Silver Jews

Silver Jews’ third album, 1998’s American Water, opens with one of the more memorable lyrics in the American rock canon: “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.” The line—coy but sad, both a joke and not—is a near-perfect distillation of David Berman’s sensibility as a writer. Berman founded Silver Jews in 1989 in Hoboken, New Jersey, with his friends and roommates Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. While the latter two would go on to greater fame with the iconic indie rock band Pavement, Silver Jews rotated through a cast of members who complemented Berman’s slightly askance view of life, his playful and occasionally confrontational arrangements, and his literary ambitions. The crack about the perils of approaching perfection is telling: Berman liked to flummox his audience in small ways, with a vocal delivery or instrumental choice complicating or undercutting lyrics that might otherwise cut too near the bone. (They often still did.) Over six brief albums—only American Water reaches the 36-minute mark—Berman makes grand emotional crises seem like half-remembered parables and the more mundane parts of life sound positively crushing. “In 27 years, I drunk 50,000 beers,” he sings on 1994’s “Trains Across the Sea.” “And they just wash against me/like the sea into a pier.” Though Berman did not release an album as Silver Jews after 2008’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, 2019’s self-titled Purple Mountains album is very much a spiritual successor to the Silver Jews project. Berman died in 2019.