Silver Jews' David Berman Talks Lookout, Outlook
"It sounds like a joke, you know, 'you were so fucked up you didn't know that you couldn't see out of your eye.'...But I was asleep for a lot of things."

In closing 2005's stellar Tanglewood Numbers, the fifth and most recent LP from his artful country act Silver Jews, David Berman touched on a "place past the blues" he never wanted to see again. It didn't take long for us rock critics to latch onto the phrase and its obvious connections to Berman's own stormy life, troubled by remnants of years of extreme chemical abuse and his then-recent decision to clean up.

In the two years since the release of Tanglewood Numbers, another phrase from "There Is a Place" seems to be more appropriate: "I took a hammer to it all." It's as apt a metaphor for Berman's recent trajectory as we'll get until Drag City's release of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the forthcoming new Silver Jews album. (Originally scheduled for release in April, the album has been pushed back until later in 2008.)

Soft-spoken, and seemingly quite sober, David Berman circa late 2007 really does seem a different person. Excited by the prospect of touring, writing songs when he doesn't have to, and preparing to be "useful in the event of an emergency," Berman speaks of this album like it's his first.

On the phone from the Nashville home he shares with his wife, Silver Jews bassist and occasional singer Cassie Berman, David discussed his new attitudes, new routines, and-- oh yeah-- the new record he's preparing to mix.

Pitchfork: How has the process of making the new album been going?

David Berman: It's been really good. I'm real happy about the writing. I've never really been completely satisfied with a release. I have always felt like you start to write a song and you can stop where you want to. And I always felt that I didn't know what would happen if I went on ahead. In a way, I kind of built in delays into the process. I really thought it was going to be done in September, but the other part of my mind knew it would take longer. When I went into the studio, the songs were about half as good as they are now. Just sitting with them for a couple months, I just couldn't leave them alone and they got better and better. I don't think I'll ever stop so early in the songwriting process again.

Pitchfork: You referred to the songs as "epic" in a recent interview. Can we expect these to be longer songs? Story songs? I can see that meaning a lot of things for you.

DB: More story songs, I would say. Even to the point of saying one of them I could define as picaresque, and another one as burlesque. One of the rules that I set up is that there's no songs that doesn't mean anything that uses oblique language or anything like that. Each one is self-contained, and it just starts in this unraveled place where things have happened, kind of a hangover kind of mood. The second side is happier but more pragmatic, like it's made its peace with the corrupt world. So it's a general arc, with the first side being the problem and the second side being the solution.

Pitchfork: It's not much of a stretch to see that as a metaphor for some of the recent events in your life.

DB: Well, all of my other albums always ended with a death or a goodbye. This one ends with a song that Cassie and I sing together that's more like Johnny Lee or some kind of urban-country love song. But even in that, it's like we could be looking for the same thing. Which is the sentiment. It's post-romantic. It's very pragmatic, almost in the way I would see older couples. Like my mom has a boyfriend and it's impossible, after a certain point... people who've been through a lot of bullshit and hard times. They no longer seek a perfect match. They're educated to know that that's impossible. They seek a compromise of some sort as just a common feature. The kind of writing I do would never, ever feature such a cop-out. In the context in this record, it means a lot.

Pitchfork: As bleak as your lyrics have been in the past, Tanglewood Numbers might've been the bleakest set yet. You seem to be suggesting that there's a little more hope here.

DB: Oh yeah. It's definitely more about human possibility. Even if the characters themselves are just kind of like rogues or whatever living by their wits, they're much more of an indomitable character, like a Saul Bellow character or Henry Miller's voice in his books. They're definitely more persistent. And I think that, in general, there's a moment of morbidity in one song. Maybe. Which is really like that.

Pitchfork: You're talking about this album like it's the first one you've ever made.

DB: With the first four records, I kind of felt like I was trying to write the same record over again in different ways, or better. And then [Tanglewood Numbers] I think is my first shot at documenting what life might be like after hell. And so this is me with my footing, and it's smarter than the last record and it's less eager to please. I turned 40 this year. I feel like now, as a writer, I'm just figuring out how to do it. I feel like all those years of not being a working rock musician, I hope has given me a different period in which to be peaking because I really feel like these are the first songs where I'm happy all the way through. I feel like as far as the writing goes, I pretty much feel peerless. I might sound like one of the British bands for a second, but I just don't hear anything that means anything to me. I don't know if this album is necessarily so good, but it's so much better than what's out there. To me, it appears to be really, really good.

Pitchfork: Actually, I recently spoke with your friend Stephen Malkmus, and he pretty much said the same thing about his new record.

DB: [pauses, then deadpans] I'm sure his will be very non-verbal.

Pitchfork: [laughs] I read that you were even keeping the songs from Cassie as recently as September. They must've really changed once everybody else got their hands on them.

DB: When they come in, I take a back seat. In fact, one thing that happens in the studio often-- because I don't take a leadership role so much-- [is that] people forget that it's my album, and I have preferences and stuff like that. Sometimes it gets to the point where you realize that the person is too attached to the record and that they're taking the record off in some direction you didn't intend to go. And that happens quite a bit, whether [it's] someone in the band or an engineer, producer. It happens all the time. So the last couple times, I decided to break it up between people. Like the last album, I started it with [producer] Mark Nevers. And I left there and took it to two other places. And this time, I took it to two other places and ended at Mark.

At any rate, as a younger person, I definitely wasn't really comfortable with taking so many risks. And I've seen the risk-taking pay off before. So I'm comfortable with it now. Just stopping a recording in the middle and having to take it all over to someone else is like carrying a basket with all these eggs in it. You really don't know what you recorded if you take it to someone else. There's been some gaps where I didn't know where I was going to take it next. So in between those waiting periods, it's very nerve-wracking. Because you want it to be done. But it's good that I had to wait.

Pitchfork: What has asserting your presence in the studio meant in terms of how the sessions went, and how the songs shaped up?

DB: Well, I always step in at the end. And even now, I'm letting Mark get familiar with the songs, I'll tell him things that are down there that he doesn't know about. I'll point things out. But until he gets to a place that's comfortable, I'm going to shut up. I guess now, it's happening at times that Mark knows I have things that I want to do before it's all done. A lot of times, the time will run out on you and you'll make compromises. I had this guitar solo that I did on Bright Flight. It was really good, actually. And he muted it in the mix. He said he forgot it. I believe him. But these kinds of things, if you have to master the next day, you're not going to say that. This time, everything's going to be there that I want to be there.

I really feel like the other guys, Peyton [Pinkerton] and William [Tyler], as two guitarists who've known me for so long and who know my taste and they work so well together, I didn't really have to tell them very much. If I would hear Peyton using a lot more distortion pedal than I want to... but then after he leaves, you can mix some of those things out. To me, it's better than pulling the person aside and telling them they're not doing something. But Peyton is doing so many things... I certainly don't want to pick on him. Because he's the best.

And [keyboardist] Tony Crow, he's, like, this total genius. If you give him the setup, he starts pulling out all of this musique concrète that's hilarious. And he instinctually knows. Like this song "Candy Jail", he brought out the Caribbean influence. That was in the song. I couldn't see it, but it was there. It needed the warm weather setting. If I just sit there, he'll just sit there with his keyboard and just go through different things. He won't even listen to you when you're like, "do that one again!" He'll just keep playing and playing. I get everyone to play a lot of stuff. And then at the end, the albums are fairly crowded. That's really just my choice. There's not a lot of breakdowns. I haven't used crescendos and things like that. I almost never do things like that.

Pitchfork: You referred to yourself as a "working rock musician" a little bit earlier, and that's certainly more true in the traditional sense now than ever before. You're putting out an album, putting on shows, then recording another album, playing more shows...

DB: Part of falling into the routine has to do with what's happened already. For instance, when I went to do press for American Water in 1998, I got in a terrible fight and got kicked in the head and had a boot-print on my head. You can see it on the cover of the Hot as Hell 7". These guys walked all over my face. Like everyone else, I didn't have any health insurance, and I couldn't afford to do anything about it. So for years, I had a bum ear and a bum eye. It was happening really slowly with my eye. It turned out that I had this thing called Keratoconus, which is like a growth on your eye. It can start from a really bad blow to the head. You get this knotty, sort of like a hill grows up on your eye, where the eye is supposed to be a dome. And so the light comes in, it goes all different directions. You really don't see anything. You see light. It's really more like looking through a soapy window.

So over the years, my eyes were getting so bad, but I was so messed up that I didn't realize it. It sounds like a joke, you know, "you were so fucked up you didn't know that you couldn't see out of your eye." Obviously, there were periods when I was sober. But I was asleep for a lot of things. And that was one of them. When I got sober, it was really upsetting to me that I couldn't see. I only had one eye. And there were all these other injuries I had. I had a broken foot, and I had really messed up teeth and all these different physical problems.

Anyway, going on tour was a good thing in a lot of ways. One of the ways was that I was able to get a cornea transplant. I was able to save up the $20,000 that it costs to get a deceased person's cornea in your eye. It also came at a certain point of my life when I realized that I had to stand up and take care of Cassie better and do certain things better. I'm not having a kid or anything like that, but I feel pretty much freed of the doubt and fears that filled my 30s.

Sometimes I notice that people nowadays seem to build their own context, whatever they want it to be. I see someone like Devendra Banhart, and to me it's fascinating that he's able to create a context in which the scene in Animal House where the folk singer's bashed over the head with a guitar never happened. In his context, not all of America saw that movie, laughed, and agreed that folk music was annoying. And I never thought that I'd live inside a context like that. But I do, so I decided to make my own ones up too. Mine are remote, they're here. I don't think they challenge truth at all. I'm perfectly comfortable inside of it.

Pitchfork: You made sort of an offhand comment to someone in another interview along the lines of "I'm very excited to tour." Three or four years ago, any time the subject would come up, it wasn't even "oh, maybe," it was "absolutely not." That's quite a change. So those shows must have gone pretty well?

DB: Yeah, they went well. I don't know why. To me, it seems like something to look forward to. I do look forward to it. It took me a long time to feel like this is what I was meant to do. I didn't feel like that was the signal I was getting back from the world. I thought the signal was mixed. The signal was, "you're a really good poet. We don't know about you as a songwriter." I don't know what I thought. Once I stopped thinking of myself as a poet, I started to feel a lot more like myself. And to me, it makes me feel a lot more comfortable about the mandates for lyrics, that they should be poetic. If they make me feel more comfortable about making high-minded stuff...

Pitchfork: When you're not recording, do you have a daily routine?

DB: I read a lot. I read, like, ten hours a day.

Pitchfork: Sounds perfect.

DB: I figure that's what I'm supposed to do when I'm not working. I think that I'm supposed to keep learning, in order to be useful in the event of an emergency, I don't know. I still have to learn how to make knots and all of that stuff. And why France collapsed so easily in 1940. There's a million things I have not caught up to. I spend a lot of time reading, a lot of time reading the Torah and Jewish texts, Jewish history. For about a year, I haven't read any fiction. It just strikes me as completely irrelevant.

When I decide to start to make the record, I sit down and I say, "this is the day." A couple weeks beforehand, I let everybody know. And on that day, you're not going to hear from me for a long time. I stop answering my e-mails, I cut off communication. It certainly has a dark side to it, because it's really... great [laughs]. Now, I'm transitioning out of that, and I don't feel bad about that at all. And looking forward to going on tour means looking forward to being with people. But when I'm writing the songs, in the sixteen hours I'm awake, one of the songs is going through my head and I'm trying to improve it. Cassie, if she whistles or hums, and I'm doing that in that period, I'll go crazy. It's like really obsessive for those six months. And then always in the past, then I could put it away and be done with it. But this time I'm not doing that. Instead, for the first time, I'm writing songs casually. I'm enjoying being able to be writing a song that doesn't need to be ready for a long time.

Pitchfork: Yeah, one of the things about the Silver Jews that can be frustrating as a fan is that the songs on the albums were pretty much all you got, and that was it for such a long time. There was almost nothing on the order of B-sides or anything like that.

DB: I always have this thing with Will Oldham. He has so many, so many collaborations. You know, he's down in Nashville once or twice a month, and he always stays here. I have recording equipment lying around. But we never try to play music together. The reason for me is that he has collaborated with so many people, that if I were to collaborate with him, I would be collaborating with all the people he has collaborated with. And to me, a lot of the people he has collaborated with, I don't want those toxins coming into the bloodstream of the Silver Jews music. It's really kind of a purity issue.

I hate so much the fact that I have an instinctual, primitive brand consciousness that I had really too early to have it. It's really gross to me. About having certain aspects formally of the Silver Jews always be the same. And deviations, to me, would cloud the issue with a frame around it all. The further I get away from my 20s and the beginning, I can realize that I can look back at that time and realize that the beginning of the Silver Jews was me just trying to be the art I was seeing at the Whitney. I was seeing all of this late 20th century conceptual art. It was like a step up for me because I could see artists that weren't restricted to the vocabulary of rock'n'roll or whatever. So the older I get, the more I realize that the beginnings were conceptual, and I only remember it as some struggle to be a recording band. But that wasn't the case at all. In a way, what I've done is re-acknowledged to myself that it was and it should be conceptual and that, in that way, I design the album where I know the ten songs or 12 songs that I'm going to work on before any of them have second verses and some of them don't even have verses. The songs get planned out, so that there's a distributed kind of emphasis on kinds of songs.

Pitchfork: Where did you get the title Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea?

Berman: Well, Lookout Mountain is a mountain in Tennessee. And the phrase "Lookout mountain, lookout sea" is almost like a paraphrase of a certain poetic rhythm of which you might see in The Band's song ["Look Out Cleveland"]. "Look out, Houston," he sings, and then the next verse is "look out, Cleveland". I feel like there's a lot of puns in the album about seeing because of my eye, and there's a lot of looking and seeing in words like that.

And as it stands, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is almost a ridiculous amount of bravado for a human being to say. It would have been noble or admirable if you would have said something like that in the early 19th century. "I'm going to take on the world" is really what it sounds like it's saying. When I could see the record, I had a real problem. I had these characters. It's the same problem I had on the last album. When a pony gets depressed. I didn't know it was a problem then. But I wind up having to anthropomorphize a lot more than I want to. Because I don't find human characters capable of being plausible to deliver some of the messages I want delivered. Or I find them unsympathetic. Human beings are like that.

I really, really felt like the title and the ideas of the songs, the idea of me going out into the world instead of me looking in-- all of it came together through the painting that I got to be the cover, which is by a guy named Stephen Bush who's an Australian painter. He's done this painting 27 times. Once a year, he paints it from memory with one tube of black and one tube of white. It's a painting of three elephants, you could say it's Babar, I'm not positive. For him, it's something to do with French colonialism. It's called "The Lure of Paris". For me, it's great. There's this character, this hero, but he's an elephant. He's standing on a rock, the sea is very rough around him, there's amazing light coming down through the sky, and then there's the other elephants coming down a cliff on a rope. I thought for a minute that I wasn't going to be able to use it. It was so devastating that I didn't know what to do. No other cover has ever... they've all been arbitrary, except for maybe Bright Flight. There's never really been any connection to what's under the cover. And this time, it's everything. Like, when you'd read a paperback when you were a kid, and you'd really like the characters, you'd look at the people on the cover and be like, "Are these the people?" And you get older and you'd realize, "Wait. This is a different artist." And then you get older, and you realize there's no connection, the author doesn't need the artist, blah blah blah. This time, maybe they're all elephants.

Pitchfork: Did Cassie write any songs on this one?

DB: No. She started writing her own songs and I decided that I didn't think it would be proper to have one of her songs on the record.

Pitchfork: She did "The Poor, the Fair, and the Good" on Tanglewood, though. But none on this one?

DB: Right, but she plays so much more because she's playing bass that I feel like she's all over it. I guess I would write a song with Cassie, that might happen. But I have, as much as everybody else, as a Silver Jews fan, imagined Silver Jews fans saying, like, "okay, you brought Cassie in real slowly. That's really nice." I brought her in singing on two songs on one album. And then I brought her in and she sang on four or five. And this time she's playing bass. She sings a little less. But I remember I didn't like Brix Smith when she came into The Fall. I didn't like any of that. So I'm sensitive to it, I guess.

Pitchfork: She doesn't have any qualms about that?

DB: She doesn't think she has written enough songs yet. She's really making herself a student. I asked her. She said she really wanted to write songs. I said, "okay, but I'm going to be real with you. I'm gonna be really frank." And that's been for like a year and a half. She works harder than anybody I know, and she reads all these books by [hit country songwriter] Tom T. Hall, and she talks to these guys around town, old songwriters. I don't know what the final end will be, but at this point, I couldn't let her be anything else but a student.

Pitchfork: Do you plan to put out any singles or B-sides for this album?

DB: I don't think we'll do that. I mean, I have some other songs... like you said, I don't like to have B-sides and stuff like that. But I may have to have some. We did a lot of covers just at the end. A lot of 70s, 80s country songs.

Pitchfork: Any particular reason?

DB: Just in case I needed them. I was like, "if I need these later..." The guys are so good and they know [musical notation method] the Nashville Number System, so it's easy to get them to put some stuff down.

Pitchfork: Do you have any other plans for the forseeable future other than finishing up the album and touring?

DB: I guess I'm going to sit around here and wait. And read. I don't think I have anything to do. I certainly don't have anything to leave town for until the end of February.

Pitchfork: Oh yeah, you're appearing at an event for [late filmmaker and visual artist] Jeremy Blake, is that right? I know he did a film with you several years ago.

DB: Yeah. He did that film and came down here and we got to be friends after that. And then, let's see, the whole time we were friends, I was also friends with his wife. They came to our show in Los Angeles. They were very nice people. But they were both extremely paranoid people. So, to make a very weird story short, this summer, she killed herself, and then a week later he killed himself. And so, I feel pretty confident that I can represent in some way, some part of Jeremy. I think I understand what he was about, and I think I even understand the paranoia. I think I know what it could've felt like.

But I'm not going to be talking you about any of that stuff, I guess, now. I guess I was thinking, "What would Jeremy want me to do?" And he would want me to play the Silver Jews. To me, Jeremy was always this person who had a way higher estimation of what I did than anyone else. So I felt a real gratitude to him. He was a lot like my friend [the late writer and Open City Magazine founding editor] Rob Bingham. He overdosed. These older guys, a different idiom, a different genre. Who both, for some reason, zeroed in and said, "I know it doesn't seem like it, but you're the one. What you're doing matters to me." And so for both of those guys I feel extreme loyalty.

I don't know, I was thinking about just playing the album or something on acoustic guitar or something like that. I guess his mother's going to be there so I would want to do something nice for her, that she would like. They wanted me to come speak, I guess, because I was associated with the show, but they said I could do what I want. And I still don't know what that would be. When you said, "what are you going to be doing for the next few months?", that'll probably be it, because it seems like a very important thing for me to think about.

Silver Jews tour date:

05-16-18 Minehead, England - Butlin's Holiday Centre (Explosions in the Sky ATP)

Video: Silver Jews: I'm Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You [from the Tanglewood Numbers LP]