Features | Interviews

Silver Jews

By Conrad Amenta | 19 June 2008

David Berman is stepping, blinking, into the sun from the Silver Jews tour jet, wrinkled and smelling of better wine. His return from a European tour finds him on the cusp: of explaining; of projecting scene-stealing diary entries, horizon-wise, on building sides; of bookshop eloquence and misunderstood insouciance; of releasing his most idiosyncratically engaging, tangential album yet in Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, out now on Drag City. We didn’t so much sit down with Berman as collect staff-wide questions and huck them at him via understanding PR people, and he was gracious enough to funnel answers back to us.

CMG: I’ll start with the most obvious topic: holy shit, that album cover. Can you give us a little bit of background on how you found it, who it’s by, why you chose it, and what exactly it is that makes it so sublime?

David Berman (DB): This is crass, but I needed album art so I went the most literal way possible and bought a copy of Artforum. I saw an ad for some Stephen Bush paintings. They were nearly day-glo, and fascinating and I decided to order his book, thinking I might have found my cover in day-glo. In there I saw “The Lure of Paris.”

He uses one tube of black and one tube of white and paints it every year from memory.

I would like to see them, or at least a few of them, side by side someday. He’s Australian and was nice enough to let me put that red logo there. That seemed like the only color that would leave the painting alone. In that same issue of Artforum someone explained that what pink had been to the last ten years, red would be to the next. I like to take an expert’s advice. We all do.

CMG: Malkmus and Nastanovich became huge friends due to their love of music and Major League Baseball. Do you dig America’s pastime and, if yes, who’s your team?

DB: I loved major league baseball from 1977-1983. I had thousands of cards and had read through all the back history of the league. Sometime in there I tried to play for a season. I was inordinately scared of being hit by a baseball though. That’s what you get when you put a kid into a batting cage without making sure he’s got 20/20 eyesight.

Also Malkmus and Nastanovich were into minor league ball. The Richmond Braves.

CMG: You’ve gone on record as studying the Torah. What’s your favorite Old Testament story?

DB: Until I read I the Tanakh (which is the Five Books of Moses, the Prophets, and all the excellent bonus material: Proverbs, Job, the Song of Songs; the O.T. is a Christian edit, to make the whole deal work as a prequel.) I never knew how the crossing of the River Jordan happened. The river stops so two million people can cross. The next day all the males are circumcised in unison. Joshua 5-8. “After the circumcising of the whole nation was completed, they remained where they were, in the camp, until they recovered.” I would soundtrack this scene with some early Primus.

Kings I and II is so wide-screen. I can’t believe I ignored it all for so long. I thought I’d pored over it somewhere along the way, motel or summer camp. Anyway, not to be bitchy but calling the Torah the Old Testament is like calling an Asian an “Oriental”. There is a terrible “country” band out there in CMA-land called Lady Antebellum. I guess that sounds good to executive ears but I think it means slave-owning cunt.

CMG: One of our writers, Dave Goldstein, has a weird thing where despite having 4,000 songs on his iPod, the Silver Jews are the ONLY band he can stomach on his morning commute. Why do you think that is?

DB: Either Dave, his iPod, or his morning commute, is malfunctioning somehow.

CMG: What’s your favorite Fall lyric?

DB: From “Kicker Conspiracy”:

“What are the implications of the club unit?
Plastic, Slime, Partitions, Cocktail, Zig-Zag, Tudor Bar.”

CMG: By including all the tablature are you being self-deprecating, insisting that “anyone” can play yours songs, or are you making a subtle statement about the dissemination of “singles” and such in our MP3-saturated world? Or both? Or neither?

DB: Definitely both. Plus its folky. And more empowering than Huggy Bear in Tikrit.

CMG: “Sleeping is the Only Love” from Tanglewood Numbers and “The Pillow is the Threshold” from your new record both seem to deal with the same topic—that is a seemingly obsessive need to catch some ZZZzzs. Do you suffer from insomnia?

DB: The weirdness of the fact of sleeping has been near the front of my mind for my whole life.

In Judaism sleeping is counted as 1/60th-part death.
Aeschylus called death “the morningless sleep.”
I find these things to be fascinating.

CMG: Why can’t George Lucas leave well enough alone?

DB: He wanted to be Franklin W. Dixon but he found out too late he’d need a ghostwriter—teams of ghostwriters—to get the job done.
I saw the first three (to come out—not in the order of the series)
You knew there were prequels (theoretically) but you didn’t think about it.
When you had to start parenthetically recapitulating the order it just became a matter of minutes seen.

CMG: Have you ever had offers to put any Silver Jews songs in major motion pictures? “Trains Across the Sea” sounds tailor made for the first 4 minutes of any suburban slacker ennui film you can name.

DB: I think “People” and “Honk if You’re Lonely” are on some innocuous, anonymous straight to video flicks from around Y2K. It was right at the beginning of the really short people with big faces trend?

CMG: Another of one our writers always considered you a writer first, and a musician second. Interestingly, he can’t actually imagine you going to the record store, and, you know, purchasing a CD. Assuming you do such a thing 1) What have been some of your favorite purchases of the past six months and 2) Do you ever feel like you’re writing songs out of obligation?

DB: 1. Record store owners should boycott Silver Jew CDs for all the business I give them on the other side. But they should be mad at bands like Devo, that gave up on their critiques of technology and simply invested in ventures like the Model Café in New York City.

2. It has to feel like obligation to get it going. It would be strange if song just created its own sense of importance, its own mission to be made, but when you have obliged the need to continue on in life creating new things occasionally, sometimes you discover this new thing is now good enough to engender the enthusiasm in my mind and make me excitedly take over the project.

It’s why created things were judged “good” in Genesis.

It means God was psyched six days a week.

CMG: In “Candy Jail” you talk about an accommodating captivity, where guards are gracious and keep your favorite music on file. Are your captors based on anyone in real life?

DB: Aha. I think I am typing in this feelings box you provide me with right now.

I am just a Swiss person.

CMG: If you could have a ten second segment of any song in the world play every time you walked into a room, what song and what segment of that song would it be?

DB: Something silent by John Cage.

I’m interested in the totalitarian world of the imaginary question.

CMG: Were there any particular challenges to recording Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea that took you by surprise, in that you hadn’t encountered them before?

DB: I don’t think there were any surprises. I’m in a yearlong trough between surprises. Everybody is pre-surprise right now and they don’t know it.

CMG: Is songwriting a private or social act for you?

DB: The writing is private. I wouldn’t “try out” a song on a person,
But all the time I’m making something that’s meant to be to be 100% social.

CMG: If you weren’t doing this, and my dad was your dad, and he asked you what your five year plan was over one of those rare family dinners where he feels obligated to do so, how would you answer?

DB: I’d say, keep your hat on, old man, I’m in charge now.

I don’t have a plan. What’s weird is realizing that “the man” doesn’t have a plan either.

Cops, presidents, CEO’s, robber barons. They’re all clueless in 2008. Long term planning has virtually ended. There are no adults in charge.

CMG: A couple of writerly questions: Do you write lyrics using a word processor and, if so, do you have a favorite font? Or is it papyrus to the max? Any pen preferences? For example, I like the Zebra F-301. Nice balance, short stock, good thin, yet solid, line.

DB: I start out on the page but as soon as I can I type it in. Then I change and rechange things for days or weeks.

I love the Pilot V5, extra fine, with the little ink windows on the sides? I have a bunch of those Zebra’s. I like them, They’re heavier than they look. The clicking is crisp. That’s an old mercantile sound. Sounds like a banker’s kiss. A good show pen, but not dark enough for my eyes.

Thanks folks, it was fun

DCB