Here's one of the most beautiful letters I've ever read.

David Berman's letter on sobriety: https://pivic.blog/blog/david-bermans-letter-on-sobriety/

#DavidBerman #sobriety #SilverJews #PurpleMountains

Get ready for the most niche poll ever.

In the Silver Jews’ song “Tennessee,” when David Berman sings “Her doorbell plays a bar of Stephen Foster/Her sister never left, and look what it cost her,” what Steven Foster song are you imagining?

#IndieRock #SilverJews #DavidBerman

https://songwhip.com/silver-jews/pet-politics

'Still wearin' last night's mascara
Now that her pet was gone for sure
She was shiverin' so hard
It looked like there were two of her'

I love Berman's music.

#SilverJews #DavidBerman #MusicTips

From the Purple Mountains reddit AMA:

'Q: What’s your biggest lyrical regret, and what will your gravestone say? Thank you, I’ve missed your music all these years!

A: So many. It hit me just recently that in the first 4 lines i rhyme myself with myself! That was not something i intended to do!

I FUCKED up on the opening lyric of the opening song though i had pored over it for months- I had to laugh.

I was "crestfallen" until i thought of the mirroring themes mentioned elsewhere, and was able to rationalize it as a great mistake.

HEADSTONE:

"HE WAS CRESTFALLEN UNTIL HE WAS ABLE TO RATIONALIZE IT AS A GREAT MISTAKE"'

https://www.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/cdjakw/purple_mountains_ama

#DavidBerman #PurpleMountains #AskMeAnything #SilverJews #music #lyrics #regret #humour

First: this song rocks: https://songwhip.com/the-arcs/eyez2023

Second: El Michels Affair—purveyor of fine beats—is in the band.

Third: one of their songs is basically a collab with David Berman, who released his own version on his Purple Mountains album:

The Long, Odd History of the Arcs’ Lost David Berman Collab https://www.vulture.com/2023/01/the-arcs-only-one-for-me-david-berman-dan-auerbach.html

#DavidBerman #TheArcs #ElMichelsAffair #beats #MusicTips #NiklasTips #PurpleMountains #music

Evening walk in #Stockholm in the “icy bike chain rain”, to quote #DavidBerman. Although his refers to Portland, Oregon.

In the latest Recliner Notes post on the songs of #BillCallahan, Smog's "Feather by Feather" demonstrates how Callahan can play with and sometimes subvert country music forms to explore deep, emotional themes.

The post also includes comparisons with Callahan's #DragCity peers #DavidBerman of the #SilverJews and #BonniePrinceBilly who also have been known to take on similar artistic modes as Callahan.

http://reclinernotes.com/2023/01/08/feather-by-feather/

"In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection."

A long time ago a friend tipped me off about Silver Jews. Said I should listen to the American Water album. And with an opening line like this, it was love at first listen.

#DavidBerman #SilverJews

https://silverjews.bandcamp.com/track/random-rules

David Berman would have turned 56 today. When it’s snowing outside, like it is today, I often think of this song. What a masterful songwriter and lyricist he was.

#SongOfTheDay #PurpleMountains #DavidBerman

https://youtu.be/50227UHWULg

blew my mind last night, still blowing my mind this morning, & possibly of only interest to me: on the front cover of the #SilverJews' 2001 album "tennessee," #DavidBerman (who would have turned 56 today) is wearing a t-shirt for the glenn phillips band, led by the hampton grease band co-founder. apparently, berman & #pavement's bob nastanovich saw phillips in college & had their minds blown. happy birthday, DCB & dig glenn's unfuckwithable "lenore": https://glennphillips.bandcamp.com/track/lenore #indie #suckrock

Remembering David Berman, born on this date in 1967

#davidberman #purplemountains #baseballcards #cardart

Via #TheEndofAllMusic #RecordStore #Oxford #Mississippi #DavidBerman #Poetry

#DavidBerman did a wondrous 'ask me anything' session on Reddit a short while before he died. David was funny and intelligent like no other person, really, and he shows in this one.

Purple Mountains AMA : r/indieheads https://www.reddit.com/r/indieheads/comments/cdjakw/purple_mountains_ama/

#PurpleMountains

https://kolektiva.social/@pivic/109628084459106666

I recall one of David's email responses to a stranger.

The stranger said this about the email in 2019, just after David died: 'Seven years ago I was about to go into the hospital for detox after a really rough few years. I was scared and isolated. I sent an email to David in the dark.
His response truly helped me and I will always carry it with me.
thank you dcb'

Here's the email reproduced with permission:

pylonshadow@gmail.com Jul 28, 2012, 6:04 PM

Tim,

After detoxing are you going into a rehab program? Assuming you are, you're going to start hearing the language of AA, certain phrases and proverbs that are fairly universal in recovery. Some of these will make sense to you, some won't. Some of what you hear will bug you.

People might bug you. You may be irritable. There will be ups and downs.

My best advice would be to go along with the program. Some of what you hear will be unhelpful, some will only seem unhelpful, indicating a place where you're resistant to what you really need to hear. It takes a while. So don't draw any conclusions; stay open. Don't look at other people in the program and define them as being way more fucked up than you are. I'd advise you just to go along as if you were in the army. There isn't any chance that you'll be brainwashed or be asked to commit to a lifetime of fellowship with nervous coffee swillers. One of the things you'll hear is “take what you need and leave the rest”. That will happen naturally. You'll hear someone say something that really connects. Write it down and remember it. Part of what helps you is helping others. Breaking down your selfishness. So listen to everything, even if it doesn't seem to apply to you. If you do this right, you'll have times down the road where youll be advising someone who has no idea what to do.
One of the biggest problems is really accepting that you can't drink again. It's impossible to imagine life without. This sense of impossibility is what the phrase “one day at a time” is supposed to combat. It's like someone has brought in all the food you're going to eat in the next year. It's filling up the room, piled high to the ceiling and after being told you'll be consuming all of it a certain feeling of despair is natural. At that point you need to remember that you've eaten many rooms full of food. Our relationship to the present doesn't call for imagining 30,000 barren days of no drinking. And when you do imagine your future that way you're leaving out some very important things you cannot know: all the good things that will fill up those days, things you are completely blind to now. You're leaving out the new people you're going to meet and know. You're leaving in your drinking companions. a lot of whom you'll not be seeing much of. (if you can move to a new town or a new part of town, you should…) after you discover much of what you had in common is gone.

The good things: When you get sober you're going to start appreciating things you've been completely numb to. You'll be raw. like a newborn.

Your senses will come alive. Emotions will resurface. You'll have to relearn things you learned how to do drunk. Be patient with your new incapacities (usually things like socializing). It takes a long time for your brain to heal. The way you feel for those first six months or that first year is not the endstate. That's why you can't draw conclusions, like “so this is how it's going to be from now on”. That kind of thinking is going to make you miserable, and it will make you relapse. Your brain has stopped making certain chemicals because you've been bringing them in from the outside. Those areas come back online but it takes awhile. So there's a lot of depression at first. You can outlast it.

For me there was a lot of life to be explored: much of it for the first time as an adult. One beautiful thing was reintroducing myself to the morning, which was like a foreign country to me. How quiet the world was. The clarity of waking up and not being sick. Having all the money I wasn't spending made me feel like i'd gotten a raise.The best was how, for about a year, everytime i saw a cop car, i'd feel the old
terror and then slowly realize “im not doing anything wrong.i am not intoxicated. i am not in the possession of any illegal substances.in fact that guy can't do anything to me at all as long as i stop at the lights and observe the speed limit!"I loved how that shot of fear instantly melted into an unassailable inviolability that id never experienced. “I'm just another citizen living withing my rights. I'm not trying to get away with anything!” What a sense of well-being that gave me. This stretches out to relationships. You're not lying to anyone. You're not trying to put one over.You're not hurting anyone.

But it’s tuff the first few months. Just remember that you're not experiencing sobriety until 6.9 months or a year have passed. The real benefits don't start until after that. So the way you feel now is not the real deal. People who relapse are ones who haven't figured this out. They want quick results. But it doesn't work that way.

I just kept my mind on a couple sober friends: thinking about how happy and congenial they were. Happier than they were before they were addicts, even That's why you'll hear sober people say they're glad they became addicts. It's because there's something about sobriety that makes a person better kinder and smarter than people who never had a problem in the first place. They're stronger, tougher, humbler, more compassionate, more aware, more reliable, and on and on. My number one piece of advice is don't think about giving in until a year has passed. Write off the next year as recovery time. Don't worry about career or romantic achievments. Just put your life up on blocks. Give yourself a year to heal before you draw any conclusions!

DCB

#DavidBerman #rehab #drugs #alcohol #beauty #sobriety

"Final Words Are So Hard to Devise" - Culture.org https://culture.org/logger/final-words-are-so-hard-to-devise/

what a story:

And there were stories. In 2009, for example, the band Hallelujah the Hills, from Boston, was opening for Silver Jews on tour. The two bands were driving separately from Toronto to their next gig in Montreal. Ryan Walsh, Hallelujah’s singer, and his bandmates were zipping down the boring highway when Walsh spotted the entire Silver Jews line-up on the shoulder, up ahead. They were running from their parked tour van up a hill towards another group of people.

Confused, Walsh called Cassie Berman, David’s then partner and bandmate. She told Walsh that they had seen a guy drag his girlfriend out of a car, and they felt they had to intervene. “And then David took the phone from Cassie, and said, in his earnest deadpan, ‘Ryan—it was a job for the headliners.’”

#DavidBerman #BrentKatz #SilverJews

https://kolektiva.social/@pivic/109628084459106666

#DavidBerman

Pitchfork: Do you have an interest in politics? Do you feel like political matters inform your songwriting?

DCB: Probably insofar as I have a sometimes angry relationship with an abstract enemy called "rich people" that's been going on since I was a kid. It's a long story. It comes out in the songs. I think in "We Are Real" off the last album which is political in a pure sense, Us vs. The Forces That Lie To Us

-from a Pitchfork interview, 2002

Were he still alive, #DavidBerman would today turn 56 years old. He founded #SilverJews and #PurpleMountains.

As #PurpleMountains, David made the best album of 2019: https://songwhip.com/purple-mountains/purple-mountains

That album contains some of my favourite rock lyrics. It's also so very well composed and made out.

I've missed David every single week since he died.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berman_(musician)

https://songwhip.com/mogwai/ritchiesacramento

This is the track 'Richie Sacramento' by #Mogwai.

There's a story behind this one:

'Brathwaite explained, "Ritchie Sacramento's title came from a misunderstanding a friend of ours had about how to say Ryuichi Sakamoto. The lyrics were inspired by a story Bob Nastanovich shared about his friend and bandmate David Berman who proclaimed 'Rise Crystal Spear' as he threw a shovel at a sports car."'

#DavidBerman #RyuichiSakamoto #SilverJews

Today it's three years since David Berman died.

listen to Purple Mountains. they were wonderful.

https://niklasblog.com/?p=23909

#dcb #davidberman #silverjews #purplemountains