Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2008 > September > 19 > Entry
Tonight at Emo’s: David Berman and Silver Jews
(Silver Jews with James Jackson Toth play tonight at Emo’s. Charles Potts Magic Windmill Band play Emo’s outside. $12 advance, $14 at the door. Doors at 9 p.m., show at 10. 603 Red River St. 477-3667, emosaustin.com.) (Photo of David Berman of Silver Jews by Stefano Giovannini.)
David Berman had good reason to believe he was unrealized potential personified. “Until age 38,” the Silver Jews frontman says by way of e-mail, “I thought I was doomed as a writer because I slept in and took naps.”
That was three years ago, around the time Berman woke up from a serious substance-abuse problem and released “Tanglewood Numbers.” The album, his fifth in 11 years, was a career breakthrough and finally granted the veteran indie rocker props on par with Stephen Malkmus, an original Silver Jew who went on to form Pavement.
Berman’s redemption song continues to be fleshed out with the recent release of “Tanglewood” followup “Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.” Like David Carr’s frank drug-recovery memoir “The Night of the Gun,” it excavates a dark past in order to build a bright future. And it does so by drawing from a host of influences. As part of the media materials, Berman, who is also a cartoonist, sketched an indecipherable chart comprising sources of inspiration that include presidential campaign songs, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” and the Pet Shop Boys.
“It was all part of an attempt of mine to encourage critics to make connections,” Berman writes, “to put such an amount of information about the composition and recording that unique responses would result. Silver Jews: encouraging exegesis since 1993.” And so here is one critic’s interpretation of some of the songs. “What Is Not But Could Be If” is the equivalent of another foot forward in the 12-step program, wherein Berman’s baritone constructs a bridge between failure and success, risk and reward. On the country-cool cut “Suffering Jukebox,” featuring Berman’s wife Cassie on “Laurel Canyon” backing vocals, a “sad machine” shouldering other peoples’ problems is a metaphor for Berman in his former state of misery. Meanwhile, “Candy Jail” says that once you’re an addict, you’re always an addict, as Berman trades in his gluttonous drug habit for an equally perilous addiction to jelly beans and cookie dough.
“There’s a lot of food on the album,” Berman writes. “Maybe some couple will have a dinner where only food from the lyrics are served.”
Berman will recite his quirky, wordy confessionals Friday at Emo’s. Prior to “Tanglewood,” touring had always been out of the question. But a string of 47 consecutive sold-out shows in support of that album showed Berman what he’d been missing. Still, life on the road in the age of sobriety is forever paved with temptation. Has the close proximity to a little taste of his bygone junkie days ever been too hard to handle? Has the nightmare of relapse ever been a concern?
“A kid in Pittsburgh whispered, ‘Got some H, looking for some C,’ into my ear, and I just laughed,” Berman writes.
Translation: apparently not.
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