His words could sneak up on you, and then they’d lodge in your skull forever.
Messy music that felt real because it was messy.
The sonic similarities are apparent both bands worked with a willful sloppiness that made their music sound more human.
Credit: Edd Westmacott/Photoshot/Getty Images
The flaws were part of the makeup of the music.
The Purple Mountains album was something of a revelation.
Berman did not do that.
He returned to the well to venture to puzzle through existence again and again.
In a July 2019interview with The Poetry FoundationBerman says, “Some people like my singing.
But it sounds like bad singing to a lot of other people.
The second hope is that it gets to those isolated individuals who really are bound to like it.”
He’s not above any of it, he’s in it with the rest of us.
Still, the Silver Jews album I come back to the most is 2005’sTanglewood Numbers.
That album was released two years after Berman attempted suicide in Nashville.
Tanglewood Numbersis a complicated album.
Berman was mostly sober, though he was smoking weed daily.
It is, on the surface, an optimistic album, but lyrically it skewed dark and unflinching.
