Songs build little rooms in time
A look back at 'Purple Mountains,' David Berman's bleak, and bleakly funny, final bow
David Cloud Berman
January 4, 1967—August 7, 2019
This week on the blog we’re sharing a few posts reflecting on the life and artistry of Silver Jews/Purple Mountains songwriter David Berman. Click here to read Meghan Harrison’s poem, “David Berman Was Alive and Living in Chicago.”
At times David Berman’s final album Purple Mountains feels like it’s from a rock mockumentary: specifically, it’s the album an exaggeratedly burned-out artist would release just before finding religion or taking a bath with his amplifier. I imagine the starry talking heads saying things like, “It came out of nowhere, man, nobody could’ve known how Dave was feeling,” while a song literally called “All My Happiness is Gone” plays in the background. “If only he’d said something…”
Here’s how the record opens (“That’s Just the Way That I Feel”):
“Well, I don’t like talking to myself
but someone’s got to say it—hell,
I mean things have not been going well—
this time I think I’ve finally fucked myself.”
And, later on in the same song:
“A setback can be a setup
for a comeback if you don’t let up,
but this kind of hurting won’t heal.
The end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting,
and that’s just the way that I feel.”
Attentive listeners to Berman’s previous project Silver Jews certainly got plenty of Dave’s biography from his lyrics, but on Purple Mountains he writes like a man who’s been suffering alone so long he’s lost the social adroitness required to hide it. Masking his despair must’ve seemed like trying to disguise the spurting stump of a hacked off wrist by simply holding it behind his back, so he allows his struggles to be the subject of the evening. Even if you don’t know the broad details of his years outside the spotlight (his separation; his monumental credit card debt; his treatment-resistant depression), most of it’s stated quite baldly in the lyrics. “I Loved Being My Mother’s Son” in particular is crushing to listen to on headphones, his slurred voice in your ear seemingly holding in a sob, the lyrics simple and devastating: “I wasn’t done being my mother’s son / only now am I seeing that being’s done.”
This newfound directness shouldn’t be mistaken for a diminution of his gifts as a lyricist. The verses of “Nights That Won’t Happen” use a villanelle-like structure with alternating refrains (“the dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind” and “all the suffering gets done by the ones we leave behind”) that give his words a sense of somber inevitability. Meanwhile, “Margaritas at the Mall” hearkens back to the Apocalyptic existentialism of Tanglewood Numbers’s “There is a Place,” only reversed—where on that 2005 song Berman spoke of reaching the bottom of despair and finding there the shadow of God looming over the world, here the presence of God is so subtle life seems as trivial as drinking sugary booze in a food court.
Still, gloomy as its subject matter often is, Purple Mountains is never a drag to listen to. It combines the countrified indie rock Berman mastered long ago with the cosmopolitan psych of Woods, who serve as his producers and backing band. The production is warm and richly detailed, and the band has a protean groove (especially on “Storyline Fever”) that makes what might otherwise be a funereal set of songs feel limber and amiable. On “Snow is Falling in Manhattan,” Woods takes the lyrical note and turns the tune into a snow globe of organ, twinkling vibraphone, and festive trumpets. Berman’s guitar basically quotes the verse of “Imagine” as he delivers the album’s fondest words, its imagery of wanderers finding respite from the cold expanding to embrace the listener too: “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.”
I’ve heard Purple Mountains described as an auditory suicide note (and in lazier moments called it that myself), but its real message might be that a person can remain himself despite illness wracking him toward the point of no return, able to see the world’s strangeness and charm even as the borders of his vision begin to darken. On the catchy “She’s Making Friends, I’m Turning Stranger” and “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” Berman delivers priceless jokes with practically his last breaths (“into my mind the thought begins to seep / if no one’s fond of fucking me / maybe no one’s fucking fond of me”). It’s one final bow from the guy that gave us “Honk If You’re Lonely,” like the portion of the wake where the grief has been momentarily spent and everyone’s swapping memories of the good times—and suddenly the departed’s right there in the space between, sharing the kind of laughter that purges as it heals.
Originally published as My Wife Left Me #270.
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