To note: This article discusses depression and suicide.
A figure in the distance even to my own eye
David Berman was still alive in 2018, and the loose ideas I had about the poetics of arguably his finest album, The Natural Bridge, were just beginning to coalesce into something that might be called writing. It is the way of these things to multiply and mutate over time: themes emerge, and elements of structure suggest themselves. In this way thoughts become words, words become paragraphs, then essays, then – perhaps, if we’re lucky – books. Writing is hard and takes a long time, especially writing about something as complex and enigmatic as a Silver Jews album. In 2019, just weeks after the release of his quite remarkable Purple Mountains album, Berman took his own life. Writing became even more difficult. The underlying architecture of the piece I was trying to write was already in place: I was going to write about the importance of doubling and mirroring, of repetitions gone slightly awry and strange echoes through time and space. The Natural Bridge was full of these ideas; it would be my job to tease them out, to apply some kind of semi-formal language to them. The language of music criticism. A language I’m supposed to be fluent in, what with it being my job. I had notes, I had snippets, I had whole paragraphs; things were both coming together and going nowhere, a state of affairs that seems to be unique to the act of writing. And then Berman’s death. The sad task of going back through pages of writing about one of my favourite living artists to make sure that what I had written now reflected that he was no longer a living artist. The necessary change from present to past tense. Every ‘Berman is’ became a ‘Berman was’. ‘He writes’ became ‘he wrote’. A task that made me feel callous and insignificant.
No, I don’t really want to die
Death might be thought of as a form of doubling. When someone dies, a split occurs between actuality and potentiality. Some of our religions personify this split in terms of the soul leaving the body: a literal sundering which is sometimes rendered as an emancipatory release and sometimes as an unwilling severance (like the reluctant soul hovering over the body in William Blake’s 1908 engraving). Because it is literal, it provides a practical purpose, allowing us to mourn the loss and celebrate the passing at the same time. Division of this kind presupposes reduplication: the soul is a perfect simulacrum of the imperfect (bodily) human form. When someone takes their own life, it is implied that they have made a choice to create a fork in a path, to enact the moment of severance. Some of our religions take issue with this choice. The implication is that it is not our choice to make: it is a sin – the ultimate sin, in fact – to knowingly and prematurely end what was started by an omniscient deity. Based on what we now know about depression as an illness, and about its consequences, I feel pretty safe in saying that some of our religions are wrong.
The Natural Bridge is not an album about death, not primarily. Death and suicide are not amongst its most prominent themes. The fact that its first song is about – or at least adjacent to – suicide, and its first line uses the word ‘die’ twice, can be read in a few different ways. It could be part of a lyrical conjuring trick: Berman entering the stage with a flourish and an abracadabra so that we don’t notice the real, occult work of prestidigitation going on just below the surface. Or it could simply be that he wants us to be thinking about death; he wants to get us in the mood for it. He is creating an atmosphere rather than introducing a theme.
Death, whatever Bob Dylan might have said, is an end of sorts. And yet here it is a beginning. Everything in The Natural Bridge branches out from its opening lines; the atmosphere they create is distributed throughout the album in invisible capillaries.
An essay about The Natural Bridge could attempt to follow these capillaries. It could take the form of a choose-your-own-adventure novel, with all the splitting and reduplication that implies. If you want to read about Berman’s fascination with architecture and blueprints, turn to the next page. If you want to learn about Berman’s relationship with his father, go to page 17. But life doesn’t enable us to make choices that easily. When Berman chose to end his life, did he do it because of how he felt on one particular day? Was he thinking about that day all his life? Did he think about it at all? Was it even a choice? Just before his death, Berman sent me a message, just a few words, thanking me for a generous review of The Purple Mountains. In thanking me for my generosity, he revealed his own. He knew what he was doing. Berman understood the reduplicative effects produced by holding one mirror up to another.
Please guard my bed
In those introductory paragraphs – which, like many introductions, were written after much of the rest of the piece was already complete – I used the words ‘architecture’ and ‘structure’. That was no accident. The Natural Bridge has a structure. I guess all albums have a structure, but The Natural Bridge wears its structure like a set of overalls, or perhaps a corduroy suit. You could say that it is its structure. Berman is aware of the interplay between form and function. He was, after all, a gifted poet, and this awareness is part of the poet’s starter kit. Pet Politics – which is a song, like so many thousands of songs, about the end of a relationship – brings Berman’s fascination with architecture into contact with one of his other great preoccupations, the double:
Still wearing last night’s mascara
Now that her pet was gone for sure
She was shivering so hard
It looked like there were two of her
I could see through the sleeve on her blouse
The plans of her architect lover
A tattoo of a boarded-up house
An ink door that belonged to another
Later on, in the lyrics of Snow Is Falling in Manhattan from Purple Mountains (2019), he would explicitly compare his writing to architecture, reflecting the ideas in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: ‘Songs build little rooms in time/And housed within the songs design/Is the ghost the host has left behind.’ The notion of song-as-room has been a persistent one in Berman’s body of work. The phrase ‘songs build small rooms in time’, culled from Berman’s notebooks, was used by Friedrich Kunath and Michael Schmelling in their book You Owe Me A Feeling, in which Schmelling’s photographs were paired with individual lines of Berman’s writing. And again, in the liner notes to a 2003 Domino Records comp: ‘Good songs build rooms in time.’ In an annotation of Snow Is Falling in Manhattan on the lyrics website Genius, a user by the name of MCorley tracked Berman’s preoccupation with songs as buildings or rooms back to a 1998 interview in the Washington City Paper: ‘I have this idea that you could make a record and it would be like you can live inside it forever […] It’s like an old photograph; everything would still be in there. Songs are like rooms and houses.’ It seems like a mania for preservation. Houses, mirrors, ghosts, rooms, blueprints: these are the locations and artefacts Berman uses to conduct his rituals, and in Pet Politics he is expelled or exiled from those locations. The house is boarded up.
If the purpose of those rituals is to fix something in time, what is it that is being fixed? And how do the rituals fail? They fail because Berman conducts them aslant. He is the human figure upsetting the perfect symmetry of a photograph, and he does so intentionally. It is one source of the mystery of his songs. The houses and rooms he creates are not comfortable; he’s inside them, or has been cast out, and either way he’s not comfortable. As for the first question, that’s more difficult to answer, and can potentially be approached via psychology or genetics or history or religion. We might gloss over it by saying that anyone who creates something is looking to fix themselves in time, and that Berman, hyper-aware of this process, is perpetually commenting on the thing he is perpetually trying to achieve. Or that his motives are more ambitious: to fix time itself.
Architecture, and the illusion of structure and permanence it provides, was not solely Berman’s preserve. His sometime bandmate Stephen Malkmus included the song Grave Architecture on Pavement’s Wowee Zowee (1995), and Fin, from Brighten the Corners (1997), begins with an ‘open call for a prison architect.’ But Berman’s exploration of the theme was the fullest and most complex. Some examples from The Natural Bridge: there is ‘the geometry of a church in a cul de sac’ in Dallas, a city of ‘buildings made of mirrors.’ There is Pretty Eyes, with its enduring image of houses dreaming in blueprints. The built environment bleeds into human consciousness and the human body; the fuzzy edges of creator and created blur further as they trip in and out of dreamworlds or vivid and unusual psychological states, and through it all Berman is the architectural draughtsman on the psychiatric couch.
The dual relationship between the creator-as-architect and the created (the blueprint-human) comes to a head in the Pet Politics, where Berman flirts with a thrilling iconoclasm:
Adam was not the first man
Though the Bible tells us so
There was one created before him
Whose name we do not know
He also lived in the garden
But he had no mouth or eyes
One day Adam came to kill him
and he died beneath these skies
There is, as they say, a lot to unpack here. There’s a god, who might be one and the same as the creator, who might be one and the same as the song’s narrator, who may or may not be Berman, who made the blind-mute human prototype, a failure, an unnamed pre-Adam without an Eve, and therefore essentially impotent, incapable of an act of procreation (or an act of creativity?) He has no mouth, so he can’t create the song. He has no eyes, so even if there were a song, he couldn’t read the words. And what good are blueprints if they can’t be studied? Then, of course, Adam kills the proto-human. Is Adam the same as David Berman, or is Berman the failed human blueprint?
He can, of course, be both. That’s the beauty of artifice. Duality drips out of Pet Politics. Creation is presented as a two-way street. As well as the religious connotations of duality, there are practical, quotidian implications. The ‘she’ in the song (Berman’s other, or his other half?) ‘was shivering so hard/It looked like there were two of her.’ And there is another ‘other’ who owns the door to the closed house so faithfully reproduced in the ink fixed in the woman’s skin. Presumably this third party is not Berman. He likes to hide in his narratives, and in this one he is almost invisible. We see a narrator (‘I’) observing the protagonist in her shock and grief, but then where does he go?
We can’t forget that this is a song with an outward meaning as well as multiple inward interpretations: a relationship has ended, and someone gets to keep the dog. This is a very literal example of a split. The fracturing of a unity, a third party (the dog) left in an uncertain state. Berman’s genius, part of it, anyway, is to make it all matter in the face of deeper philosophical connotations that might seem all-encompassing.
There’s an extra in our midst
David Berman was seventeen in 1984, the year in which the narrator of his most famous song was ‘hospitalised for approaching perfection.’ Seventeen, the number and the age, is at the centre of a personal system of numerology which is mystical, limited and important. In Send In the Clouds (from 1997’s American Water), Berman talked about a puppy with ‘seventeen ideas in his head,’ and earlier in the song ‘seventeen doctors’ try and fail to work out whether the newborn (or possibly unborn) narrator should be allowed to exist. Seventeen is a mythical edgeland, a precipice over which some of Berman’s lyrics hang, forever.
Seventeen is the best age to visit those ‘little rooms in time.’ It acts as a reference point for future ideas of nostalgia. As time speeds up as the universe ages, so the seventeen-year-old self lives faster and faster in the knowledge that he is coming to the end of something – not necessarily childhood or innocence, but a certain way of existing in the world – and as everything speeds up, the seventeen-year-old attempts to slow it down, to fix these moments completely statically in time. It reflects a sudden understanding of loss, and the trauma it brings.
The Natural Bridge is a bridge in time, a jump from one static moment to another, from pre-adulthood to maturity. Each song, in fact, is one such moment: a little room. If nothing else links the songs, then it’s this idea of standing on the edge of moving time, observing it from within a room. ‘The year ends in the next room,’ Berman sang: another song, a different album. The end, some kind of end, is nigh and here in the song we are both in it and separate from it.
Is there a thread, beyond this, that runs through The Natural Bridge? It’s worth looking bigger. The received wisdom is that Silver Jews albums are sequenced in opposition to each other, or like arguments against each other, a constantly unfulfilled dialectic with thesis and antithesis being repeated through time without hope of the finality of synthesis (this idea becomes particularly interesting when you consider Berman’s debt to Hegel. It also led me down a coincidental rabbit hole of research when I discovered the existence of a philosopher by the name of David Berman who lectured at Trinity College Dublin and whose work was concerned with dialectical thought. This David Berman died in July 2026. One of his key ideas was that a form of universal consciousness outlived the human body. The Natural Bridge, chronologically speaking, represents the first antithesis, the first bipolar downslide after the comparative elation of the 1994 debut album, Starlite Walker. Similarly, the free-and-easy American Water (there’s even a funk-rock song on that one) was followed by introspective Bright Flight (2001). This theory is at least partly confirmed by Berman, who discussed his methods at length, including how he made a point of only using the Pavement musicians on odd-numbered albums.
So, The Natural Bridge is a downer. What’s the root of Berman’s consternation? The album’s narrators all seem to have lost something. There are clues everywhere that point to the end of a relationship (except it’s not quite the end. In Berman’s universe, nothing really ends: incomplete dialectic; infinite regress). Here’s the first verse of Albemarle Station, a song which, on first reading, seems pretty obscure:
Call me from Albemarle Station if you can
I hope you find your concentration beneath those ceiling fans
We used to dance in this split-level ranch
Moonlight flooding the room
Now you’re gone and the shades are all drawn
In my air conditioned tomb.
What’s happened? A relationship has ended. Time has passed. Time is still passing. Our narrator – let’s call him David – expects a phone call, which we are led to suspect doesn’t come. Being without his ‘other’ is like being dead, because in Berman’s songs things seem only to exist in pairs, even when that shared existence is characterised by resentment and pain. David seems to be in a kind of purgatory, sanitised and immoveable, surviving on memories of his relationship’s good days. The ‘split-level ranch’ is another idealised room in time, a nostalgic tableaux of a pre-fall Eden. Two phrases from Albemarle Station are reused: the ‘split-level ranch’ and the later reference to something being ‘pushed by the wind’ can both be found in his poem Coral Gables. Maybe David is stuck in the expensive, antiseptic architecture of this most affluent area of Florida, a very different place from Albemarle, VA.
The other striking architectural image from Albemarle Station is the abandoned drive-in. Here, architecture has gone back to nature: ivy grows over the screen, Hollywood is sleeping a ‘sleep without the dreams’ (the final, unending sleep). The narrator’s relationship is encoded in this image of Hollywood’s idealised silver screen (and what is a silver screen if not a mirror) simultaneously conserved and condemned.
Mirrors are everywhere in The Natural Bridge. There are so many of them it can begin to feel disorienting, like the sinister fairground attraction at the heart of Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury’s 1962 horror-fantasy novel (which also features an abandoned house and a carousel that runs backwards and has the power to reverse ageing). In Dallas, which is the album’s most outwardly catchy song, the buildings are literally made of mirrors. Architecture, in the traditional sense of walls and roofs, has become obsolete. Money has turned the city into a giant mirror maze, and it draws our narrator in like a kind of honeytrap. In a hall of mirrors, everything is possible, and nothing is right. There are warps and imperfections in everything, and when mirrors are placed in opposition to each other, these reduplicate into distorted infinity. You can only observe this if you are slightly off to one side, like when the barber tries to show you the back of your own head. The endless tunnel bends away and threatens to come back around in a complete circle. This is all a game. An impossible puzzle.
Mirrors, set up deliberately askew, create imperfect repetitions. In The Natural Bridge these repetitions appear frequently as syntactic jolts, tripwires concealed in a clause. In Pretty Eyes alone there are five examples of micro-repetition (the italics here are my own): ‘Little forest scenes and high school Halloweens/But they don’t come to you/They don’t come to you at all,’ ‘One of these days, these days will end,’ ‘I believe the stars are the headlights of angels/Driving from heaven to save us, to save us,’ ‘I set my dog before a hoop and said now boy, now boy,’ ‘I promise that I’ll always remember your pretty eyes/Your pretty eyes.’ And in The Frontier Index we have the shortest, strangest stutter of all: ‘Time, cum, sand and surf/These are the building, building blocks of life.’ It’s worth noting that all of these verbal slips come towards the end of the album, like it’s stumbling, slowing, becoming reluctant or recalcitrant as it approaches the inevitable, like Berman’s eyes are blinking in unconscious resistance to the glare of the angels’ headlights.
There are good lights and bad lights, and Dallas shines with an evil light. It is the light that reflects back from infinite mirrors. It comes from us. We are the source of the evil in Dallas. Not the billion steers, not the sleepless deity. It’s the make-up girls, not the mannequins. It all comes from us, the bad kids in the back.
The most powerful and personal mirror-image on The Natural Bridge appears on Inside the Golden Days of Missing You. The song – another about the end of a relationship – begins amid shattered glass which is somehow sentient and communicative: ‘It said “I know you… what’s your name?”’ Berman is observing himself, and the broken remnants of his relationship, and the recognition is only partial. Then – unsurprisingly – we’re in a bar-room. ‘I wish they didn’t put mirrors behind the bar/Because I can’t stand the look on my face when I don’t know where you are,’ he sings, in one of the album’s saddest, funniest bon mots. This is the cliched country and western singer’s hard luck story taken to its self-deprecating extreme, the cuckolded drinker as a form – a distorted, reflected form – of American hero. Golden Days is the song where Berman’s genuine love for country and western music comes through most strongly. But aside from being a witty appropriation of blue-collar self-pity (and it is an appropriation – Berman’s affluent upbringing shouldn’t be forgotten), it’s also sly and clever and warm and broken. It expresses regret in the most interesting way regret has ever been expressed in song, in the form of ghosts in a classroom learning how to balance equations:
What if life is just some hard equation
On a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts?
Then you can live again
But you’ll have to die twice in the end.
It’s all there: the hauntedness, the mirroring, the repetitions. Also, it’s very funny.
Structurally, too, The Natural Bridge contains mirror images. Again, they are decentred, set up at angles. Ballad of Reverend War Character, the album’s most inscrutable song, begins:
Miss Mary Jane measures rain
In a cracked cup on the sill
In Embry’s last photograph
He disappears over a hill
Skip forward a few songs and Pretty Eyes opens with the lines:
Everybody wants perspective from a hill
But everybody’s wants can’t make it past the window sill
The reversal in the rhyme here is telling. The first example moves from an internal scene to an external one. The suggestion is that escape is possible, even if it is an escape into anonymity. In Pretty Eyes, the movement is from outside to in. Those little rooms in time, those songs, can be places of escape or prisons.
And while we’re on the subject of mirrors, it might be worth noting that Pretty Eyes, that incomparable concluding document (and perhaps the best song in the entire Berman catalogue), holds up a mirror to the entire album. The song’s narrator, spent but finally content, it would seem, finds himself back ‘at the ranch.’ Is it the same ranch where he used to dance in the moonbeams in Albemarle Station? It’s kind of irrelevant: one thing we’ve learnt along the way is that mirrors don’t have to be exact. What’s important here is the sense of an ending. The song is like a mirror at the end of a room. A solid thing, but a thing that you can see through into – if this isn’t too dramatic – another dimension, or another time. Mirrors have two conflicting qualities: solidity/presence and infinity/absence.
Pretty Eyes is unparalleled as an example of Berman’s ability to create an entire world out of nothing. Just look at the line ‘meanwhile, back home at the ranch.’ It’s a version of the platitude thought to have originated in early westerns, a crude cinematic device for shifting perspective (and Pretty Eyes is, among other things, a song about perspective; that much is established in its first few words). After those formulaic westerns, the same device was used successfully by Alfred Hitchcock, who turned it into a piece of storytelling advice for prospective film directors. Hitchcock identified the trick of structuring a story as two parallel narratives. A good (or merely adequate) visual storyteller can create tension by cutting from one thread to another just as the first thread reaches a peak of drama or threat.
Berman’s use of the phrase is his way of commenting – slyly, self-deprecatingly – on his own songwriting techniques. By baring the bones of his craft, he nails his colours to its flag: the flag of the cheap western, and by extension the cheap country and western song. The art of the white American vernacular. And if we are to treat Pretty Eyes as a narrative along the lines of a western film, the mechanics of the phrase ‘meanwhile, back home at the ranch’ must be preceded by a moment of drama or threat. In this case it’s the failure of the Governor’s heart, the state bird falling from its branch (Berman’s parochial American equivalent of the ravens leaving the Tower of London). In short: upheaval, turmoil. The disintegration of a societal order. Our narrator flips the switch with his hackneyed phrase, and suddenly he is positioned back home, away from it all, in comparative peace and quiet as the world – or at least America – burns.
There are such ill portents all over The Natural Bridge, as there are in all of Berman’s work. But there are moments rich with hope too, or at least a kind of fervent love that mimics hope. ‘I believe the stars are the headlights of angels/Driving from heaven to save us, to save us,’ he sings in that excruciatingly moving final verse. It’s heartbreaking because we know what he had to go through to get there, and we know this because in Ballad of Reverend War Character he sings (twice, of course), ‘the stars don’t shine upon us, we’re in the way of their light.’ (We also know it because of the evident pain in the way he sings ‘your pretty eyes’ – twice, of course – and because of the contemporary accounts of his fragile mental state during the recording of the song.) There was a time, in Ballad of Reverend War Character, when he didn’t believe. He has been on a journey, and he communicates his metamorphosis through his various reactions to the portents that erupt along the way. These eruptions construct a riddle: they reveal a doppelgänger – ‘an extra in our midst’ – and there’s no way of knowing which one, the original or the double, makes it home to the ranch.
Berman has a habit of enticing an elephant into the room, and in Pretty Eyes he fills a room with literal elephants. This is a joke as much as the shaggy dog stories in The Frontier Index are jokes. Usually he asks us to look at the room, at the architecture of the joke; here he’s asking us to look at the punchline. The elephants are a tragicomic troupe; sad clowns. But he humanises them. The punchline is that the elephants (in the room, in the fridge) have transcended the joke. They are real, and the joke’s on us.
Here’s another joke about elephants. Two elephants were taking a bath. One said, ‘Please pass the soap.’ The other replied, ‘No soap, radio.’ It’s a joke so famous that it spawned an entire genre of humour. ‘No soap radio’ now refers to any kind of joke that has a deliberately irrelevant or meaningless punchline and is told as a prank to elicit a confused or false response. (Stephen Malkmus, Berman’s partner in pranks, was in on the joke too: ‘No soap in the john!’ he sang on Pavement’s Rattled By the Rush.)
And Berman is a joker. Somewhere between Stephen Malkmus’s surrealist prankster persona and the dark and deadpan one-liners of old friend Bill Callahan. The humour of bumper stickers and tales told in bars. Sometimes he hides his jokes in terrifying or sad images, but sometimes he just tells them straight. The Frontier Index, with its two fully realised jokes, is essentially a stand-up routine in song form. Both of the jokes are well-known examples of a classic American form of humour, and both are on subjects close to Berman’s heart. The first is about religion and a fractious father-son relationship; the second implies a future where robots have outstripped human intelligence. The first makes use of an apparently unbridgeable generational void, while in the second Berman builds a bridge in time with an appropriated quip based on double meanings and misunderstanding.
Some kind of strange magic happens
While I have no wish to descend into cheap psychoanalysis, any discussion of Berman’s writing on The Natural Bridge needs to address the subject of father-son relations. Richard Berman is the biggest elephant in the room, and if at times his son seems to be doing his best to force him out of the door – a door comically too small to fit an elephant through – he nonetheless appears as a vital if decaying presence in several songs in the Silver Jews’ catalogue. The most obvious of these is How to Rent a Room, which is The Natural Bridge’s first song. ‘No I don’t really want to die,’ he sings in those frequently quoted opening lines, ‘I only want to die in your eyes.’ What follows is a complex mixture of invective and regret, bound up in what seems like suicidal ideation but is actually a subtler wish for a certain kind of void. ‘I want to wander through the night/As a figure in the distance even to my own eye,’ he sings in the second verse. Berman’s wish to distance himself from his father is inseparable from a more insidious wish: to distance himself from himself, or from a version of himself. A double.
‘Motherfucking son of a bitch.’ ‘A despicable man.’ ‘A human molestor.’ This was how Berman described his father in the statement explaining the end (calling it a break-up doesn’t seem fitting) of the Silver Jews, seventeen years ago. And he was right. Richard Berman is, or seems to be, a terrible person: a powerful right-wing lobbyist whose list of ‘accomplishments’ includes (but is by no means limited to) the legal representation of the American beverage industry in cases against the victims of drunk driving, personal verbal and legal attacks on labour union leaders and environmentalists, campaigns against public health restrictions on smoking and legal battles against minimum wage increases. He also headed the dismantling of Obama’s climate agenda, paving the way for Trump’s vision of energy at all costs. Many of his campaigns have been at such a high level that they have influenced American right-wing policy and have likely contributed to the deaths of countless American people.
So David Berman was probably right, but he was also Richard’s son, and their relationship was more nuanced than the one suggested by the tale of complete estrangement that emerged with the details of the Silver Jews’ closing statement. David was known to have accepted financial aid from his father, for instance. But the 2009 outburst suggests that there was a past that had been partially obscured up to that point. Some elements of that past were there in Berman’s songs, hidden in plain sight, and How to Rent a Room is the clearest example of this. When he sang ‘I should have checked the stable door for the name of the sire and dam,’ he wasn’t joking: he was genuinely worried that something poisoned in his bloodline would emerge in him. But in speaking of his father in terms of an animal, he also paints himself in those terms. There is something unescapable, something that transcends distance and time, and that something is genetics, or family, which is simply what sociologists call genetics.
Berman spent time in Dallas, and it’s where his father went after his divorce. Might this be why the city shines with an evil light? In Dallas, the song, Berman seems to have an ambivalent relationship to the city. Attraction and repulsion in equal measure. Or not quite equal: when the lights come on, the draw becomes stronger, and he can’t keep away. Whether Dallas stands for Berman’s father may always be a matter for conjecture; there are deeper and more interesting inferences to be made in that song. A partial history of a city can be read in its architecture, and Berman takes us on a whistle-stop tour of Dallas’s buildings and their interiors, from the seedy to the sacred. The picture that emerges is one of a city polarised: night and day, black communities and white communities, dark and light, good and evil, eroticism and frigidity, sex and violence, cat and mouse, rich and poor, the blizzard and the blazing sun.
When we see dichotomies like this in Berman’s lyrics, there are many ways we can think about them. The pervasive spectre of dualism (in a religious sense) hangs over his songs, just as it hung over Leonard Cohen’s songs (is there an irony that the two songwriters who spoke most eloquently on Christianity were both from Jewish backgrounds? Or is it more of an inevitability?) Then there is the father-son dichotomy, which we could shoehorn into the discussion of practically any Berman song, and which is perhaps linked to the idea of Father and Son in Judeo-Christian theology. Berman seems to have been torn between wanting to expose his own relationship with his father and wanting to cloak it in layers of mystery. In Black and Brown Blues, the narrator is forced to make a choice that seems like no choice at all: the choice between black and brown (notice also how in this song clothing becomes architecture, specifically gutters, which are the architecture of waste and effluence, the meeting place for rats and hopeless drunks). In Dallas, and in a handful of other songs on The Natural Bridge, there is another form of tension that is talked about less often, namely the history of race and race relations in the United States.
The narrator of Dallas stays in a dramhouse in Oak Cliff, a suburb that became an important site in the history of racial desegregation in Texas. The Ku Klux Klan carried out multiple beatings there. Violence – a whipping with a belt-buckle – finds its way into Dallas. The narrator watches an episode of General Hospital; tellingly, it’s the one where BB King appears. King was a Mississippi-born bluesman who relocated to Chicago. Berman has a distant and at times wary relationship with the blues as a musical form (and a much closer relationship with the blues as a psychological concept or condition). His engagement with the blues, at a tangent, at a few degrees of separation, is evidently a comment on sadness, low mood, depression. It is also an engagement with a historically black musical form. This engagement comes closest to the surface in Black and Brown Blues: in its title, which is a misnomer (the song is closer to country and western than to anything else – a genre often associated with white working-class America), and in its content, which includes a quadroon ball in Tchula.
Tchula was once infamous as the poorest place in America (Guardian, 2015). Its population is 96% African-American. It was home to at least three noted blues musicians who would later, like BB King, find fame in Chicago. It was also home to Hartman Turnbow, who was the first black Mississippi citizen to register to vote, and who, coincidentally, also relocated to Chicago. The history of Tchula is the history of race relations in America. In 1982, the town’s first black mayor was incarcerated on charges that were at best dubious. So why is it raining triple sec in Tchula? Triple sec is known for being dry – it’s right there in the name – which is ironic because rain is, you know, wet. And you can put triple sec in a margarita, something Berman would write about later. It’s used in a bunch of other cocktails, including a white lady and a variety of corpse reviver. A cocktail is by nature a frivolous thing; its making and its consumption are both concerned with artifice and image. Not something you’d readily associate with America’s poorest community.
And neither, perhaps, is Ozzy Osbourne. But there he is, a very white man in very black clothes, on the radio, singing Crazy Train.
I dream of a cold river
It’s raining a lot on The Natural Bridge. In fact, only two of its songs don’t explicitly mention the weather. One of those – The Right to Remain Silent – is an instrumental. The other is Inside the Golden Days of Missing You, and it’s possible that the ‘golden days’ of the title (a phrase coined by Milton in Paradise Lost) refer to a time of sunshine, however ironic this might be in this instance. ‘The rain turns the ditches to mirrors’ in Pet Politics. That’s a line which couldn’t be more Berman if it tried. In Pretty Eyes, Hell is beginning to freeze over. There are blizzards (Dallas) and bad snow (Albemarle Station). There is folk meteorology in The Ballad of Reverend War Character (Miss Mary Jane measuring rain in a cracked cup). The sun shines despite everything in The Frontier Index, while How to Rent a Room is haunted by thunder, wind and yet more rain.
I’ve heard it said that The Natural Bridge is an autumnal or wintery album, and the general trend towards wetness and wind, snow and ice, would seem to back this up. But it’s not like other seasonal albums. Lambchop’s Is a Woman and Nixon. Most of Sparklehorse’s output. Some Tindersticks. Richard Hawley. I’m pretty set in my ways when it comes to listening to those. Strictly September to February. But that’s not the case with The Natural Bridge. There is an underlying musical generality which works in contrast to the specificity of the lyrics. It means that The Natural Bridge is one of those rare albums I can listen to at practically any time, and in any place.
The band responsible for this admirable neutrality is very different from the group of guys who played on the first and third albums. Where the Pavement boys were playful (Malkmus in particular was the font of a lifetime’s worth of tart lyrical ad libs and lo-fi rock god guitar interjections), the players on The Natural Bridge are very much there to create a backdrop. Language has primacy, and is Berman’s sole preserve. Even the title of the album’s only instrumental, The Right to Remain Silent, is an arch comment on verbal communication. But that’s not to say that the music is unimportant. New Radiant Storm King members Peyton Pinkerton and Matt Hunter, as well as Rian Murphy and Michael Deming, whip up some unadorned alt-rock with hints of country, with Pinkerton in particular laying down some impressive, controlled licks. You get the feeling that Berman was aiming for something like creative control, or at least the tension that comes with striving for creative control over musicians who, by definition, are creative beings in their own right. Compare this approach to the Pavement albums, Starlite Walker in particular, where the overriding feeling is of a freewheeling creative abandon, unconstrained and often improvised.
Bob Dylan needed a name for the sound he birthed when he attempted to assume full creative control over his band in the mid-1960s. He famously called it ‘that thin, that wild mercury sound.’ Replace the mercury with aluminium – replace the fluid with the architectural – and you might be talking about the music on The Natural Bridge. Structured ambiguity sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true of some of these songs. The musicians do just what they are required to do. The spooked grandeur of the drums on Ballad of Reverend War Character, the tight, bright guitars on Dallas. Peyton Pinkerton confirmed that ‘the rules for the record were strict from the start’: each song could only be practiced three times, and the band were only allowed one or two takes. These conditions led to what Pinkerton described as a ‘sparseness’ which left Berman ‘a vast canvas to sing over.’
Sparseness, thinness. The feeling of something stretched tight. It all plays into Berman’s lyrical vision, with its strange mirror images and permeable boundaries, its preoccupation with fraught mental states and the endings of things (relationships, lives). There is a fine web that stretches across Berman’s work which, despite its fineness, is strong and structural, and the voices that carry along its filaments are clear and precise. We are meant to know, for example, that Albemarle Station takes place in the same poetic space as his poem Coral Gables (despite the physical miles that separate Virginia and Florida). As I’ve already pointed out, both mention the ‘split-level ranch,’ the building that contains two distinct worlds, and in Coral Gables we learn that the ‘something’ that ‘gets pushed by the wind’ is actually a bell. This doesn’t clear anything up, though neither does it make anything more dense. It simply shows that the same thing can exist twice, in different locations or different times. More doubles, more mirrors, more imperfect repetitions.
Pick up a copy of Actual Air, and you’ll soon start noticing these links. The starlight from one of Berman’s constellations can be felt in the night of another. Sometimes, an image that seems to lack meaning or logic when viewed from one side can be partially explained when observed from another perspective.
If thy kingdom ever comes
‘The chimes of rabies’ is one of the album’s most enduring images, all the more so for its inscrutability. The most obvious thing to say about it is that it is the evil twin of Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. Other Silver Jews songs mirror Dylan: the line ‘when I paint my dining room’ from American Water’s People appears to be a deliberately mundane mirror of When I Paint My Masterpiece, and when Berman sings ‘seems just like a freeze-out’ on Pan American Blues (from Starlite Walker – and another blues that isn’t really a blues) he is quoting from the working title of Dylan’s Visions of Johanna.
The other implication of that line – ‘the chimes of rabies are ringing again’ – has to do with time, and possibly with a kind of eternal return or infinite loop, in a Nietzschean sense. We are, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, doomed to regression and repetition, to a future that is also a past. Berman seemed to fight back against this notion on subsequent albums. On American Water’s closer, The Wild Kindness, he steps outside of time: ‘Instead of time there will be lateness/And let forever be delayed,’ and, from the same song, ‘The year ends in the next room.’
But many of Berman’s apparently cryptic lines do a different kind of work. The poet David Berman and the songwriter David Berman are two distinct but inseparable elements, like conjoined twins, or like a mirror and its observer. As a poet, he exists in a lineage of American verse whose most lauded scion is John Ashbery, and he often worked in an Ashberian mode, in what David Shapiro called a ‘syntax of dreams’. In places, The Natural Bridge seems to be an attempt to pull away from that syntax and into the more universal language of popular song, specifically country and western. He comments on this tension in The Frontier Index:
When I was younger I was a cobra
In every case I wanted to be cool
Now that I’m older and sub-space is colder
Just want to say something true
It’s not an uncommon creative trajectory, but it’s one that occupied Berman acutely as a subject of his writing rather than passively as an unavoidable occurrence in his writing. And so the syntax of dreams remains, looped around the grammar of the mundane, peaking in the disparate roll-call of Ballad of Reverend War Character, or in Albemarle Station’s mysterious ‘dust congress,’ perhaps a reference to Richard Brautigan’s ‘American dust’ motif which in turn seems to be mirrored in the title of American Water.
But for all his desire to ‘say something true,’ Berman was a poet, and his poetry in its dream-syntax goes beyond saying what is true and into the realm of saying what could be true. In a sense, Berman is writing into the future, not as prediction or prescription but as an exploration of multiple possibilities. One such possibility is the mystically and musically conjured rabies outbreak; another is the inevitable singularity, the moment when the robot usurps the bartender. And still another is a kind of American rapture, where the angels arrive at the ranch in their Cadillacs and their Ford pickups to save us. Berman is not playing the part of the naïf; he realises that all of humanity is naïve. He writes his belief – which is the neutral form of hope – across celestial time zones.
Final words are so hard to devise
My time zone woke up to the news that David Berman had died. I was in my kitchen when I read about it. I think I was making or drinking a pot of black coffee. A quick glance at the historical weather records tells me that it was 69 degrees Fahrenheit. I think that means it was warm. I think I was wearing pyjama bottoms and the T-shirt I’d slept in.
I played the song Room Games and Diamond Rain from Bright Flight, and I held my three-week-old daughter, who was silent. I think I cried silently for a while.
My daughter will be sixteen when I am the age that Berman was when he died. While I sat in my kitchen playing whatever Silver Jews songs came up on YouTube, I contemplated some simple, incontrovertible facts: my daughter only shared the world with David Berman for three weeks; I, like Berman, have suffered from periods of depressive illness; Berman described his depression as treatment-resistant, which is to say a lifelong condition, and my own depression seems to have followed the same path – certainly, the various pills and techniques I have tried have had little or no positive effect; creative people have creative ways of dealing with depression, often by turning it towards artistic ends, or towards acts of love and generosity and fierceness of feeling – positive or negative feeling – towards other people. The wild kindness.
The depressive mind is paradoxically prone to wandering and to fixation. It self-examines fervently. It has the habit of turning simple facts into complex, ruminative thought-processes whose flawed logic often presents as truth. While I was in the kitchen that morning, my mind sought out the false truth of numbers. My daughter will be sixteen when I am fifty-two. Right then, that fact seemed cloaked in evil mystery. There was a patch of sunlight on the kitchen table. The primary colours of the vinyl tablecloth were warm. The innocent day was full of meaningful portents: the ghosts of numbers, the unavoidable terror of symmetry.
Depression is different for different people. I look for comfort in the fact that my depression is not the same as David Berman’s depression. The number fifty-two is not some kind of magical cut-off point, some cosmic benchmark. I am lucky to have never experienced strong urges to self-harm. I have often wanted not to be alive, but I have never wanted to die. I can’t imagine my depression taking this turn (though I understand that doesn’t mean it won’t happen). I’ve rarely even thought about hurting myself in the physical sense. It’s a temporary comfort. But I hate the thought as soon as it occurs. It’s a selfish thought. Why should I have this easy form of illness? Why should I be allowed to cope? Then thoughts like this follow: the world is a terrible place and I am a terrible person and the world and I deserve each other, and perhaps David Berman is better off now, perhaps he is at peace. I cringe at those words now – ‘at peace’ – even as I write them. The idea of death equating to peace is a fallacy concocted by the unimaginative and a crutch for people who want to believe in a higher power but can’t comprehend the greatness in the world. Suicide is not a lifestyle choice.
On July 23rd 2019, David Berman sent me the message I wrote about in the introduction to this piece. He thanked me for my review of his wonderful new album, The Purple Mountains. It was the first and last time he communicated with me personally. I didn’t know him. I never met him or saw the Silver Jews live. I’m not aware that he ever read anything else I had written.
That particular review had been written in something of a frenzy, as if it were a race against time (most of my reviews are written like that, if I’m honest). It ended up as a long and rambling piece, more of a career retrospective from the point of view of a fanboy than an objective piece of music criticism. Predictably, nobody except a few friends and maybe some hardcore Silver Jews fans read it. And then David read it and sent his reply.
Generosity clones itself easily, happily. So too does humility. I was humbled by the humble language of David’s message. I saw the generosity of his spirit when he described my review as generous. I wrote back, a simple ‘you’re welcome’ and a few lines about how The Purple Mountains was my favourite album of the year up to that point. David, as I’ve already suggested, understood the mechanics of reduplication better than most, and he dealt in the currency of kindness, knowing that he could always mint some fresh when he needed it. Though in the end kindness may not have been enough for him, it remains the best thing we’ve got.
In the end
In the end, my review of The Purple Mountains was a living thing for about two weeks. Now it is nothing. Its conclusion expressed the hope and the belief that David had turned some kind of corner, that he was going to be fine or at least better than he had been. It turned out that writing it had been a race against time, though not in the way most writing is a race against time. Perhaps, to play the amateur psychiatrist for a second, I had known all along that things weren’t getting better. I was angry at myself and everyone who had written about the album for missing those obvious signs. Everywhere you looked were music critics saying that this was a new beginning, that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, that David was ready to make peace with himself. But every single song screams about the end of happiness. I mean, the first single was called All My Happiness Is Gone, for chrissakes. Lyrics like ‘The dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind.’ Those aren’t the words of a man content with his lot in life. We all praised the lyrics for their sincerity, then treated them as if they weren’t sincere.
I’m still angry, but not because nobody did anything. I’m angry because nobody could do anything. You can’t stage an intervention based on a work of art. Depression has despicable means of going undetected, of hiding in plain sight, of daring you to fuck with it.
Depression is not death, though it feels like a form of death at times.
The Purple Mountains was the first album I listened to in full after David died. I have had those words in my head, sometimes in odd strings and muddled combinations, ever since. I will occasionally be interrupted by a lyric that turns the architecture of my day wobbly and intangible, or simply brings it crashing down around me, if only for a few seconds. A lyric that, a week before, would have been completely innocuous suddenly appears loaded with sinister or melancholy or heartbreakingly hopeful meaning.
I listened to Bright Flight and American Water a lot in the days after David’s death. It took me weeks to give The Natural Bridge another spin. I was afraid that a song like Pretty Eyes would be too much for me. That wasn’t the case. Of course I cried, that kind of quiet crying that engulfs you and you can feel a light throb in your fingertips and a tightening of your scalp. But there was a bittersweet undertone, a layer of hope. It made me feel for a second that art was worth defending again, that words and love and emotion and all those things valued by wishy-washy creatives like me were actually meaningful and had an important part to play in the world. The Natural Bridge had changed. Perhaps it was David’s death that had changed it. Perhaps he left something behind, the idea of himself as a being that no longer exists in a physical sense. Is that the closest we can get to alchemising the soul, to understanding the duality of human existence?
I have an admission to make: I was late in coming to the music of the Silver Jews. I first listened to Starlite Walker and Bright Flight when David was in the process of quitting the music business. I had a couple of burned CDs that a friend had given me, and I played them through a crappy TV speaker on an old PlayStation 2. A couple of years later, I finally got around to listening to The Natural Bridge, probably on YouTube. Up until that point I’d seen them as a sporadically brilliant but inconsistent band. The Natural Bridge was a revelation. It changed everything. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it was the single most important musical discovery of my adult life. The first nine songs conformed to my idea of perfection. They were individually brilliant and conceptually cohesive. And then, somewhere in the middle of the final track, you are forced to realign your notions of perfection. As I’ve already said, it brilliantly sets up what is to follow on the next album. But it also makes you think about what has been. How do you view those nine tracks once track ten has asserted itself in this way?
It makes me want to start again from the beginning. It forces me to notice new things in those preceding tracks. Pretty Eyes is a magic protective circle drawn around an enchanted building.
People talk about David Berman as an alchemical writer or a transfigurative one. I’ve written about him in those terms in this piece. We want to see him as the man who turned his immense personal sadness into something round and shiny and startlingly beautiful. But art is not alchemy. It is a real and imperfect process, and sadness remains.
In a sense, and despite his famous generosity, David’s songs and poems aren’t meant to be perfect little gifts for the world. For one thing, he would never have expected the world to listen. Perhaps, to begin with, he wrote songs as if he had a reciprocal agreement with the world, but he always knew the world would renege on that agreement.
For some time I suffered from the irrational fear that David’s death would somehow make me immune to music, which is another reason it took me so long to listen to The Natural Bridge again after he died. I now suspect that the opposite was true, that I now have a fuller understanding of the Silver Jews’ music and music in general. Understanding, like the process of mourning and recovery, can take time. Understanding may even be part of the process of mourning and recovery.
and if the apocalypse turns out
David Berman, ‘Self-Portrait at 28’
to be a world-wide nervous breakdown
if our five billion minds collapse at once
well I’d call that a surprise ending
and this hill would still be beautiful
a place I wouldn’t mind dying
alone or with you
If you’re struggling, Samaritans are available any time on 116 123 or at samaritans.org