroundings there influenced your writing? Do you see yourself in Nashville permanently?

DB: I’m happy in Nashville. If it became more knowing and cool, that would be a drawback, but maybe I would like it. It would be good to have more bookstores without having to go the ways of Atlanta or Austin. People are somewhat humble here I find. I think Elizabeth Bishop said “there is nothing more embarrassing than being a poet.” In a way this applies to living in Nashville. Because there is something so fundamentally Hee-Haw to the word “Nashville”, you’re almost expected to be humble and goofy about your town. Since people are always slamming the country music industry, it’s developed a sort of crass reputation music from, Texas for instance, isn’t supposed to have. But that kind of purist PR has left Texas intolerably arrogant and paranoid while Tennessee keeps a cracked, hopeful smile on throughout the year.

EF: While on the subject of place, what are your lasting impressions about Massachusetts from the time you spent studying there? I grew up there so naturally I guess I’m a bit curious…

DB: The first day I was in Northampton I was spooked. I’d never been anywhere in New England, and that morning my friends had driven me up from New York and dropped me off with my futon and garbage bags in front of this purple house I had rented a room in over the phone. I was very sensitive to an HP Lovecraft/Salem Witch Trials vibe which seemed to overlay everything. But Western Massachusetts was a great place to go for those two years. So many bookstores. Tremendous apples. I could tap into the American intellectual tradition of the nineteenth century there. It helped civilize me.

EF: My friend Sam told me a story that may or may not be accurate. He said that when Tanglewood Numbers was coming out, Drag City delayed the release from the summer to October of 2005; at the time, someone from the label then pointed out to you that the date kept with a pattern established by earlier releases (Starlite Walker - Oct 94, The Natural Bridge - Oct 96, American Water - Oct 98, Bright Flight – Nov 2001). This would suggest that your history of releasing records in autumn was coincidental and unintentional. Is that story at all true? If not, is it a conscious decision to plan album releases around autumn? Why? And why break from it for Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea?

DB: I was trying to make it by October for Bright Flight. When I missed it by a month due to delays I gave up the whole concept of October release. So the next album was supposed to come out in summer. It also got delayed and only by accident reassumed the pattern. But the initial idea was that the albums would be a series like the Hardy Boys. I wanted a formal regularity to exist regarding the album art and other things.

EF: How was the recent European tour? Are you becoming more comfortable with “life on the road”? Any plans for upcoming U.S. dates?

DB: We did our three weeks in Europe. Five weeks in the fall in the U.S. I don’t like life on the road, but I do like doing the shows. But it is a place where new work dies or never lives for me (the road).

EF: How attuned to current popular culture are you? On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being you occasionally switch on the TV and may have even seen an episode of American Idol in your life and 10 meaning you could name all eleven of David Cook’s cover songs currently on the Billboard Hot 100, where would you put yourself? Does pop culture inform your writing at all?

DB: I think I just in the last two years have made a successful break from it. It’s kind of like scripted television. By realizing life without it, your life is so improved you’d never dream of going back. All this to say that until this question I don’t believe I have ever heard of a person called David Cook. I do watch some reality television. I get caught up in the cruelest ones. My wife hates NBC To Catch A Predator, but it’s just amazing to me, the whole set up. A primal scene.

Pre-order Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea HERE

Listen: “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat”

Visit Silver Jews on MySpace.
–
See the list of bands recently featured as EAR FARM’s Band of the Week HERE.