Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
13. Silver Jews Exegesis Part I: Starlite Walker
73 Plays1 year ago
This episode marks our first deep dive into Silver Jews’ first studio album, Starlite Walker.
Note: Due to technical issues (and apparently the fact that it’s no one’s favorite SJ song) there is no audio snippet for Tide to the Oceans.
Silver Jews recorded on Drag City records.
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Downsizing and Echo Chamber Project
00:00:00
Speaker
Should we have an episode that is just this is Bernadine Dorn playing on a loop? Yeah. I mean, if we want to chisel out our already teeny tiny listenership. Sure. Welcome to Candy Jail, the podcast that has too many listeners. And so we're going to try to alienate some more of you with this upcoming episode. That's right. We've decided to downsize the podcast. So we feel like we're getting ahead of ourselves and getting a little bit
00:00:29
Speaker
the power has gone to our heads and we don't feel like we have the purity that we did when we started this project when we were naive but idealistic and we're rich and successful now but also jaded and cynical and quite possibly manipulative. We were really inspired by Wu Tang Clan's Enter the 36 Chamber, at least the title, and we wanted to write our own podcast, album, experimental thingamajig called Enter the Echo Chamber.
00:00:56
Speaker
And we can only really achieve this really ambitious artistic project by removing as many listeners as possible. I got stuck in the first chamber. I never made it to the other 35. Every once in a while, Ghostface just sticks his head in the door and mutters in my general direction and then leaves, but...
Social Anxiety and Recording Together
00:01:24
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome again to Candy Jail. I'm Brendan. I'm here, as always, with Robert. This is a first for us. We are recording in the same room, which could lead to some sort of critical mass of smugness, I don't know, but we'll find out.
00:01:43
Speaker
I'm just feeling socially anxious. Do you see my anti-anxiety meds? Just to be around me in person is triggering your social anxiety. Yeah, I prefer my friends at a distance through a screen, atomized. Don't we all these days? If you could just back off from the microphone a little bit. Yeah, please, preaching to the choir.
Silver Jews Album Discussion Begins
00:02:05
Speaker
So as promised, we are going to be going through every single, every single, every Silver Jews album over the course of the next six months or so. And we're going to start at the beginning with Starlight Walker, the 1994 debut album from David Berman's band, The Silver Jews. And our conversations are never really scripted, but we also, we often map them out ahead of time because there are points we want to hit, things we don't want to forget to talk about.
00:02:35
Speaker
This conversation is not gonna be mapped out in any way We're really just gonna listen to the album and talk about it and we're gonna try not to get too far into the weeds about You know production and backstory and all that unless it really seems relevant But with that said I think Robert you have a little blurb that Bob Nastanovich gave in an interview back in 2011 where he just talks a little bit about like what the making of this record was like for him and
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, so he said, quote, Starlight Walker was an Oxford, Mississippi record.
Insights on 'Starlight Walker' from Bob Nastanovich
00:03:12
Speaker
David resided on the outskirts of town at the time. He was renting a tiny building that was part of a professor's chemistry lab in the woods. He paid $100 a month.
00:03:24
Speaker
it was mildly suspicious steven malcolm is and i went there to rehearse for about five days oxford is a beautiful town there are lots of beautiful people we were well peaking physically. We build songs around david's words david had just about all of his lyrics written down in a notebook when we were seventy percent ready we headed up to easily studios in memphis which burned to the ground a few years ago.
00:03:52
Speaker
Doug and Davis were ready for us. They were cool and it was welcoming. Steve West joined us on the songs that we needed a real drummer. I just wasn't good enough. It didn't bother me. I was proud of my drums on trains across the sea and my Moog. Moog. Moog, geez, all right. He even told me in advance and look what happened there.
00:04:15
Speaker
and my Moog on New Orleans. We didn't have any significant problems recording and it turned out well. Our host Sherman Wilmot, we stayed above his record shop in a small apartment, did a marvelous job of keeping barbecue sauce on our faces the whole time. I gained six pounds. Upon completing Starlight Walker, Silver Jews felt like a band instead of a project. We became formidable." End quote.
00:04:43
Speaker
So the record starts off with a little number welcoming us to the record called Introduction Number Two. I don't think Introduction Number One ever saw the light of day. This is the beginning of the Silver Juice. Hello, my friends. Hello, my friends.
00:05:12
Speaker
Come on, have a seat Come on, in my kitchen My friends, take it easy My friends, have a seat
00:05:55
Speaker
So in some ways, I think that's sort of
00:06:01
Speaker
the most typically desultory indie rock. We don't give a fuck, but we're sincere at the same time kind of introduction you can get. And I think had it been the first thing that I heard from the Jews, although I quite like it now, I don't think I would have at the time. But I think Robert, you hear it as a real welcome, like as a reflection of Berman's kind of welcoming character.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that that as a recurring theme is present probably across all the albums, but certainly most recently, like think of Purple Mountains, the song, Snow is Falling in Manhattan. I think it takes on both an explicit and just sort of a, what would you call it,
00:06:52
Speaker
The foundation of that song is a welcoming in of the listener, or certainly if you're a longtime fan, a continued reminder that you're welcome. I'm going to take your point because we need not inundate our listeners with endless trivia here. And I do want to keep in mind that
00:07:16
Speaker
I'm actually very grateful that Bob Nastanovich, who has played drums on many of the Silver Jews records, has generously shown up on many different podcasts, including In Living Recollection or In Loving Recollection. Really wonderful podcast. So folks, if you are enjoying what you're hearing on our podcast, I have a feeling you'll enjoy much of what's on that podcast as well.
00:07:46
Speaker
but Nastanovich did get on the air with that host in order to discuss the making of Starlight Walker. So I might pepper the episode today with a few anecdotes that I learned from the episode on In Loving Recollection, one of which was that Nastanovich did make explicit, David making explicit,
00:08:12
Speaker
that he wanted this to be a genuine welcome for a new listenership and that it was intended to be open armed and warm. And yeah, I agree with you that it succeeds while at the same time there is an undercurrent of, but we're still pretty cool.
00:08:32
Speaker
This is still the 90s. We're still in the midst of a lo-fi renaissance, and don't kid yourselves. We're welcoming, but we're badass too.
Analysis of 'Trains Across the Sea'
00:08:44
Speaker
And there's a little bit of wistfulness or sort of wry resignation to it, right? I never want this moment to end, and then it ends, and then the song is over, and I think
00:08:59
Speaker
thematically that the transitoriness of things, as we've talked about on this podcast before, is sort of a recurring theme, I think, on all of Berman's music.
00:09:10
Speaker
which I wanna just say there's an interesting mixture going on, right? If we make a, treat this like ingredients in a dish you're cooking up in the kitchen, one is, I think, genuine joy and celebration, but there's always a hint of melancholy. And I think that both are present in this intro song. And maybe it's safe to say that co-mixing is present throughout his entire body of work. Yeah, probably.
00:09:40
Speaker
And then we get into it. This is for me trains across the seas where the album really starts. And this is a
00:09:50
Speaker
This is a two-chord song, which is actually a pretty rare thing. There's a lot of famous songs out there that are three chords, but that third chord is usually really important in getting the whole thing off the ground. And to write a song that only contains two chords that isn't melodically repetitive in an off-putting way, that allows room for creativity, that allows room for surprise, I think is a really difficult thing to pull off. Trains Across the Sea, I think the first time I heard it,
00:10:20
Speaker
I was disappointed by it because it pulled me in from the beginning and then I felt like rather than building towards a climax, it petered out. And on a second or third listen, I realized that was my mistake, that I was not really listening to what was happening in the song. I wasn't taking the song on its own terms. So this is trains across the sea.
00:10:52
Speaker
you
00:11:21
Speaker
No troubles, no troubles On the line And I can't stand to see you I can't stand to see you When you're crying at home
00:11:50
Speaker
Scott Jen Penicillin Please try Carlton A cold black maple hanger And husbands on the run I just got back from a dream attack That took me by surprise And in there I met a lady Her name was Shady Besides and she said
00:12:30
Speaker
It's been even all day long It's been even all day long And how can something so old be so long? Sin and gravity Drag me down to sleep to dream of Trains across the sea Trains across the sea
00:13:11
Speaker
Half hours on earth What are they worth? I don't know In 27 years I've drunk 50,000 beers And they just wash against me Like the sea into a pier
00:13:53
Speaker
Okay, so this is it. This is the moment you've all been waiting for. This is the moment where we break down that song for you. We tell you exactly what it means. We tell you exactly why it's important. What to think. What to think. How to think. For that matter, when to think it. Who to marry. I don't want to go that far. I don't even know if I believe in marriage anymore, man. All right, never mind. Will you marry me? Ask me again tomorrow.
00:14:23
Speaker
I mean, first of all, that's just a fucking fantastic song. And it's so, like I said, it's two chords. It's somebody vamping with one finger on the piano. It's a simple bass line. The drumming that Bob Nusandovich is proud of is a really simple drumming.
00:14:43
Speaker
The lyrics are non-linear, and yet I could listen to that song over and over and over and never get tired of it. And I think when we did our What's the Deal with David Berman episode, you were talking about coming back from the record store with your friend Joey, hearing the Jews for the first time, and this being the song that pulled you in.
Personal Reflections on Silver Jews
00:15:08
Speaker
Do you know what it was that pulled you in?
00:15:11
Speaker
I think that there is something that happens in this song that is very hard to put my finger on, but I could say I'd never heard anything like it before, and it did feel like it was speaking to things, however non, what's the word, tethered to reality, it might seem.
00:15:39
Speaker
upon first, second, third, listen, which I think might also speak to something more interesting about how art works on us. I don't think you need to be literal or need to tie certainly imagery to concrete reality
00:16:01
Speaker
to get at something real. And maybe actually sometimes you get at something real by going in the opposite direction. And the question is like, for me, what is it about this that was touching something so true and so real for me?
00:16:17
Speaker
I think, again, as we discussed the ad mixture of Joy and Melancholy in the introduction part two, introduction two, that's in here at full form. Because the opener is, as I put it in our, what's the deal with David Berman episode, maybe a little unfairly, it's not really a song. I mean, it's kind of a song. You've got a guitar playing here and there, but it's delivered more like,
00:16:46
Speaker
Yeah, conversation. Whereas this, you know, the album has begun. And I think it all just comes together in this beautiful synthesis of speaking to true things or feelings inside you that maybe you didn't have the language for, and all of a sudden you are meeting someone who has found that language.
00:17:08
Speaker
and gotten at feelings, gotten at ways of seeing the world, gotten at ways of maybe being in the world that just feel like you can identify with. I certainly felt that when this washed over me the first time. And according to your guitar teacher, this is not a song also. Should I give that brief anecdote? Because it's pretty funny. So when David Berman died,
00:17:35
Speaker
in 2019, uh, I don't feel embarrassed to say, although I do qualify this because I didn't really know him, right? And that the stuff gets weird. So the same way you've never met Bono, but you too has been supremely important to you or who fill in the blank. I met him once at a glorious show and he was wonderfully kind to me and my friend.
00:18:03
Speaker
But beyond that and an email exchange that, again, he was very generous with responding to me, I really don't know this man, although I feel like I know him very intimately, or to put it from the opposite end, he knows me very intimately, as his music has remained a very dear friend to me over the years.
00:18:27
Speaker
So when he died, my way of grieving his death, which again, it's a little strange to say
Balancing Technical Skill and Creativity in Music
00:18:34
Speaker
this about basically a stranger, but it's the right word, I decided to take up the guitar, mostly exclusively to learn his songs in order to kind of continue a conversation with him and maybe work through some of my feelings about his passing.
00:18:54
Speaker
So i brought my self over to a guitar teacher in town. Who said let's meet for our next session but do send me the song you wanna work on in advance here's my email find a youtube link and send it my way so i sent him trains across the sea i show up a couple days later open the door he literally like.
00:19:21
Speaker
greets me shaking his head, I think like literally shaking his head. And of course I'm like, Oh God, what's like, do I, is my fly down? Do I have spaghetti on my shirt? What's going on here? And he says, so I listened to your song in quotes. And that is, I don't know what to tell you, my friend, this is like, this isn't good. And it just seems random, man. Like none of it makes sense. This isn't really a song.
00:19:50
Speaker
And I did find like something inside me die, like curl up and die. And I did say something along the lines of like, dear sir, let's listen to it one more time, but this time let's light some candles and come a little closer so I can hug you while we do this. Just kidding.
00:20:08
Speaker
But yeah, I thought that was an interesting reaction from someone who was more or less a professional musician who grew up in the midst of the heady 60s with all of the phenomenal music that came out of that period and
00:20:24
Speaker
I certainly respectfully disagreed with his assessment, but nonetheless found it intriguing that this is a man who has been steeped in Bob Dylan and Crosby Still's Nash and every other band that came out of that period and knows, I think, what good music is and definitely cordoned off this song as not good music.
00:20:49
Speaker
for whatever it was worth. So it was sort of an interesting anecdote and window into a career musician not knowing how to relate to this, which I found both intriguing and a little confusing. Yeah, I get intrigued by this stuff too, because I'm not a musician either. I know a little bit of musical theory, I can play a little bit of some chords on the guitar and stuff like that, but
00:21:15
Speaker
I never would be a musician. I don't have that necessary skill set. But there are people I know who are really talented, at least technically as players, where I often find myself vehemently disagreeing with their takes on
00:21:32
Speaker
other aspects of music that are disconnected from technical skill that I think have to do with more nebulous aspects of creativity and what it means to make something beautiful and how you can take very, very simple elements, elements like a C chord and an F chord that you've heard a million times before, and you can still make something beautiful out of them without having to
00:22:00
Speaker
deconstruct them in some post-modernist sense. You don't have to be Cecil Taylor sitting there at the piano deconstructing the blues in a way that sounds like a cat walking across the keyboard. I remember a few years ago that band The Pet Shop Boys, the English band was really big in the 80s,
00:22:20
Speaker
I don't, but- They were sort of an electronic band and I think they're still around. I don't listen to them, but I remember seeing a headline where it's two guys and one of them was saying something along the lines of like, he's so sick of the sound of an acoustic guitar. And I just thought that was the saddest thing. Yes, we've all
00:22:42
Speaker
We've all had our fill of the guys in bars or the guy around the campfire. I've had my fill of myself sitting in my house playing an acoustic guitar badly, of course. But if you can't still just hear the beauty in that sound or the sound of somebody at a piano or the sound of somebody banging on a cheap drum,
00:23:05
Speaker
That's what everything else is built out of. And if you've lost the ability to hear the beauty in the fundamentals, then I would argue that maybe you're not as sophisticated a listener as you think you are. And that might seem like a lot to put on the back of a song like Trains Across the Sea.
00:23:26
Speaker
But I think it's important, but it's something that I don't entirely know how to define. I do know that there seems to be very, very little correlation between
00:23:37
Speaker
technical musical ability and actual creativity. So I had a student last year who in the course of one year became not just proficient, but I would actually say objectively incredible at guitar. And every once in a while, right, if you're not careful, like there's like the Amadeus situation if you're not careful where
00:24:02
Speaker
You watch someone who has taken up an instrument for a year play at a high level of proficiency and you've been at it for three and barely, you know, past novice. And you're like, well, I guess it's time to fucking quit.
00:24:17
Speaker
But I actually think that is a mistake because I brought up to this young man who took me through music theory, harmony, how to navigate a guitar, and explaining it both cogently but also with like a kind of mathematical aptitude that was intimidating.
00:24:38
Speaker
I was like well so how much proficiency do you need do you feel before you can make your own music i love this response he said.
00:24:50
Speaker
you don't really need that much because it's not about that. It's about connecting with your listeners and you can connect with your listeners with a very simple arrangement and that's where the action's at, not with the, you know, crazy, theoretically advanced musical compositions. Like that stuff
00:25:11
Speaker
interesting and valuable too but I really was impressed that this was coming from I'm gonna say an actual prodigy who was humble enough but also I think authentic in saying exactly what I think you just got at which is yeah of course being excellent at something helps but you don't need to be Mozart in order to make powerful music you don't need to be Stephen Mountmas
00:25:41
Speaker
You can do this and I think Berman's a little bit. What's the word? Deceptive in this regard because. There's a ramshackle quality to this particular production like trains across the sea is a little rough around the edges as confessed by Nastanovich at least himself.
00:26:01
Speaker
And so you listen to this stuff and you're like, oh, well, if he can do it, I can. And I think that is the right message, but don't kid yourself. The talent on display is immense and the songwriting talent even at this early point is impressive. And I don't know if you ever tried to write songs, man. I've barely sort of kind of tried, but even in my introductory attempts,
00:26:28
Speaker
you're just confronted ultimately I think in a humbling and positive way with like wow the people we love especially the songs that are seemingly simple in some ways there's a paradox that it's it's that much harder to get at deep artistic achievement with the fewest number of ingredients rather than the most and this might be an example of the former
00:26:53
Speaker
So, yeah, songwriting is really, really fucking hard and largely divorced from the separate skill of playing instruments a certain way. I was lucky enough years ago, one of my favorite singer songwriters is a guy named Gregory Allen Isekov, and he performed with the Colorado Symphony in
Favorite Lines and Themes in Silver Jews' Music
00:27:13
Speaker
Denver. I was lucky enough to go to that show. And it was fascinating to watch a symphony orchestra. You know, they were all, they weren't
00:27:20
Speaker
dressed up the way that they would be for like a Beethoven performance. They were all in their street clothes, but these are highly, highly trained professional musicians who are at the top of their game. And then Greg is up there with his band, which is a really fucking good band, but they're a folk rock Americana kind of band. And Greg's fiddle player, a guy named Jeb Bose, the poetically and appropriately named Jeb Bose, the fiddle player,
00:27:50
Speaker
It was fascinating to watch him up there, standing in front of the first chair of the Colorado Symphony, sawing away at his fiddle, stamping his feet.
00:28:03
Speaker
And it sounded fantastic to me, and I would have loved to have spoken with some of the violinists in the symphony afterwards and said, what do you think of all the studies that you did? What do you think of the way he plays? What do you hear when he plays? Because it's just different skill sets coming together, different languages coming together.
00:28:27
Speaker
All right, we've talked about this song a lot, I think, because we both love this song a lot. Before we move on to the third track, favorite line in here? I think my favorite is, I mean, I like them all, but I like in 27 years, I've drunk 50,000 beers and they just wash against me like the sea into the pier, followed by his idiosyncratic calming.
00:28:54
Speaker
definitely. If I had to, that's my favorite. What about for you? Sin and gravity drag me down to sleep, to dream of trains across the sea. And I think if you will humor me for a minute, I'm going to try to say something intelligent about why that line is so good, why that couplet is so good. Sin and gravity, it's a perfect
00:29:23
Speaker
juxtaposition of words right there. They're not the same kind of thing, they're two very distinct. One is a literal physical thing, the other is a metaphorical invented thing. Gravity is the metaphorical invented thing? Yeah, sin is the most real thing in the world, man. Okay, just wanted to check. Yeah. But both of them together drag me down to sleep,
00:29:49
Speaker
Is that a reference to literal sleep? Is that a reference to death? I don't know. But that line to me is not a nonsensical line. I feel sin and gravity drag me down to sleep. To me that is a feeling that I have sometimes, that I think you have sometimes, that I think Berman had sometimes, which is just that things are pulling at you. The weight of being alive is pulling you down. And part of it may be the gravity of being
00:30:19
Speaker
living thing that none of us can escape. And part of it may be a sense that we've committed sins that were guilty, that we failed. And then the second line, drag me down to sleep, to dream of trains across the sea. And that I don't know what it means, but it's such a strikingly original image.
00:30:43
Speaker
That to me is what Berman is so good at in his poetry and his lyrics are these juxtapositions that both sound good, but also feel true on some level. There's an impossibility about the idea of trains across the sea, but also of beauty.
00:31:03
Speaker
and almost to me a sense of peace. If you could take a train across the sea, I would like to do that. I think I would probably enjoy that much more than I enjoy taking an airplane across the sea. That may not be the best exegesis you will ever hear of those lines, but it's the best I can do right now.
00:31:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I'd also just add like I agree with your assessment of the image as fundamentally positive and happy on maybe in some ways, but also liberating because trains
00:31:42
Speaker
at least at present can't travel across the sea. So the fact that they can in dreams, there's something that you can access or a way of being in a dream world that you can't in the real world. And I do think that that's another
00:31:57
Speaker
whatever you want to call it, theme, tension that he plays with throughout his work. I'll also add, just as a side, I can't help now but tie this to the scene in Miyazaki's Spirited Away, where there's an actual train that does go across the sea, and the main protagonist is sitting amongst these ghost-like characters as it's traveling.
00:32:22
Speaker
pretty beautiful scene. You know, you're right. I haven't seen that movie in so long that I'd forgotten that that was in there. It would be fascinating to know if that was just another example of Miyazaki's fabulous imagination or if somehow a line into David Berman's song made its way to him. I love the idea of Miyazaki listening to Silver Jews. That would definitely make me happy. Yeah, for sure.
00:32:48
Speaker
So that takes us to track number three, which is an instrumental, which is we're not going to play the entire thing. I don't think it's an interesting choice though, because we have our introductory track, which is used as hardly a song. Then we have our first real song and then we pivot to in a band that is fronted by a poet who is not a very good guitar player. We then pivot to an instrumental, which is a really interesting choice to make.
00:33:14
Speaker
And interestingly, I actually like the Jews' instrumentals. They have quite a few scattered around their albums. I don't think we need to say much about that, but I do think, Robert, you have some insight as to why they made what I think is the unusual choice of putting that on the record where they did.
00:33:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I just want to give another shout out to the maker of the podcast and loving recollection whose name he's posted it online. So I assume he's comfortable with his name being known as Brent Walburn. And it was just a phenomenal episode that really went into the genuine history behind the making of Starlight Walker. And it's it's tremendously valuable, I think, for for big time Jews fans. So check that out. But
00:33:59
Speaker
In that interview, in which Bob Nastanovich agreed to talk to Walburn, he said that
00:34:06
Speaker
David wanted this in there as a kind of palate cleanser because the songs that come subsequently are somewhat serious or maybe become gradually more and more serious as the album progresses. So this gave listeners an opportunity to maybe just reset a little bit before entering into that content. And when I heard that, I actually felt like, yeah, that makes sense. And I do think it achieves that that end.
00:34:35
Speaker
So that takes us to Advice to the Graduate, which is actually if you have the liner notes of the actual physical copy of the album is addressed to someone named Zoe. So I think for all of the sort of self-aware, ironic humor in some of the lyrics, and of course, we can't get away from Malcolmus's voice and the
00:35:06
Speaker
the emotional content that comes along with Malcolmus's voice. But I think in a lot of ways, this is intended as very sincerely meant advice to the graduate.
00:35:36
Speaker
And always use the old sense of the words
00:35:46
Speaker
This is a song that I like.
Exploring 'Advice to the Graduate' and Band Anecdotes
00:35:48
Speaker
It's not my favorite on the album. If I were pressed and if I were being honest when I do return to this album, it's pretty much a beeline for Trains Across the Sea, then over to New Orleans, and then finally if I'm feeling spunky, Rebel Jew. But I would put this up there as one of the better songs on the album.
00:36:10
Speaker
There's some great lines. I will start with my favorite line while I'm thinking of it. I feel like my favorite line in this is, on the last day of your life, don't forget to die. The things that you do will always make your mama cry. And one bit of trivia and then one tie into another musician.
00:36:35
Speaker
David and Nastanovich and Malkmus pre-Silver Jews were playing their music, if you could call it that. It was pretty rough in their rented basement room. And they, what did they take on the name? Ectoslavia and Walnut Falcon. I have not done enough digging to get to the bottom of why they chose those names. Walnut Falcon sucks. Ectoslavia is a decent band name. Yeah.
00:37:04
Speaker
Yeah, but I'm glad they did not go with Walnut Falcon. I don't know that we would be sitting here today if they had gone with Walnut Falcon. That's a good question, actually, how much it would color the rest of our feelings. Anyway, but they were given by some sort of irresponsible friend of theirs who somehow managed to get the number of the, I think it's the lead singer to the Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore.
00:37:29
Speaker
And they, I don't know if alcohol was involved, although I wouldn't put it past them as college or recent college graduates. They would play their music in quotes and they even admit like this was bad sounding stuff.
00:37:47
Speaker
Into this guy's answering machine at all hours of the night and Stanovich apparently still doesn't know What Thurston Moore made of that if you liked it if you found it obnoxious, but just think it's funny that
00:38:02
Speaker
that was part of their early shenanigans and that it starts, the album, this song starts with, if you got a message, leave your name and number. I can't help but feel like they're making a kind of inside reference to their own origins. There's a part of me that can't help but wonder, because now you're talking about Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth and Stephen Malkmus and Pavement at the same time. And these are
00:38:33
Speaker
Two people and two bands that I could imagine trying to out cool one another in an early 90s sense in a movie where they're both played by Ethan Hawke, but they're trying to look like they don't look like Ethan Hawke.
00:38:52
Speaker
And I would like I mean, I'm not that curious, but I'm kind of curious to know is like, were they doing that because they were Sonic Youth fans or were they doing it because they thought they were cooler than Sonic Youth and they were trying to fuck with like they would go to show sometimes. I heard this from other places that they would go to shows and semi heckle musicians if they did not respect them or if they thought they were being overly lauded.
00:39:19
Speaker
That was not outside of their toolbox, if you want to call it that. They could definitely be obnoxious. I think, of course, if you're going to do this, and especially if it's late at night and you don't know this guy, you're already in a certain area of obnoxious hijinks, but maybe endearing still. How about for you, man? How do you feel about this song and do you have a favorite line?
00:39:47
Speaker
I like it, but I like the lyrics more than I like the music. And I do think there's something legitimately optimistic to it. The chorus, well, I know you've got a lot of hope for the new men.
00:40:03
Speaker
And then you're waiting for the butt, right? I know you've got a lot of hope for the new men, but let me tell you, kid, you're going to be disappointed or something, but the butt never comes. And even the line about death on the last day of your life, don't forget to die is it's a funny line. And it's delivered in the same spirit has always used the old sense of the words, which I think
00:40:23
Speaker
might be my single favorite line in the song. So yeah, to me it's kind of a sweet little song, but not one that probably, it's not my favorite Silver Juice song or even anywhere close to my favorite song on the album.
00:40:40
Speaker
I'm not like a Mac DeMarco superfan, but I do like his music. I've spent most of my time listening to his album. I think it's called Salad Days. He's got one track on there called Passing Out Pieces. It's got this wonderful recurring refrain that says, the things that my mom doesn't know is starting to take its toll on me.
00:41:06
Speaker
And now that i've heard that i can't help but tie it back to the things that you do will always make your mama cry so good line yeah did you ever see the money python skip salad days now are they. It's a.
00:41:22
Speaker
The skit is Sam Peckinpah presents salad days. And then of course it's people sitting around having a good time and then they all start murdering each other. And it's, I'll never, I'll never hear the expression salad days for the rest of my life without thinking of that Monty Python skit. That is number one, hilarious. And number two, it seems, I have, I have like a mental block in envisioning Peckinpah ever having a good time.
00:41:50
Speaker
because of the coarse, bleak, nihilistic, explosively violent endings of, I think, every movie he ever made.
Critiquing 'Tied to the Oceans' and Water Imagery
00:42:03
Speaker
So, Sam Peckinpah, of course, is the perfect transition into track number five on Starlight Walker, Tied to the Oceans. I don't really like that song. Do you like that song?
00:42:17
Speaker
I like how it sounds, but I don't like, I'm not taken in, in the way that I was with trains across the sea, if that makes sense. Like it's, I can appreciate it as not, it's not offensive to my ears. It's pleasing, but it's not an all-timer.
00:42:41
Speaker
Yeah. And it's a good example, I guess, of I don't as much as I go on about Berman as a lyricist and how his lyrics sometimes don't make logical sense, but feel true. I don't think that he it's not like everything he ever wrote had that quality to it. And the lyrics to this, I can find almost nothing in them that creates that sensation for me.
00:43:11
Speaker
and the non sequiturs to me are not pleasing in any way, bought himself a little cigarettes I find insufferable. It might be the most pretentious line across all albums because it's a sort of self-consciously, grammatically incorrect delivery. And even the title, Tied to the Oceans,
00:43:36
Speaker
If you look at the liner notes of the record, he spells the title Tide as in the lunar pull of the seed, but he said in the first line, he writes that Tide, T-I-E-D, Berman was fond of puns like that. That is not even a good one. He has not discovered any truth in juxtaposing those homophones. So lest you think we have no ability to criticize Berman whatsoever,
00:44:05
Speaker
We do. Check that out. Yeah. But now that we have, I think I need to go have a little cigarettes. Yeah, have a little cigarettes. But let me just say one thing before you have your little cigarettes. I'm going to just keep saying that now to be annoying. Yeah. I never had a sibling, so we're going to make that happen right now. Explain so, so many things. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,
00:44:30
Speaker
water, right? You have trains across the sea tied to the oceans, the album American Water. I think it's safe to say he's smitten and taken in by water in their various iterations. I'm even thinking of the shorelines of the lake in the opening song to Natural Bridge. So I bet if we kept digging, we'd keep seeing water
00:44:59
Speaker
pop up again and again and again. Yes. So anyway, that's all I got. Have your cigarettes. Thank you. Do you want one? It seems I have multiple ones. I want one for each opening in my fingers. Good con decoration made for the doctor that gives my arm.
00:45:36
Speaker
But let me just read the first verse of this song. A fifth on decoration day for the doctor that fixed my arm. The Federale is back from Tucson. Each one got an arm gone. Limehouse Pratt got dim inside. Can't see the painted ladies run around at night.
00:45:58
Speaker
a wood-paneled room, my cigarette fumes waltz and dissolve just for you. It's almost setting the stage to a kind of eccentric Western. And then it goes in a totally different direction. Decoration Day is Memorial Day. And if you don't know the song, Decoration Day by the Drive-By Truckers, the Jason Isbell song, fucking incredible song. Greatest musical reference to Decoration Day I know of.
00:46:27
Speaker
And then after that, we have a jaguar simmering in a cage. We have history getting its walking papers. What do you make of that? What the hell does that mean? History got its walking papers. History's got its walking papers. Can't get enough of the makeup that makes it look so tough. I don't even know if the it there is still a reference.
00:46:49
Speaker
to history, but the way that I read it is sort of a dismissiveness of something that we are supposed to accept with relevance and or a sort of who gives a shit about the past. What about you? How do you hear that line? I honestly don't know what to make of this song, like in the same way that that... I say this, I say that with in loving recollection, right?
00:47:19
Speaker
So unlike my totally uncharitable, never to be guitar teacher, we ended our relationship shortly thereafter. And he's been sitting in his house just trying to master those two chords in exactly the right sloppy way ever since because you just totally upended his entire understanding of music.
00:47:45
Speaker
But it is a little it's almost like it's it's where whatever ties trains across the sea together and it be funny actually to look at the lyrics to this matched up against trains across the sea.
Lyrical Coherence and Historical References
00:47:58
Speaker
and have me try to make a case for why there's a narrative cohesion and trains across the sea that I think is not present in this. But we don't have the time. I don't want to subject you or listeners to that kind of analysis. But I guess I just bring that up because I don't know why this doesn't work for me, but it doesn't really work for me. I don't hate it. I don't love it. It's in the album. It's fine, but I couldn't tell you.
00:48:27
Speaker
But let me just add one bit of nerd trivia that's non-Nostanovich related. I read this from a Berman interview, which was fascinating. At University of Virginia, because they have a tremendous, apparently, amount of holdings in their archives, like historical archives, there are original documents from many of the first presidents of the United States. There is ephemera from people as wide ranging as,
00:48:54
Speaker
who was it Theodore Roosevelt, his son who went by Kermit, who gets a mention in an actual air poem. And it was interesting to read Berman's, he went into the archives in order to handle these documents. I remember reading him basically saying,
00:49:14
Speaker
How magical it was to actually have his hands on some of these things like I held a piece of paper that George Washington's writing was on and he referred to them as great men, which I thought was curious because I know even though he's not like.
00:49:31
Speaker
explicitly anti-capitalist we know based on his highly fraught relationship with his father and his general worldview that he's certainly far, far from being on the right. I would say he's clearly situated on the left, even if he doesn't spell it out. And yet, at least at that point in his life, there was a kind of reverence, at least for the the tritus of history as it came down from
00:50:00
Speaker
the world historical figures that handled them. What to do with that? Maybe they can both coexist. But I think he also, you know, he references like all wars end in the fall in pet politics. Like it's clear he's actually a reader of history and he likes it and makes all kinds of obscure historical references throughout his work. And so
00:50:25
Speaker
Again, I can't make heads or tails of this line, but I would push back if maybe in this instant maybe there's a certain dismissiveness to the discipline. But in general, I would say there's a total obsession with it, actually. History is clearly very important to him. Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up the fact that the song doesn't entirely work because this is
00:50:51
Speaker
The first record by a band that was fronted by a man who was first and foremost a poet and the relationship between poetry and music can be a really beautiful one or it can be a really fraught and difficult. I was just listening to Bernie Toppin on Marin's podcast and he went out of his way to say that
00:51:15
Speaker
I'm not a poet, I'm a lyricist. I've dabbled in poetry, but what I write are lyrics, and it always bothered him, apparently, when people referred to him as a poet. And I've brought that up on this show before, that they're not the same thing. But in Berman's case often, and I think this is true of Pan-American blues, he isn't writing song lyrics. He's writing poetry, and then they're being set to music.
00:51:40
Speaker
And they haven't yet, he hasn't yet gotten to a point where he can do that flawlessly every time. And so sometimes what you're hearing, I think, on Starlight Walker is a kind of experiment. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. But it is very much a debut album. And sometimes, I think because Malchmus is there, the music is
00:52:07
Speaker
more sophisticated than you might expect it to be, just on the basis of like trains across the sea, for instance, but trying to combine the music and the poetic lyrics results in something that's interesting and sometimes pleasing, but that doesn't necessarily come together in the way that a lot of songs would on later records. Do you think that's fair?
00:52:30
Speaker
Yeah, and it also made me think about the fact that he clearly did. It seems to me that he kept writing poetry maybe to his dying day, but very little, if anything, was published after actual air. There are videotaped public readings that he gave after he dissolved Silver Jews, and it was fresh material. So he definitely kept at it.
00:52:58
Speaker
but you more or less I guess from 1995 forward have a huge chunk. I guess you could say actually to the end of his life where because he didn't publish any of those poems he really did transition fully into being a musician. So I like how you've sort of situated this because
00:53:20
Speaker
It's an interesting way of getting at, like maybe this is him also really figuring out how to plant his feet firmly into musicianship, into lyricism versus poetry.
00:53:34
Speaker
and we're watching that transformation and that transition take place in real time. One other thing that I think is interesting about the distinction between poetry and lyrics, right, and one thing that will separate Berman's poems from his songs
00:53:50
Speaker
I don't know if you noticed this in actual air.
Rhyme in Poetry vs. Music
00:53:53
Speaker
He's very rarely, he very rarely if ever deals with rhyming rhyme schemes, rhyming couplets. Rhymes really are nowhere to be found in the poetry. Rhymes are everywhere in the music making. And I find that actually kind of comforting because that's how I tend to write. I actually do more the poetry in rhyming couplets, but
00:54:18
Speaker
he clearly something for him, right, felt right in leaning into rhyming in songs in a way that he really avoided like the plague in his poems. I just wanted to float that out and see if you had any thoughts about that and if you'd noticed that. I do have thoughts about that. Funny you should ask. You know, rhyming went out of fashion in poetry
00:54:45
Speaker
in the early 20th century. I didn't get the memo. In some ways, there's a part of me that wishes nobody had gotten the memo. And there's a part of me that thinks it was a wonderful and much needed development. But it's a little bit like to do rhyme well is really, really hard. And anybody can rhyme, but to rhyme well is very, very hard. And to me, it's a foundational skill of putting words together.
00:55:15
Speaker
And it's a little bit like what I was saying earlier about how if you're a musician and you've lost the ability to kind of feel a thrill in your spine when somebody goes from a C to an E minor on a guitar, or think about someone like John Coltrane coming up through the jazz scene, learning the standards, building up his chops.
00:55:39
Speaker
demonstrating his technical ability until finally you end up with the Village Vanguard days at the end of his career where he's playing this really abstract jazz that's really hard to follow and isn't very melodic but is incredible because it's Coltrane and then you get somebody like
00:55:56
Speaker
Like Pharaoh Sanders who comes along and just like starts doing that and I'm always like Could you just like would you have been able to hang? Like in one of Miles Davis's man's like cuz you didn't put that work in and to me Like if you're a poet and you can't rhyme Because once once the more restrictions you remove. Okay, so we moved away from metrical poetry Nobody's writing an iambic or trochaic anything anymore. We moved away from rhyme and
00:56:26
Speaker
there aren't very many constraints left. And so if all you've got is words on a page and you're not working within the limits of rhyme or meter, there's an incredible freedom in that you have to have discipline in order to work in that freedom in a really skilled, powerful way.
00:56:50
Speaker
And if you're coming up as a poet, I think, and I'm saying this as someone who is not a published poet, but if you're coming up as a poet and you've never tried to rhyme before, I think you're missing something that is going to make the rest of your poetry suffer, which I think is part of why a lot of poetry sucks. And I think Berman probably on some level was aware of that.
00:57:13
Speaker
even as rhyme was going out of fashion and poetry, where was it still acceptable in song lyrics? And then especially when hip hop brought rhyme back and there's so much sophisticated rhyme in hip hop where you get into internal rhymes and slant rhymes and assonance and all this kind of thing. It was like if you're a musician, you're given this freedom to play with words that ironically,
00:57:41
Speaker
poets didn't have or don't have. And I think as someone who was at bottom a lover of words, an obsessive lover of words, I think Berman probably loved rhyme, but understood that that's not what was happening in poetry at the time. And I think probably based on some of the comments that he made around Purple Mountains,
00:58:08
Speaker
I think he was more proud of that writing than he was of much of the earlier writing that he'd done, and I think part of it was because he could finally settle in.
00:58:18
Speaker
and embrace his love of rhyme. Just one added thought before we move to the next song. You brought up rap and how rap not only has become arguably the dominant genre in the United States, but also is, I mean, rhyming is about as central as it can possibly get to rap.
00:58:42
Speaker
I probably know more about rap than any other genre. My musical knowledge in terms of just general like history, rock history, et cetera, is shamefully ridden with holes.
00:58:58
Speaker
I remember listening to, I've now obsessively, maybe neurotically exhausted just about all podcasts I could find that deal with David Berman, but two co-hosts whose podcast I can't remember made this statement, which I went, fuck, this is really interesting.
Connection Between Rap and Silver Jews
00:59:14
Speaker
Both of them said they were huge rap enthusiasts, new next to nothing about rock.
00:59:22
Speaker
Had been introduced to silver jews and immediately took a shine to it and they thought that in a weird kind of way rap had primed them to love silver jews and they actually were sort of seeing rap resonances in the.
00:59:41
Speaker
lyricism of Berman. And I went, damn, I never made that connection. But that's exactly my my own background. And it definitely made me think like double take and go, they're clearly right. And they're on to something here. And I never went further with it other than just confirming, yeah, there's there's a connection here. There's a linkage. That's fascinating, man, because like going back to, you know, when we were
01:00:08
Speaker
What's the deal with David Berman episode where I was talking about my. Allergy to certain affect what I see is affectations in certain kinds of like indie rock. I didn't my musical tastes were not shaped by rap I didn't get into rap until I a lot of my musical tastes had already been been formed and so if you.
01:00:28
Speaker
came up like I did lying on the floor of your parents' house in front of a shelf full of vinyl records with earphones on, listening to Led Zeppelin, listening to The Stones, listening to The Beatles. It's very much about melody and harmony and conveying emotion through melody and harmony.
01:00:53
Speaker
a lot of the rock music that I love the most, like U2, has an operatic quality to it. Whereas the aesthetic, especially of early Jews, like Starlight Walker, is very different. And I want to think more about that, but that makes sense to me, that there is, that rap could be, because it's such a totally different aesthetic.
01:01:18
Speaker
that it could prime you to hear this music in a way that in some ways like I'm the more natural silver juice audience just by virtue of having grown up with rock in a way that you didn't, right? Yeah, that's fascinating, man. One other piece to that and then we'll move on because I know that Berman himself being a poet takes as we've discussed and it's self-evident lyricism very, very seriously.
Debate Over Lyrics vs. Vibe in Music
01:01:46
Speaker
Whereas to your point with like, for instance, Tori Amos's work, which I'm less familiar with, you made the point of like, you know, there was experiment, experimenting with non sequiturs, which maybe sonically sounds pleasing, but for you who cares about lyrics found it pretty obnoxious. And rap, right? I mean, I've had this debate with a friend of mine who's definitely more schooled in rap history than I am. So
01:02:12
Speaker
I take, I respect his opinions on the genre. But he basically is like, in your mind, what is it about? Is it about the vibe or is it about the lyrics? Vibe being like, you know, just the feeling that you're the atmosphere of the sounds and what kind of mood that puts you into. Because I think it's true that, like, for instance, gangster rap clearly has
01:02:37
Speaker
connections to film noir and to gangster movies. And so you're creating a whole atmosphere that puts you in the headspace of a kind of gangster vibe. I immediately without even thinking for a millisecond responded with lyrics take precedence over the vibe.
01:02:57
Speaker
my friends countered with the vibe takes precedence over the lyrics and i think. This is one of those debates that you don't get to the bottom of and there isn't necessarily a right or wrong but it does speak to your own proclivities and i think i could see berman actually appreciating rap.
01:03:14
Speaker
because there are very healthy contingency of rappers that definitely put lyrics above everything else. And for that reason, again, I can see some clean crossover and linkage between the two genres as seemingly unrelated as they seem to be on the face of it. Certainly with Silver Jews connected to
01:03:39
Speaker
oral sweatshirt or the notorious B.I.G., but I think if you scratch a little bit, it doesn't take much. You see, okay, wait a second. I need to reassess that. Yeah, it's an impossible thing to solve. I'm a word person. That's just the term that I keep coming back to to describe myself, but at the same time,
01:04:00
Speaker
When it comes to music, to me, music is music. I respond to the musical elements of it before I respond to anything else, and I don't always want poetic lyrics. I don't. Sometimes I think that would be some songs that would be absolutely the wrong approach to make. And if you're looking for poetry, then you can't listen to David Bowie. You can't listen to Radiohead. You can't listen to Elton John. You can't listen to The Beatles or The Stones or Zeppelin or The Cure.
01:04:27
Speaker
like band after band after band, their lyrics are not poetry, they're song lyrics. Berman actually went on the record. I don't know if you saw this interview with him when he was asked, it might have been by Pitchfork, what his thoughts were on Radiohead.
Critique of Radiohead and Musical Substance
01:04:42
Speaker
And he said, not verbatim, but in so many words, I never can understand how bands can become as famous as Radiohead. They're literally like when he was discussing them, he was framing them as the most famous band in the world.
01:04:56
Speaker
He goes, how can the most famous man in the world reach that status and have so very little to actually say? And I thought that that was a very un
01:05:07
Speaker
That was a uncomplicated, almost attack in a way of really revealing, like, he kind of holds them in contempt. And he seems to hold any band in contempt that's going to put the atmosphere over and above the substance. So maybe this is like a content and a form discussion, and he's basically saying the content is so lacking, this is embarrassing. I'm shaking my head in incredulity right now. I did not know that. He's wrong.
01:05:36
Speaker
Yeah, he might. That's a complete misunderstanding of like, it's not atmosphere. That's like saying that going and listening to a Beethoven symphony is about atmosphere, like music. That's my word, by the way. That might not be his, but he definitely did say, how can a band this big in so many words have you getting texts from CVS? No, I'm getting texts from my brother. I just send him my love, even though I've never met him.
01:06:05
Speaker
So just I think what he was getting at just so we're clear and really emphasize that I am in my head remembering a quote that I could be heavily misquoting. The general substance of it was, how can a band get this big and have so little to say? OK, I want to pursue this a little bit. Yeah. I had no idea what Tom York is talking about half the time.
01:06:31
Speaker
Half the time I do, and I don't think that's fair to say he had nothing to say. I don't think that's fair at all. I also have no idea what David Berman is talking about half the time. But for some reason this morning, as I was sitting in front of my computer doing work, the song Revolution by the Beatles got stuck in my head. I don't know why. Whatever bizarre train of thought led me there.
01:06:57
Speaker
And I started like, and you know, song gets lodged in your head and then the next thing you know, you're hearing the lyrics in your head, whether you want to or not. And I haven't thought about that song in years and years, but I started running through John Lennon's lyrics and I was like, you tell me it's the institution, but well, you know, you better free your mind instead.
01:07:19
Speaker
That's fucking asinine, man. That's like Timothy Leary's entire body of work in a nutshell. That's unfair. No, it's not. And then I went through, I ran through as much as I could remember them every verse in that song. And I was like, that's a fucking stupid song. It's not just stupid in retrospect. At the time,
01:07:43
Speaker
The only trenchant thing he says in that is if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow. Okay, fair enough. But that song came out in 68. You're talking about Malcolm and Martin and the Black Panthers and the weather underground. They should not have broken Leary out is what you're saying. Basically, well, given how he acted later, they should not have broken Leary out.
01:08:12
Speaker
It's a fucking asinine song, and yet it was hugely famous even at the time, and the Beatles are the most beloved band of all time. I could just as well say, how could a band like the Beatles get so famous while having so little to say? That would be missing the point of part of the Beatles.
01:08:34
Speaker
I mean, and if you don't kind of what I said about like, you know, if the hair on the back of your neck doesn't stand up a little bit when you hear somebody go from a C to an E minor. If the hair on the back of your neck doesn't stand up when you hear Tom York's falsetto, when he's not even singing words when he's just making sound.
01:08:53
Speaker
over the incredible stuff that the band is doing, then you're not hearing music. You're trying to make music into something that it's not. Music is music. Two things. Number one, I'm a huge, huge fan. I don't really listen to their albums from start to finish. That's not how I relate to their music.
01:09:15
Speaker
And I'm far from expert in radiohead discography, but Karma Police is a fucking good song, like really, really, really good. And I will never get sick of it. And that has, when I heard it at 14 or whatever, I was like, yeah, that is how I feel. They've nailed what my angst is right here. I don't know what this means really myself, but that's it. But what you just said,
01:09:45
Speaker
How does that then square with the Tori Amos critique? Because she's making sounds, you could say, or stringing nonsense words together. In that instance, it's an issue, but when Tommy York is belting out gibberish, it's fine. So what's happening with York that's working for you that's not with Amos?
Creativity and Execution in Lyrics
01:10:06
Speaker
That's a really good question. I'm going to try to give you a good answer. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to. It's a question. Your life depends on it.
01:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, my sense of self-identity depends upon it. Part of it is sound, that when you put words together in a way that is self-consciously creative, it just better sound good. When Berman does it tied to the oceans aside, when Berman does it most of the time,
01:10:38
Speaker
He's like a painter who understands how colors fit together in a way that most people do not. He understands how words fit together in a way that most people do not. Words are like colors or musical notes or something like that. They fit together in different ways. They don't fit together in certain ways. So part of what I react to is sound. If lyrics are just simple,
01:11:05
Speaker
I have no problem with that whatsoever because that's not somebody self-consciously trying to be creative, that's somebody trying to say something that makes sense. So karma police may not be the best example because I think the lyrics to that are actually fairly coherent, but think about
01:11:23
Speaker
the song How to Disappear Completely off of Kid A where he just says, I'm not here. This is not happening. I float down the liffy. He's not trying to write poetry. He's just saying sentences that have sense to them that make sense.
01:11:43
Speaker
Whereas, all right, this is gonna be a fucking two-part episode, man, but I think we should talk about this stuff. When I did bring up Tori Amos, the song that I cited as having really good lyrics was Crucify. I've been looking for a savior in these dirty streets, looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets. I've been raising up my hands, driving another nail in. It's on the nose, but for song lyrics, it's good. But the opening of that song is,
01:12:09
Speaker
Every finger in the room is pointing at me. I want to spit in their faces, but I get afraid of what that might bring. OK, that's just straight up. I'm saying what I mean, which is fucking perfect because it's a song. You can do that in a song. But then the next line is I've got a bowling ball in my stomach. I've got a desert in my mouth.
01:12:31
Speaker
That happened to me once. Well, if you think about it, it actually did. But even when that's when I first like because what you know what she means, like she means like her stomach feels really heavy and her her mouth is dry because she's afraid and she's anxious. But even like at 13 or 14, listening to that, I was like, I don't know, like that's not it's verging towards cliche.
01:12:53
Speaker
And my point, I think, is that once you start, you don't have to be creative with language to write song lyrics. You do not. But once you start trying to get creative with lyrics, then you better be good at it. And if you try to get creative and you're bad at it,
01:13:11
Speaker
the result is much more off-putting to me than if you'd just been straightforward and hadn't tried to get creative with it at all, right? See, I don't know if I'm, I think for me with Tom York's, whatever you want to call it, singing style that is sometimes untethered from actual words, like it's just like these moans or groans or whatever, falsettos.
01:13:36
Speaker
It's feelings and feelings music gets it feelings in ways that nothing else can exactly and he does achieve that from me so i do think it's wrong to if you if you make a claim like. How can a band get this world famous and have so little to say.
01:13:57
Speaker
I think it misses the point that saying isn't all that music is. It's also feeling, and there's lots of ways to get to feeling. And in some ways, the most sublime musical moments are the ones that are gotten at without words because we have to use words for so much of our communication to finally communicate a really true feeling
01:14:22
Speaker
just by how you are using your voice, not even attaching that voice to words, might be, to me actually, if I'm really, really being honest, the most sublime moments I've ever experienced in music.
01:14:37
Speaker
That being said, sometimes the words can be so sublime in being synthesized with the music that accompanies them that I fail to, I don't actually separate
Analysis of 'New Orleans' and Song Imagery
01:14:49
Speaker
them. I see it as one whole. But yes, the more we talk about this, the more I actually do feel like that's an unfair knock on Radiohead and maybe specifically Tommy Ork. Let's play this next song, what's coming up, New Orleans, right? Arguably,
01:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, in some- The heaviest hitter? The heaviest hitter, I think in some way, the reason that we're both here for this album is maybe this song more than any other. This is New Orleans.
01:15:44
Speaker
I'm scared, I swear, of you In the tunnel, in the darkness, the darkest walls of blue
01:16:11
Speaker
there's man and there's something on this earth that comes back again alpha delta gamma everybody smoke well you can't say that my soul
01:16:41
Speaker
That my soul has died away Well, there's trouble in the hall And trouble upstairs And trouble in the trouble that's been troubled in heaven Well, please don't say That my soul has died away
01:17:48
Speaker
There is a house in New Orleans Not the one you heard about I'm talking about another house They spoke of gold in the cellar That a Spanish gentleman had left I broke in 100 years ago With a dagger tucked in my vest
01:18:17
Speaker
Legends of gold I've tried to hold The gray half-light of the hallway at night One Two
01:18:33
Speaker
We're trapped inside the song Well we're trapped inside the song Trapped inside the song Trapped inside the song Where the nights are so long Trapped inside the song Trapped inside the song Trapped inside the song Where the nights are so long Trapped inside the song Trapped inside the song Trapped inside the song
01:19:34
Speaker
Fuck, man. That, as much as we love trains across the sea, that is the moment when this band is functioning as a band and everything is coming together musically and lyrically.
01:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that this thing, that New Orleans still holds up as one of the great songs in the entire catalog up until the final Purple Mountains album. It's as good as any of the best songs on any of the albums.
01:20:07
Speaker
And this is the, I mean, save for early times and the Arizona record, which are intentionally truly ramshackle their first foray into a studio. So yeah, I think this is, I agree. This is the song of the album.
01:20:27
Speaker
I have a lot to say about it. I want to give you a chance to weigh in maybe first because I'm probably going to be top heavy in what I'm going to subject you to. Well, I think the lyrics are typical Berman in a sense. We pivot several times and there's the delightfully corny joke that I've referenced before.
01:20:57
Speaker
There is a house in New Orleans, not the one you've heard about. I'm talking about another house. And the strange reference to the gold buried in the cellar and breaking in 100 years ago. But there's also... Essentially this is a song about...
01:21:11
Speaker
death and Berman, I think throughout his career, there are numerous references to an afterlife. I think that is something that he seriously believed and he insists in the song, you can't say that my soul has died away. There's beasts and there's men. Men are different, men have souls, very Judeo-Christian idea. But even later in his life, he seemed to write about death the same way as though there was something after it.
01:21:37
Speaker
And then at the end of the song with the same sort of frantic insistence that he tells us, you can't say that my soul has died away. He says we're trapped. We're trapped inside the song. The night is so long. And in fact, you probably can't pick this up no matter how many times you listen to the song. But if you actually look at the lyrics as he wrote them out in the liner notes, the final line
01:22:05
Speaker
of the song is the knife is so tall. Which apparently was Malchmus improving, if you can believe it. And Nastanovich has weighed in and been like, it's astounding when the collaboration's at its best what Malchmus is able to pull out and compliment so elegantly with Berman's rehearsed lyrics. Right.
01:22:25
Speaker
And then what's happening musically, not just with the weird little breakdown between the sections, which is so cool, but just, again, you only have a few chords that you're working with. And I can't tell if it's two or three guitars there in the mix, I think it's three. And I assume it's Malthmus who's on the third guitar.
01:22:44
Speaker
who's playing the little figures, just the one or two note figures that almost like something the edge would do in U2. He's not playing full chords, but he's adding another dimension of tension, I did not mean for that to rhyme, to the chord progression and just the forward momentum of the song that has this almost unbearable tension to it.
01:23:14
Speaker
And that tension just gets ramped up and ramped up and ramped up. And then finally you have, you know, even the laconic kind of monotone Berman kind of raising his voice and then mountainous behind him. It's just, it's haunting and gorgeous and thrilling.
01:23:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, obviously, Beauty's in the Eye of the Beholder, but to me, and it sounds like to you, this is one of the rare examples of what would count for us as a perfect song. Like somehow, all elements came together and they just nailed it. They nailed it. They hit bullseye after bullseye, which is, I don't know if you can plan it. I think some of it has to do with a certain amount of chance and the stars lined up properly for this one.
01:24:00
Speaker
I have some pretty heavy duty Berman Kabbalah exegesis that ties certain elements of this song, certain themes to other areas of his catalog, and I wouldn't subject you to that with the other songs, but this one I do feel compelled to because I have a couple insights that I think, one in particular, that I think is substantive.
01:24:28
Speaker
Do you mind if I subject you to this? Knock yourself out, man. Okay, so the first one is I think there could arguably be a natural bridge tie-in, but even if there isn't, I think we can add a couple more recurring images to Berman's universe as it shows up in this song.
01:24:51
Speaker
So to your joke line, although when I hear it, it's delivered in such a deadpan fashion that I take it deadly seriously. I think that's fair, yes.
01:25:04
Speaker
So there's a house in New Orleans, not the one you've heard about. I'm talking about another house. This is what I want to focus on. They spoke of gold in the cellar that a Spanish gentleman had left. I broke in 100 years ago with a dagger tucked in my vest. I wrote, so here's a song, here's a line from pet politics, which is the second song on the natural bridge. Is it this? No, it's the third is the third.
01:25:31
Speaker
I could see through the sleeve of her blouse, the plans of her architect lover, a tattoo of a boarded up house, an ink door that belonged to another. The last song of Natural Bridge Pretty Eyes, All Houses Dream in Blueprints, All Houses Dream So Hard. And then there's another house reference I'm gonna hold off on, because I'm especially proud of one connection I'm gonna make in a moment, where I'm going, whoa, I wonder if the house that he's,
01:25:59
Speaker
in New Orleans is the house on the woman's sleeve in the tattoo. And I've brought this kind of stuff up to ex-girlfriends, one in particular. Were they just girlfriends until you brought this kind of stuff up?
01:26:15
Speaker
They became ex-girlfriends once I brought this kind of stuff up. No, but there was one in particular who really took to the silver Jews in a real way. So I had an opportunity to subject her to this stuff. And I remember bringing up this anecdote that I just shared with you, and her response, which I think was fair, and I think it came up in our What's the Deal with David Berman episode, was like, maybe it's also just, he's the web.
01:26:44
Speaker
And these images are important to him for reasons he both knows and doesn't know just like for anyone. And they do recur but they might not be recurring as systematically as you're making it out to be some open to that as probably the more correct and sober.
01:27:04
Speaker
sane version of connecting these dots. But nonetheless, I think there's value in maybe not making an Excel spreadsheet out of this, but in really showing that these images are central to his artistic universe, to his imagination. And I just find it maybe it's pleasurable to reflect on or ruminate on why.
01:27:32
Speaker
Why do these keep showing up? And I think there's something too about the fact that so many of them are mundane things like houses and hallways. And I think at least in the modern world,
01:27:45
Speaker
the creative person is often driven to find magic in the mundane. Think of what David Lynch did to ceiling fans, where you take something that is an everyday, unromantic part of everybody's life.
01:28:05
Speaker
And then you make of it something beautiful or something sinister or something, almost something numinous in some cases. And I think, you know, the opening lines of this song in the tunnel, in the darkness, the darkest walls of blue, just his ability to speak of these spaces that are domestic spaces, everyday domestic spaces.
01:28:28
Speaker
and then to find them pregnant with meaning, pregnant with expectation, I think maybe invites a kind of pseudo-cabbalistic analysis. Okay, so here's the one that I'm really actually proud of. And I think once I read this to you a year ago, you're going to be... I will be your girlfriend. Yeah, will you marry me?
01:28:54
Speaker
I said tomorrow. Fuck, okay. So he says one, two, three, four, five, trapped inside the song, we're trapped inside the song, where the nights are so long, there's traps inside us all. He does that three times and the nights are so tall,
01:29:12
Speaker
and the night is so tall and the knife as you put it is so tall. Now, this is from Berman's song on Purple Mountains, the final album that he released, Snow is Falling in Manhattan.
01:29:29
Speaker
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. Here's what I wrote, because I think this is really profoundly important potentially.
01:29:48
Speaker
I find it interesting that in New Orleans the lines are we're trapped inside the song, which to my mind sounds like a bad thing, something negative. No one wants to be or wants to feel trapped.
01:30:04
Speaker
But jump ahead now to Snow Is Falling in Manhattan. Berman says songs build little rooms in time and house within the song's design as the ghost the host has left behind to greet and sweep the guests inside in this song.
01:30:20
Speaker
Berman frames his being in the song as a cozy and comfortable room meant to usher in his friends, back to that ushering in friends. To my mind, all humanity really, but of course his fans. Here the song is a respite from the harsh realities of the world outside of it, where New Orleans describes songs as traps. In Snow is Falling in Manhattan, he describes them as sanctuaries. So interesting to me.
01:30:50
Speaker
I think there's something there. I think that that might be one where you have an intentional conscious decision being made as he's reflecting on his work. And I do see a natural tie into New Orleans, certainly snow is falling in Manhattan and definitely nights that won't happen, which features a house to the roadside and then where the guests inside.
01:31:13
Speaker
and death is a black camel that kneels down so you can ride. So this idea of the trapped, trappiness being in tension with the, um, the getaway and that they're kind of serving that those there, they're acting in different ways depending on where you are in the catalog and ironic, right? That the first album is the trap.
01:31:40
Speaker
even though in real life, and I mean this with ultimate compassion, he was probably more trapped than he'd ever been while recording Purple Mountains, but you have a reversal where the song becomes the escape and the liberation and the respite, even though it was arguably the hardest moment for him. So wow, what's happening here?
01:32:03
Speaker
Am I on to something? Do you think that that's a little more substantive than the New Orleans pet politics tattooed house line? Yeah, I can't gainsay anything you just said. I don't know if I can add to it though. I think that Berman, however, had an uneasy despite the fact that he was in a band.
Berman's Songwriting Evolution and Thematic Complexity
01:32:31
Speaker
I think that he had an uneasy relationship for a long time to songs and to performance. And he did speak in the final years of his life about how he had deliberately tried sometimes in the past not to be clear. And how with Purple Mountains, which what was he, 50, 51 when he recorded that album,
01:32:56
Speaker
that he, as an older man, a more mature man, had made an effort to try to be clearer. And I think that what you're seeing, the evolution of the song from a trap to a sanctuary, may reflect his own growing understanding of, no, it's okay to do this, it's okay to write these things in a coherent way.
01:33:25
Speaker
and that in turn is mirrored by the sometimes incomprehensible lyrics on Starlight Walker and the never incomprehensible lyrics on Purple Mountains. I'm with you. Let me just, because as you were speaking, it helped me make another connection and that maybe those two things, even though they are in absolute tension, do coexist because
01:33:53
Speaker
When songs build little rooms in time housed within the songs design is the ghost the host is left behind to greet and sweep the guests inside. David Berman the man is gone like he's no longer on this planet with us we can't speak with him but we he is in those songs.
01:34:14
Speaker
But he's also trapped in them and I do think that those two things can link up and there is a tension that's coexisting in that. You can have both the relief and the respite and the sanctuary that is at the same time the trap.
01:34:33
Speaker
And I find that to be, I mean, that to me might be the mark of what makes truly great art when you can get those kinds of seeming contradictions to sit alongside each other and in there sitting alongside each other reveals something that's deeply profound.
01:34:49
Speaker
I think that's beautifully said, man, and I think that's a perfect place to stop. New Orleans is not the end of the record. There are four more tracks on Starlight Walker. I don't think we're going to get into those. If you've made it with us this far, you probably know those songs. And if you don't, go check them out because they're cool. But I think for Starlight Walker, we're going to leave it there in the gray half light of the hallway at night.
01:35:17
Speaker
and we'll be back in two weeks. And at some point after that, we will be back to discuss the second Silver Jews album, 1996's The Natural Bridge. We will be doing that. We will be welcoming you into the kitchen to join us.
01:35:37
Speaker
into the kitchen of the candy jail. That's inside of a house in New Orleans, but not the one that you folks have heard about. But it's also kind of like when they go to jail in the godfather, but then they're just like in there, like making pasta and drinking wine. Yeah, is that the godfather or is that Goodfellas? You fucking up your... Am I fucking up my mom? Maybe I am.