Silver Jews
Bright Flight (Drag City)
Andy Warhol said that the best thing about being famous is that the magazines are all about your friends. Such has been the case for writer/songwriter/cartoonist David Berman ever since his college pals and Silver Jews bandmates Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich found success with their other project, Pavement. Pavement's ascendancy in the '90s did mean that Nastanovich and Malkmus had progressively less time for Silver Jews, but Berman soldiered on, making records with a rotating cast of musicians, penning a critically acclaimed book of poetry, Actual Air, and drawing hilarious cartoons for indie/underground periodicals The Baffler and The Minus Times. In 1999, he relocated from Louisville to Nashville with his fiancée, Cassie Marrett, to pursue “a career out of writing sad songs and getting paid by the tear,” as he sings on “Tennessee,” the first single from the Silver Jews' latest record, Bright Flight.
But Berman isn't a careerist; he performs reluctantly and rarely, and he does little else to promote his albums aside from short press tours. In fact, he views an album as a project to be retired after completion. If anyone has noticed his considerable talents, it's not because he's a schmoozer or because he employs a crackerjack marketing unit. Luckily, album sales have been brisk enough that he is able to concentrate on writing free from a day job. He has hopes that Bright Flight, which came out late last year on Chicago's Drag City label, will be a breakthrough record for him and perhaps attract the attention of a Music Row publishing house.
Such sentiment might sound like so much irony coming from a musician with solid indie-rock credentials, but Berman speaks in earnest. “If just one of them gave me the chance, I'd show them,” he confides. “I could be the best songwriter in this town.” Hell, he might just be the breath of fresh air needed in Nashville's stale tune canneries. Berman is keenly aware of what's wrong with Music Row these days, and he criticizes country labels for trotting out insincere acts who consistently lowball the intelligence of their audience. For example, he finds “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?,” Alan Jackson's response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks, insulting to the listener. “I liked the song at first,” he says. “He had me until he got to the part about not knowing the difference between Iraq and Iran. He's selling Americans short. [Iraq and Iran have dominated our foreign policy interests for over 20 years], and he pats himself on the back for not knowing about it.” But if Berman is justifiably appalled by much Music Row product, he admits to genuinely liking some of it, citing Clint Black and Lisa Hartman's duet “When I Said I Do” and Lee Ann Womack's “I Hope You Dance” as standouts.
It remains to be seen whether Berman's work will ever connect with Nashville song publishers—it seems like a long shot, if only because Music Row remains willfully ignorant of anything beyond its comfort zone. But he did have the good sense to look elsewhere in the Nashville music community when he started recording Bright Flight. He hired in-demand engineer and producer Mark Nevers, who has worked with acts ranging from Alan Jackson and Sammy Kershaw to indie rockers Jenny Toomey and Macha to his own projects, Lambchop and CYOD. Berman likewise assembled a stellar cast of musicians from Nashville and points beyond: Mike Fellows of Royal Trux and pioneering D.C. emo band Rites of Spring; the excellent New York-based drummer Tim Barnes; Lambchop's piano omnistylist and longtime Mel and the Party Hats/CYOD member Tony Crow; Scene music writer and Lambchop/Lifeboy/Character multi-instrumentalist William Tyler; and Lambchop/Calexico guitarist Paul Niehaus.
Nevers' fingerprints are all over the record: “Turn Your Guns Around” from the accompanying CDEP Tennessee could easily be an outtake from his own band, CYOD. The session was rushed—one week to track, overdub and mix—but the result is a subtle and confident album that bears, and indeed rewards, repeated listenings. It's also a departure from Berman's older material, which used more lo-fi recording methods. The first two tracks maintain the loping sing-song country feel for which Silver Jews are known, but with a rock edge. These harder-edged songs have a relaxed power reminiscent of The Band or Neil Young's On the Beach, but without sounding like either.
“Time Will Break the World” changes the pace a bit. The song begins with Berman's solo voice and acoustic guitar before a driving buildup resolves into a chorus with an angular, Gothic '80s guitar charting the melody's curve. When Berman sings, “Snow is blowing through the baseboard outlets,” the guitar provides chordal wind gusts. The song's story is one of stifled rage and obsession; the narrator conveys a sense of helplessness in the face of unavoidable decline and genteel decay.
Two of the finest songs on Bright Flight, “Tennessee” and “Horseleg Swastikas” are joyous tunes assembled around cheap puns. When Berman confirms his commitment to Cassie Marrett in the former, singing “But you're the only ten I see,” the sheer badness of the pun good-naturedly wears the listener down, forcing a grin by the end of the song. The same is true of “Horseleg Swastikas,” a Taoist lament in which Berman strives “to be like water if he can / 'cause water doesn't give a damn.” The nyuck-nyuck pun here short-sells its own cleverness, as Berman suggests that to be like water—to seek the lowest level, to be flexible, to effect dramatic change—is a good antidote for human weakness and insecurity.
Another standout is the rollicking “Let's Not and Say We Did,” a musical nod to the late Rolling Stones pianist Nicky Hopkins, whose Tin Man Was a Dreamer album is a favorite of both Berman's and Drag City honcho Dan Koretzky's. (Berman hopes to influence Koretzky to reissue the out-of-print classic.) The album's closer, “Death of an Heir of Sorrows,” is a bittersweet memoir that Berman regretfully notes “keeps attracting subjects after it was written.” Originally written following the death of Berman's longtime friend Rob Bingham, the song gained particular significance during the recording of Bright Flight. That same week, Berman received a telephone call informing him of the death of another close friend, local artist/zine writer/musician Hillary Small. So he recorded the song, dedicating it and the whole album both to her and to Bingham.
Throughout, Bright Flight deals explicitly with themes of motion vs. stagnation. In “Tennessee,” Berman sings that “Louisville was death.” The songwriter chose to exit the hipster nexus in favor of Nashville, a city not exactly known for its countercultural exports. But Nashville has a legacy of great songwriting and a populace that values and reveres the accomplishments of a good songwriter—even if that populace too often equates sales with artistic merit.
Given the depth of his lyrics, you could characterize Berman as a novelist writing songs. (He is, without question, a bona fide poet.) But rather than directly stating the action in a particular song, he maps rich, compressed metaphors packed with vague clues that lead to back roads and forked paths—roads that listeners will want to travel again and again to get the lay of the land. Bright Light is an excellent fourth album; but as the closed notebook on the album's cover suggests, the project is over. Here's hoping Berman taps even deeper into Nashville's creative resources for his next one—and here's hoping that Music Row notices.
