David Berman, poet and musician, has died. An obsessive teller of musical truths—harsh, grim, and otherwise—Berman was a fixture of the indie music scene over the last 20-odd years, first as the sole stable presence in the Silver Jews, and, more recently, as the central driving force of his new project, Purple Mountains. (The band just put out its first album back in July; Berman was set to go out on tour with them in service of it this weekend.) Berman was 52; per Pitchfork, no cause of death has been announced.
Born in Virginia (to a father whose work as a corporate lobbyist he openly disdained), Berman started making music early and enthusiastically, initially teaming up with future Pavement co-founders Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. Embracing a lo-fi aesthetic—including, famously, recording the better part of an early album on a Walkman—Silver Jews was a lyricist’s band first and foremost, serving as a platform for some of the most inventively weird lyrics ever to grace a jangly, fuzzy-sounding guitar lick. His songs are full of lines like “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection” and “Are you honest when no one’s looking? Can you summon honey from a telephone?”—sentence-long puzzles and punchlines designed to worm their way permanently into a listener’s brain. Berman was, among other things, a longtime subject of fandom and appreciation around these parts; there’s a reason one of our formerly regular features was called Random Rules (and why Berman was its very first subject).
When Pavement took off, Silver Jews was occasionally forced into the public perception of a Malkmus side-project; Berman typically responded to the shift by, true to form, not responding very much at all. (Besides occasionally crediting his collaborators under aliases.) Although he’d continue to work off and on with Malkmus and Nastanovich over the years, Silver Jews continued on as an expression of his interests and obsessions, swapping in and out members, indulging in long, fascinating tangents about Teddy Roosevelt and the curdled optimism of 1913, and staying most and especially true to itself. Listening to Berman sing could sometimes feel like dipping into the world’s most well-thought-out stream of consciousness; his vocals are filled with odd word choices and turns of phrases that seem laser-aimed to trip up the tongue, while still conveying a heady sense of misery, anxiety, and, occasionally, hope.