David Berman
☁️ My favourite songwriter.
Content warnings for mental health and suicide.
I feel like I have an awful lot more to say about David Cloud Berman than I'm going to fit on this page right now. I could write a lot of essays about the guy and his work and what it means to me. Hell, this page is far from the first time I've tried to do that.
But if I had to sum it up in a paragraph:
David Berman was a musician who was the driving force behind the bands Silver Jews (who released 6 albums) and Purple Mountains (who released a single self-titled one). When he died in 2019, I was so upset that I couldn't stop crying and had to take the day off work. He is my all-time favourite songwriter and changed the way I think about language and I still think about him all the time.
People who like David Berman's work really like David Berman's work. It makes me kind of happy to know that there are lots of strangers out there who get just as dizzy listening to his words as I do, even if it's probably because we're all a bunch of sadsacks. If I'm going through a Berman phase, it very often means I'm going through some shit.
The first Silver Jews song I ever heard was "Punks in the Beerlight". Some internet stranger put it on a mix of the best songs of 2005 (a mix which also included Sufjan Stevens, so thank you, whoever you were, for changing my life). I liked the song a lot but I didn't come back to the band until I was older and they'd already split up.
When I did finally fall for the music of Silver Jews, I fell hard. Berman wrote songs about down-and-outers, drunks and dreamers. People who may have been struggling not to give up, but damn it, at least they were struggling. Running through it all was a ribbon of unexpected poetry, of striking and surreal images that made me see the world in a different way, all balanced with a streak of derelict Americana. And the songs were funny, and surprising, and touching, and has anyone ever made an album as good as American Water? I don't think they have.
In 2019, when I heard Berman was back with a new band (Purple Mountains) and a new album (Purple Mountains), I was over the moon. And then I listened to the album and I was even happier. In retrospect, this seems completely naive of me. But at the time, it really felt like the words of a man who'd been battling his demons but had brought his head above the darkness anyway, still able to make jokes about all the shit he'd been dealing with. I'm sure I wasn't the only fan who took it as a triumphant return.
Berman died less than a month after Purple Mountains came out. The darkness got him in the end. I still think Purple Mountains has some of his best ever writing, but it's also really fucking hard to listen to now. The man could really write about depression like nobody else – the emptiness, the desire to curse whatever higher power put you in this situation, the odd moments of nihilistic humour. After his death, there was one very obvious, very unignorable way to read this album. Sometimes I feel guilty for still loving it.
But David Berman could also write about beauty, and about the tentative hope of falling in love again despite it all, and about the sheer, simple bliss of a day where "It's sunny and 75 / It feels so good to be alive". Every time I think about Purple Mountains, I always come back to "Snow is Falling in Manhattan", which has a perfect description of the way art can make you feel less alone:
Songs build little rooms in time
And housed within the song's design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines
...
Snow is falling in Manhattan
Inside I've got a fire crackling
And on the couch, beneath an afghan
You're the old friend I just took in
RIP DCB. Miss you, old friend. Still love you to the max.
Some of my favourite lyrics
"Trains Across the Sea"
Half hours on earth
What are they worth?
I don't know
In twenty-seven years
I've drunk fifty thousand beers
And they just wash against me
Like the sea into a pier
– Track 2 on Starlite Walker (1994)
This is everyone's favourite lyric and there's a good reason for that, which is that it's fucking great.
(Is this a good time to mention my theory that Seb Murphy from Viagra Boys is also a David Berman fan? "I can drink about 15 beers, or maybe 25, it depends on the can")
"People"
I love to see a rainbow from a garden hose
Lit up like the blood of a centerfold
I love the city and the city rain
Suburban kids with biblical names
People ask people to watch their scotch
People send people up to the moon
When they return, well, there isn't much
People be careful not to crest too soon
– Track 5 on American Water (1998)
There's something so beautiful and empathetic about this song and it fills me with goodwill every time I listen to it.
"The Wild Kindness"
I'm gonna shine out in the wild kindness
And hold the world to its word
– Track 12 on American Water (1998)
I've never thought of myself as a lyrics tattoo person. But if that changed, this would be the one. I love this fucking song.
"There is a Place"
I could not love the world entire
There grew a desert in my mind
I took a hammer to it all
Like an insane medieval king
I saw God's shadow on this world
I saw God's shadow on this world
I saw God's shadow on this world
I saw God's shadow on this world
– Track 10 on Tanglewood Numbers (2005)
This one's really fun to sing/mutter/shout to yourself if you are ever going for a walk with nobody else around. Or if there are people but you're just not bothered.
"San Francisco B.C."
Doll-house lightning and the next thing I knew
We were back at our point of rendezvous
I was in the possession of burglary tools
Children's fur coats and diamonds and jewels
Gene's talking about insignificant shit
Just like the crooks in the movies when they do that bit
– Track 7 on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (2008)
I love a good narrative song and this one is an entire Coen Brothers movie. Peak comic Berman.
"That's Just the Way that I Feel"
Course I've been humbled by the void
Much of my faith has been destroyed
I've been forced to watch my foes enjoy
Ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude
– Track 1 on Purple Mountains (2019)
What a fucking introduction to the album. It's clever and it's catchy and it's brutally fucking sad. The first time I heard this song, it felt like sharing a drink with someone who just got it. Honestly I could just print the whole damn thing.
"Margaritas at the Mall"
Drawn up all my findings
And I warn you they are candid
My every day begins
With reminders I've been stranded on this
Planet where I've landed
Beneath this gray as granite sky
A place I wake up blushing like I'm ashamed to be alive
How long can a world go on under such a subtle god?
How long can a world go on with no new word from God?
See the plod of the flawed individual looking for a nod from God
Trodding the sod of the visible with no new word from God
– Track 5 on Purple Mountains (2019)
I have never been religious, but I still find myself drawn to lyrics about faith and the difficulty of maintaining it. It's hard to tell if the thudding rhyme scheme is a sign of some residual playfulness or just another way of emphasising the relentless pounding feeling of desperation. Either way, it's one hell of a song.
Reading Actual Air
I bought this volume of David Berman's poetry after he died but couldn't bring myself to read it. Now, in 2025, I am finally getting around to working my way through his poems. I've never been much of a poetry reader but the odds were good that I was gonna like this, and of course I do. Actually, it makes me want to get into reading poetry more.
The lines that stick in my head most are from "Community College in the Rain":
All: O Dougs, where are you?
Dougs: In the wild hotels of the sea.
I saw someone talking about him once (can't remember who) and they said that when they first read Berman's work, it was like discovering they could write too. And I get what they mean, because I also feel that way. I don't think this is to say that his work is simple or trite or anything like that. But I do feel like every time I listen to his songs or read his poetry, it uncorks something in me, some way of seeing and exploring and describing things. I wrote some poems on my phone and they weren't any good, but I wouldn't have written them at all if not for him.
In the wild hotels of the sea.
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