Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
15. The Natural Bridge (Part 1)
57 Plays11 months ago
Part one of our deep dive into the 1996 Silver Jews album The Natural Bridge.
Silver Jews recorded on Drag City records.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Personal Reflections
00:00:00
Speaker
Well, this is the first sort of collaborative, creative enterprise I've ever engaged in that gave me a kind of pseudo sense of what it might sort of be like to be a Jewish mystic, to be a rabbi. Yeah, I should just point out that we're on Zencaster right now and your screen name is actually my monadies, so. Pain works on a sliding scale. Soda's pleasure in a candy jam.
00:00:31
Speaker
And secondly that I don't want to lose sight, Brendan, of the fact that we both just like this fucking album.
00:00:39
Speaker
And we're responding to it as music that we like, as opposed to a text to be parsed, like we might do at our alma mater. Well, I'm going to do some of that, but I don't want to forget or forget to at least mention that it's really not about that in the end, I think.
Podcast and Album Review Setup
00:01:01
Speaker
Hi, everybody. Welcome to Candy Jail. I'm Brendan. That's Robert. Last time when we recorded on Starlight Walker, the first Silver Jews record, we just sat down. We were in the same room with each other. If you noticed any weird audio stuff happening, that was why. And we just listened to the album in real time and talked about it. For the second record,
00:01:27
Speaker
natural bridge. We're gonna do something a little bit different. Robert has spent a lot of time researching, thinking about this record, and I know you have a lot to say about it, man. So I'm gonna let you take the lead on this one. And please, everybody, let us know what you think about how we're doing this. When we did
00:01:53
Speaker
Starlight Walker, we played every song in order, or at least we played excerpts of every song and then talked about it in a sort of informal off-the-cuff fashion. And now here we are for Natural Bridge, which I think we both agree is the stronger album.
00:02:11
Speaker
We're releasing this in three parts, we're cutting down the audio segments, or eliminating them all together in some cases, and we are taking a much more organized in-depth approach to each song. So by all means, please feel free to drop us a line.
00:02:30
Speaker
CandyJailPod at gmail.com. Let us know what's working for you and what's not working for you. And we will definitely take that into account when we get to the third Silver Juice album. And just to add a caveat to the feedback that we receive,
00:02:50
Speaker
We've discussed, Brendan and I, the reality that not all albums will be given equally systematic treatment. I think this one for both of us was an important one and one that was quite rich in whatever you want to call it, mineable content. Others might not be, but yeah, just to keep that in mind with whatever feedback we more than welcome.
Background on 'Natural Bridge' Album
00:03:20
Speaker
Natural Bridge is the second studio album by Silver Jews. In every component except for David Berman, this is a different band than the one that recorded Starlight Walker two years before. After a failed session with the guys from Pavement led him to storm out of the studio, Berman decamped to another recording space and recruited another band. And it's telling that the first sound we hear on the record is his voice. This is David Berman's record.
00:03:50
Speaker
Musically, it's both tighter and more country-inflected than the first record. It also sounds, to my ears at least, more self-assured. At just under 36 minutes, it's short by the standards of the 90s, when albums were planned to fit on CDs, but Berman's lyrics are so rich and strange that it contains a wealth of material to analyze, if you find yourself incarcerated in a candy jail.
00:04:17
Speaker
And let me just point out because I don't want to overlook giving anybody credit here because we may lose sight of this once we really get into it.
00:04:24
Speaker
This album was produced by Ryan Murphy of Drag City, and the band was Murphy, Matt Hunter, Peyton Pinkerton, and Michael Deming. And so I just wanted to acknowledge all the participants up front before we really get into it. Robert, you just put on your Purple Mountains hat, which I take it is a sign that the spirit is moving through you.
00:04:53
Speaker
It's been coursing through me before I even knew what my grandparents' faces looked like before they were born.
Spiritual and Lyrical Inspirations
00:05:01
Speaker
That was a botched attempt at a zen koan that's meant to, I guess, stimulate some thinking, or maybe not thinking.
00:05:10
Speaker
Did you notice my shirt, man? I have the hat, but do you notice the shirt? I can only see part of it. Is it the wild kind of wild kindness? OK, yeah. So this is a man that made this custom for I mean, they made a run of them, but it's images imagery from the wild kindness for dogs, a wildflower, a letter. It's very cool.
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, that is very cool. If you get on Etsy and want to get engaged in some good old fashioned capitalist consumption, but in the right direction, check that out. Just type in silver juice t-shirts and you'll find it.
00:05:52
Speaker
OK, so I think what makes sense, Brendan, is let's start with just the casual, like, what did you make of this song? We'll work our way through it. It's only 10 songs, one of which is the, I think it becomes the staple song without lyrics. So really, it's nine.
00:06:14
Speaker
And I'll then chime in with the exegesis, and we'll see how that feels. But let's just start right from track one, titled, How to Rent a Room. No, I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes. I'm still here alone. The chandelier where they always used to read us our eyes.
00:06:44
Speaker
I want to wander through the night as a figure in the distance even to my own eyes. Have you ever rented a room? Have you even ever rented a room? What was your impression of this song? General takeaways, favorite lines, anything you want to share?
00:07:13
Speaker
Well, let me say first of all, this album is just flat out better.
00:07:19
Speaker
than Starlight Walker, start to finish. I mentioned that I thought it sounded more assured. I don't think there are any weak tracks here, and the band is very... They're letting Berman take center stage, and they're doing exactly what they need to do to support his lyrics and support his melodies. This is not an album that has guitar solos or flashy instrumental breaks or anything like that, even though there is an instrumental, as you said.
00:07:49
Speaker
How to Rent a Room is, you know, the first line of the album is, I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes, which is immediately ambiguous. Does he mean
00:08:03
Speaker
He wants to die in your eyes in the sense that he wants to be dead to you, right? In other words, he wants you to stop thinking about him, to leave him alone. Or does he want to die in your eyes in some sort of more romantic, positive sense? And so it's typical Berman in that it's ambivalent from the beginning, but it's also
00:08:28
Speaker
immediately catchy. It's got a country kind of lilt to it. What I wrote in my notes here is that Berman sounds more confident here, but also less beholden to an indie rock slash pavement slash smartasses in a dorm room aesthetic. And then of course the chorus is, or there's sort of a chorus to this song, have you ever even rented a room?
00:08:56
Speaker
And what does that mean? Who is it being addressed to, right? Right. Yeah. So let's get into it, man. What have you got for me? So yeah, I was also taken by, I think, what you accurately put as, I think, a finished work of art.
00:09:19
Speaker
I think as you also put it, there isn't a track that's a dud. There might be a couple that have, you know, gun to head. I were forced to say, like, remove this one. I might have one or two. But they don't mar the other excellent songs. So in that regard, I'd say they're left in for good reason.
00:09:40
Speaker
Um, and, um, as classic, uh, in classic Berman form, the opening line is great. You know, the same way that, uh, uh, in 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection. When God was young, he made the wind and the sun. And since then it's been a slow education and on and on. I mean, they're just all so fucking rich. I, before you get into actually, I do have one other thought that I, I don't know, I don't know where it's where to put it. So I'm going to put it here.
00:10:09
Speaker
And when Purple Mountains came out in 2019, I thought that record sounded like a suicide note. And I thought that before it transpired that, you know, that Berman did in fact take his own life. Listening to this album now
00:10:33
Speaker
I hear traces of that. Definitely. And I think it's a lot easier to hear those traces after the fact. Now that we know how his story concluded, there's certainly no credit to be had in going back.
00:10:50
Speaker
and finding that, but I do think
Balancing Personal and Artistic Analysis
00:10:53
Speaker
it's there. The more I listen to this record, the more I heard that. And so when he says, no, I don't really want to die, there's a part of me that thinks he's telling himself that because he does really want to die and he's trying to work his way out of that feeling.
00:11:12
Speaker
And let's actually pause for a second and add a little bit of a, what do you want to call it? A footnote, an asterisk, a disclaimer. Like it's a fine line, right? We're both of the mindset, right? Of the temperament for whatever reason. We don't need to psychoanalyze it. That wants to know the artists in addition to the arts. And I see, and we've discussed, right? At least in sort of glossing over the question of
00:11:42
Speaker
Whether that's a good idea, certainly I think we both voiced respect for people who choose not to and just want to take the art on its own terms and not try to factor in sort of the biographical historical background of the artist themselves. I think both of us are inclined to do that and I think that that's fine, but
00:12:03
Speaker
I hope that it goes without saying, but maybe we will reiterate at times when it gets potentially tender that these are comments made with the utmost respect to a person that was struggling and it is speculation. But nonetheless, I think with the amount of time I've spent listening to this album over and again,
00:12:24
Speaker
and your time now with Berman's work, I hope that we can make these kinds of conjectures, but know that it's coming from a place of deep respect.
00:12:35
Speaker
Yeah and we're not gonna, people so often go to one extreme on the other or the other with stuff like this like either there's the death of the author on the one hand and you don't factor the artist in at all or you get maybe a la Taylor Swift people get way too hung up on the details of the artist's life and neither one of those things is
00:13:01
Speaker
really the right way, I think, to analyze creation. And when you're dealing with certain salient facts about someone who created something, you have to take those facts into account sometimes. And so we're going to do our best to not go too far in either direction. Spoken like a true Zen Buddhist, that's precisely the Zen or generally the Buddhist mentality of the middle way, right? We're going to avoid extremes.
00:13:30
Speaker
So this is the first time, man, that I've ever engaged in what I will call a forensic analysis of an album, like essentially going line by line and squeezing as much as I can out of each line and trying to understand it on that level.
00:13:46
Speaker
So one, this was a new and new experience for me. And two, I really started to come into it by the second track. This first one is a little more loosely explored, and then I get more systematic with how I break down songs. So on that note,
00:14:05
Speaker
You mentioned the opening line, no, I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes. And my dear friend Joey, who's the person who turned me on to Silver Jews, made the astute observation that the opening line to Purple Mountains is, well, I don't like talking to myself.
00:14:26
Speaker
Not exact, not identical, but they're clearly in conversation with each other. So I think in the same way that you sort of were able to intuit traces of Purple Mountains themes,
00:14:41
Speaker
or preoccupations in his second official album, Joey was seeing, okay, it's not just that there's traces. I do think Berman at times is intentionally putting his catalog in conversation. And this is an instance of that. If you listen to the opening line of Purple Mountains, it'll echo this one.
00:15:02
Speaker
Then he says later in the song, because again, I'm going to basically forward the thesis, or no, not the thesis, the possibility that there is in fact a coherent narrative unfolding in this album. But in, as you've put it, classic Berman-esque fashion, it's elusive.
00:15:23
Speaker
It's elliptical and you kind of have to treat it like a detective story rather than a straightforward, this happened, then that happened, then that happened, if that makes sense. Yeah, you know, if you listen to this album or if you bring this album up in Apple Music,
00:15:41
Speaker
not Spotify, Apple Music specifically, there is a blurb about it. And whoever wrote that blurb seems to think that the album is about a road trip. And I've read a lot of those Apple Music blurbs. Well, in fact, whenever I'm listening to an album that has the blurb, I will read it. And I don't want to be overly harsh because many years ago I had a job where I wrote blurbs like that.
00:16:06
Speaker
And it's very hard to write an intelligent paragraph to three paragraphs about a record. And I probably wrote some dumbass stuff back in the day. But anyway, I don't want to ask you to spoil your sense of cohesion, but are you going to tell us that this album is about a road trip?
00:16:28
Speaker
No, but I like that interpretation and now I'm interested in reading that blurb because I could see that. I could see an argument for that, but that's not the narrative that I gleaned. No, it's not the narrative that I gleaned either. Yeah, okay. Oh, and by the way,
00:16:48
Speaker
Where is the natural bridge?
Imagery and Narrative Exploration
00:16:50
Speaker
Because that is a reference to an actual monument, a natural monument in the United States. Do you know? Well, the one that Berman was thinking of is somewhere in Virginia, Southwestern Virginia. I think there are a lot of things around North America or the world called the natural bridge, but he apparently was struck by the idea when he was
00:17:14
Speaker
in a gift shop for the Natural Bridge that's in Virginia and said that he was in the same way that he wanted to have a band called Traditional Arrangement, which is very funny. He thought, well, if I call the album Natural Bridge, then everything will be, all these postcards and t-shirts will be promotions for my album.
00:17:34
Speaker
For free. Yeah, as often with Berman, I suspect that there is some truth in that, but that he's perhaps not telling us the entire story, but he was specifically thinking of the natural bridge in Virginia.
00:17:48
Speaker
It's funny, right? Like in the same way that Jason Molina has truth cycles, which is more like stretching the truth beyond all manner of believability. What's his oblique-licals? I like that oblique-licals, yeah. It's funny, right?
00:18:08
Speaker
Okay, I don't know, I had a thought as to why I wanted to bring that up, but anyway, I'm glad we established at the very least, it's tied to a particular natural bridge found in Virginia. So he has later on in this song, the lines that go, should have checked the stable door for the name of the siren dam.
00:18:26
Speaker
And this does, and I don't want to do too much foreshadowing, but it does link up with the line from Pretty Eyes, the final song of the album, which goes, meanwhile, back home at the ranch, I still get up early in the morning, as well as on the track. I should have done this in a different order because Alber Marle Station shows up before Pretty Eyes. But on that track, he sings, we used to dance at the split level ranch moonlight flooding the room.
00:18:54
Speaker
So there's a recurring image of stable doors, a split level ranch, back home at the ranch. All of these references make it seem to me, at least it's hinting at the possibility of a narrative clue. And it's being dropped throughout the album, and whether in truth this is a sort of narrative presented in the form of a puzzle to be solved,
00:19:16
Speaker
Or maybe that it just creates the impression that there is. Um, if you only have the eyes, wink, wink to see it or solve it, you can, I don't know. Right. Let's the verdict is out. Um, but okay. So just to, I'm basically saying like, let's keep an eye on references to things like ranches and also things that get referenced repeatedly throughout the album.
00:19:42
Speaker
So he also backed the opening line. No, I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes. Two things. Obviously death is ever present in this album. And certainly across, we're going to say, I'm going to use the acronym DCB, right? David Cloud Berman. So across DCP's and DCB's entire catalog.
00:20:05
Speaker
But to linger a little longer on the significance of the opening line and pointing to its potential meanings, and I'm putting that in plural, he plants a seed or to use movie terminology, does some album foreshadowing by immediately drawing the listener's attention to eyes. Did you notice that, man? Actually, no, but you're absolutely correct. Arguably, I'm going to say eyes are the central recurring image of the album.
00:20:34
Speaker
And it's no mistake, of course, that the last song is called Pretty Eyes. But I also think it's no mistake that he's drawing from a rich lineage of literary antecedents in which eyes are both literally and metaphorically of great significance. So we both were educated in the Western classics, the Western European classics. I'm thinking of the famous examples, ancient Greek tragedy and playwrights Sophocles with Oedipus Rex.
00:21:01
Speaker
We've got where eyes are more specifically sight and blindness are at the center of that play as well as Shakespeare's King Lear where eyes and again the exploration of sight and blindness are at the center of that play as well and so knowing DCB's background right as a poet trained and surely read a lot of those books
00:21:23
Speaker
I think he must have known and consciously acted upon the fact that he was engaging in a time honored literary tradition to use eyes and all that connects with it, sight and blindness as a central image in this album. Do you want to just like add to that? Do you agree, disagree? Yeah, of course. I mean, it's not just Western
00:21:46
Speaker
It's not just the Western canon and Oedipus Rex and Thereseus and all that kind of thing. It's a worldwide thing. Obviously, eyes are primally important to us. But the obvious fact that the very first line of the album references eyes and the very last song in the album is named after eyes, and in fact, the last line of the album references eyes, I had not noticed that. And I'm kind of gobsmacked that I missed that.
00:22:16
Speaker
Hell yeah, a little bit of silver juicy and gobsmacking fucking knockout punch or something. I don't know. Anyway, God, that's nerdy. Okay, moving on, unless you wanna add to that.
00:22:30
Speaker
No, go ahead. Okay. So again, the line hinting at a kind of elusive narrative that might be pieced together detective style by kinds of forensic album analysis. Or the question is, is this just a fantastic opening line or both? It could be both.
00:22:46
Speaker
Because he says, I don't really want to die, but then later in this song, in How to Rent a Room, he sings chalk lines around my body, like the shoreline of a lake, which could indicate that the presumed main character of the album has in fact literally died in the opening track.
00:23:06
Speaker
If that is the case, are we detective listeners trying to solve a murder mystery of sorts? If so, would this qualify as a legitimate concept album? We'll have to keep taking this out to see where we land with these questions. But did you notice that? There is a character that in theory is dead in this song.
00:23:28
Speaker
So the way that I read that, and I'm not saying that my interpretation is correct, the way that I read it is an acknowledgement of just the fact that we're all going to die. Like, if you encounter a certain kind of person in a certain kind of mood, you know, they will point out to you that we are all actively dying all the time. Every day you live, you are one step closer to being dead. That's so depressing, bro.
00:23:57
Speaker
on our podcast saying something depressing actually that's actually like uplifting compared to what we usually say i know i thought i thought i was being like perky over here pardon me pardon me i but i saw it as an acknowledgement that
00:24:11
Speaker
like a corpse with chalk lines drawn around it at a murder scene, we are all bound by our death, right?
Thematic and Metaphorical Analysis
00:24:22
Speaker
And so I saw it as an acknowledgement of just the limitations of mortality, a really, really elegant metaphor for the limitations of mortality. But I'm also totally open to your suggestion that we're dealing with somebody who is in fact already dead.
00:24:37
Speaker
Okay, good. So I like where you took it and how you understood it. Let's keep those two ideas sort of floating as we move forward. So I also want to add that the song at first glance seems like, right? I think it could be seen as a kind of breakup song, which actually would have another Purple Mountains resonance.
00:24:57
Speaker
Is DCB singing to an imagined ex-lover? Or is he singing to someone else? If you listen closely, I don't know if you noticed, man, you'll notice there's no gendering of the person who the song is presumably directed towards. So I actually have another theory. He says in one of the lines, quote, of how to rent a room. Anchor lets you see the river move now that your evil dreams came true. And he sings,
00:25:25
Speaker
you see your curtains move in the wind, you can bet I'm betting against you again. The anchor line is in reference to a boat, obviously. I'm actually imagining a yacht since he sings now that your evil dreams came true. I'm thinking of someone who's made a lot of money in a less than reputable way. So the second line is analogous to sticking in a way like pins in a doll, right, to hurt one's enemy. It's actually threatening
00:25:54
Speaker
It's intended to cause mental disquiet. Quote, you see your curtain move in the wind, you can bet I'm betting against you again. So there's a supernatural quality to this, right?
00:26:06
Speaker
Do you? Well, yeah, there is. And I that's actually one of the things I made a note about was the supernatural aspect of some of this stuff. Do you think this song is about his dad? Yes, that is where I was. Maybe I was like leading too much. But yes, I'm forwarding the argument that this is actually a song about his dad. That totally tracks for me, actually, based on the way that you framed things. I'm totally willing to entertain that.
00:26:32
Speaker
Okay. So let's keep that very much in our brains. Like if in a way the opening song, which at first glance looks like it's addressed to a lover might in fact be addressed to his father. I want that to be a potential red thread that can be tracked through the whole album potentially. Okay. Any final comments with how to rent a room?
00:26:58
Speaker
Is this the one that Lana Del Rey posted a picture of herself listening to? That it is. Bless that woman. Neither here nor there, I was just, I couldn't remember if I was remembering that accurately or not. Yes, it is. You were. Well, some point we'll get her on here and she can tell us her interpretation. You know, I'm really busy, so if you can have her just leave a message with our agent, we got shit to do, right? He might fit her in. She keeps calling, but I'll
00:27:28
Speaker
Get back to her when I have time.
00:27:30
Speaker
She's just in my phone as Lizzie. Anyway. Anyway. She only calls me in the summer when she's sad, which pisses me off. I hate those sort of friends that only show up when they're in a bad, bad way. And then she comes over to your house and she keeps blackening the pages of all your poetry books with your notes. Yeah, exactly. And just like constantly singing about Sylvia Plath. I don't get it. Okay. If we keep doing these riffs, this is going to be like an eight hour episode. You're right. I can't help it. Okay.
00:28:21
Speaker
guard my bed while the rain turns it ditches to mirrors by a vase of carnations from central Ohio where the looking machine can't hear us
00:28:40
Speaker
Deep in the night, we dream of positions. There's a line for the phone. Pet politics, what were your thoughts? I don't know what this song is about. Obviously, the title is a pun. Berman is inordinately fond of puns, double meanings, exploring homophones. Actually, when we talked about Starlight Walker, I criticized him for his tide, tide thing and tide to the oceans. But obviously,
00:29:11
Speaker
Pet politics is a phrase that you can use to refer to someone who has an issue that they come back to again and again and again. This is their pet issue, but the song makes actual references to an actual pet. So then it becomes not pet in a metaphorical sense, but pet in a literal sense. And so I'm interested in what your thoughts are about what the connection between those two different meanings of the phrase is.
00:29:40
Speaker
Yeah. So, it opens with the line, guard my bed while the rain turns the ditches to mirrors. Amazing line. Beautiful. And I just, I wrote, like, is this a request being made of a person or a pet? Sounds plausible to me that this is being requested of a pet. And to my mind, I think of a dog since I know Berman was fond of dogs and had dogs in his life. But
00:30:07
Speaker
We can imagine, right? It's an easy image to see a dog guarding our beds. And then he follows that with, or further on in the song, and in the cold places where Spanish has spoken, most wars end in the fall. And it seems to me another elusive reference to first and foremost history, but perhaps to specific historical events. Can you think of wars that he's potentially referencing? I'm just curious. In the cold places where Spanish is spoken,
00:30:37
Speaker
is that a reference to the Falkland Islands and Argentina, for instance? It's one of those Burman phrases that's when you start thinking about it, how many of the places in the world where Spanish is spoken, of which there are many, are in relatively temperate climates, right? But I'm not sure
00:31:02
Speaker
what specifically he was getting at simply if you if you say to me in the cold places where spanish is spoken and then you bring up war at the same time the first thing that will come to my mind is argentine in the falcon islands but i have no reason to suspect that that's specifically what he was getting out.
00:31:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that it certainly doesn't have much bearing on this narrative thread that we're potentially tracking, but knowing he's a history buff and was going into those archives at University of Virginia to handle the papers of Kermit, Roosevelt, et cetera, I'm sure it is tied to something specific in his mind. So the narrative continues to unfold and you bring up like there's the pet that's
00:31:47
Speaker
sort of as an image being played with on both a metaphorical and a literal level. And at one point we find out a woman is crying because her pet has died, right? She's also got a tattoo of a boarded up house on her sleeve.
00:32:05
Speaker
And he writes sort of as he's mapping out or like painting this picture of a woman grieving her pet with this tattoo on her arm, which I want to get back to in a later song. He sings, when the rain hits you, it hits you slow, stitch after stitch, stitch after stitch, and so on and so on. He says that a few times. Layer upon layer of potential meanings and interpretations, right? And here's, I'm just like going to play with this to show like how
00:32:34
Speaker
rich this stuff is. The rain in my mind could be literal, and he's getting creative in his poetic expression of getting hit by rain and the rain being tied to the image of stitches. Somewhat similar in this regard to his originally coined, and I would say brilliant, icy bike chain reign of Portland, Oregon in All My Happiness is Gone off of Purple Mountains. It could also be read as a reference to the tattoo seen on the woman's arm.
00:33:03
Speaker
the stitches being the ink stitches of rain as part of the actual landscape of the tattoo. And finally, and I think this is my favorite read of the line, it could be understood as the woman's tears being the rain that hits you or her slow stitch after stitch onto her own body as the tears come pouring out of her while she's grieving the loss of her recently deceased pet.
00:33:31
Speaker
How do you feel about that sort of multi-layered, multi-take view of that single line? I think that Berman had made associations between inclement weather and slowness. Snow is falling in Manhattan in a
00:33:53
Speaker
What is it, slow and stately fashion? Diagonal. Thank you. My brain always wants to change that to something slightly less good, and I don't know why. Rain and snow in his lyrics seem to be associated with slowness, like a kind of gradual realization.
00:34:14
Speaker
I too was struck by the idea of rain with the idea of stitches. It's a little bit of a stretch to me to see stitches being metaphorical for any part of the act of rain falling or being rained upon. I think it's definitely
00:34:37
Speaker
evoking something else there. And because he lingers on it, it's the end of the line. The closest thing the song has to a chorus is that repeated phrase at the end of each of the verses. And so he says stitch after stitch four times. And I think when it's given that kind of prominence, you have to assume that it probably has multiple layers of meaning or association with it.
00:35:04
Speaker
I mean, I miss the most obvious, right? Which is stitches come or go with a wound, right? You get stitches when your lip busts open or you cut your hand. Well, wounds are often associated most psychically, emotionally with grief. And so stitch after stitch could be the sort of stitches being applied to the wound of the loss of a loved one or a pet. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, for that matter, you know,
00:35:32
Speaker
back when we still used shrouds for dead bodies, you stitched up a shroud. Personally, I think that's a bit too much of a stretch. And that's always a danger with stuff like this is once you open yourself to the associations, once you are a version of David Lynch setting out upon the infinite sea of the subconscious looking for associations,
00:35:58
Speaker
It's easy both as a creator and as an audience member to mistake a very subjective personal association with a more universally meaningful association. Good point, good point. And I think that's where some artistic analysis just runs aground. Yeah, that's fair, that's fair. But nonetheless, right, we both
00:36:24
Speaker
snapped to the fact that this was repeated four times. And there was something about it that I think caught our inner ears, eyes, so to speak, right? Something we your antenna goes up a little
00:36:35
Speaker
Right. Okay. Now, this next stanza man, arguably, I might argue is the most densely packed stanza of the whole album in some regards. It's this sort of biblical, re-envisioning parable of Adam not being the first man. So before I subject you to my hyper analysis, what did you make of it? How are you understanding this?
00:37:00
Speaker
You know, the very first time I ever heard this song, that was the line that jumped out at me. Let me just bring up the lyrics here. Adam was not the first man, though the Bible tells us so. There was one created before him whose name we do not know. He also lived in the garden, but he had no mouth or eyes.
00:37:24
Speaker
one day Adam came to kill him and he died beneath these skies and the first time I heard this that first quatrain Adam was not the first man that the Bible tells us so there was one created before in his name we do not know I sat up
00:37:40
Speaker
I heard that, and I was like, all right, this is going to go somewhere really, really interesting. Where is he going to go with this? And it's evoking this air of mystery and sort of Talmudic obscurity. I'm thinking now about the tradition according to which Lilith was actually the first woman in the garden as opposed to Eve. But then where he goes with it in the second four verses is just a totally different direction, and it's
00:38:08
Speaker
You're waiting for, a lot of times with Berman, you're waiting for the sort of punchline, right? Whether the funny punchline or the incredibly insightful turn that brings it all together. But here, he also lived in the garden. Okay, well that's not really giving us any new information. But he had no mouth or eyes. Okay.
00:38:34
Speaker
I don't know what to do with that. It's creepy as fuck. I don't know what to do with it. It makes me think of a little bit of a golem if we're staying with Jewish mythology here. One day Adam came to kill him because he was a threat. Doesn't get answered, right?
00:38:53
Speaker
Yeah, was it a mercy killing? Is Adam the villain here? And he died beneath these skies, which skies? So I've lingered a lot over that verse, and I don't know what to do with it.
Jewish Mysticism and Biblical Narratives
00:39:10
Speaker
So give me a nudge here, man. Okay, so Gersham Sholem.
00:39:16
Speaker
Still, so far as I know, is the scholar when it comes to Jewish mysticism. He's since been dead for a while, but he was also Walter Benjamin's best friend. Sholem emigrated to Palestine, I think in 1926, before the Nazis fully locked down Germany and thus survived the war. Benjamin tragically didn't. He never left, of course.
00:39:42
Speaker
He was intimidatingly, this is Sholam, prolific and erudite. So years back, I read one of his books, one of his many books. This one was called On the Kabbalah and Its Origins. And it's a 240-page book that is so fucking dense, man. It felt like I was reading 1,000 pages. It was intense. I misunderstood so much that I understood how fucking deep this shit goes.
00:40:11
Speaker
So in it, Sholem writes about various kabbalistic practices, one of which, to your point, involved the mystical ritual of creating a kind of almost human being without sexual intercourse. And that kind of almost human being in Jewish mysticism is known as the golem, as you brought up. So I'm making the case that this section of the song is a kind of reimagining of the Old Testament.
00:40:38
Speaker
where God creating the Gollum precedes God creating Adam.
00:40:43
Speaker
Let's return to the opening line in the stanza. Adam was not the first man, though the Bible tells us so. I never thought, Brendan, I'd ever reference an actual line from Genesis, but here it goes. Genesis 2.7, okay? The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. God then called the man Adam and later created Eve from Adam's rib.
00:41:14
Speaker
If I'm remembering correctly because I was too lazy to dig this out of Sholem's densely packed book, this is actually more or less understood as God creating a golem, but a golem with just that extra dash of spice that transforms it finally into a human being. The mystics alternatively could not actually create a human being through ritual practice, right? They're barred from that.
00:41:40
Speaker
but they can create an almost human, or in other words, they're able to make a golem. Anyway, to all those Jewish mystics out there who are screaming at me through their speakers right now for my ineptitude and ignorance, please have mercy on my soul.
00:41:56
Speaker
So to get back to the song, I think we can speculate upon this in terms of the significance of the line in the album. You have a claim that Adam was not made first, even though the Bible tells us so. So first off, DCB is making a bold counterclaim about mankind's origins.
00:42:20
Speaker
But perhaps more provocatively, he's implicitly claiming that the Bible, for whatever reason, has presented a false narrative regarding humankind's origins, which to keep things in religious and mystical terms would count as a heretical statement. A lot of Jewish mystics were literally either driven out of their communities or even killed for these kinds of interpretations.
00:42:44
Speaker
Well, what are religious mystics in any tradition, if not heretics? Was Jesus Christ himself, if not to reference DCB's fittingly funny penultimate song to Starlight Walker, a rebel Jew?
00:42:58
Speaker
DCB goes on to sing, there was one created before him whose name we do not know. This also implies that whoever this man before Adam was, he most certainly has a name, but it's a name that has not been based on the song's narrative logic shared with us. The only one presumably who knows the man before Adam's name is God himself.
00:43:24
Speaker
which means there must be some reason that God himself does not want us to know the man before Adam's name. Why would God not want to share his name with us? So in the Jewish mystical tradition, Brendan, and again, I'm speaking from the non-authoritative and therefore, in this case, deeply stupid place of an outsider dilettante, their whole thing, man, in many regards is textual exegesis.
00:43:52
Speaker
In other words, commentary. It's a central activity and a downright religious prerogative of Jewish mystics. And from what I've read, the commentary that mystics provide serves to ultimately illuminate the text and drill down deeper and deeper into its ultimate meaning and that this process goes on ad infinitum.
00:44:13
Speaker
In other words, the exegetical analysis is not an option, it's a requirement, and not just an arbitrary requirement, but rather the only means by which to peel back the layers of the text in an infinite approach towards ultimate meaning.
00:44:29
Speaker
So Sholem made clear that according to the mystical tradition, the religious texts as they presently exist are what humans in their present state of spiritual development are able to comprehend. But that through continuous and unbroken exegesis, the text itself will undergo transformation so profound that those engaging in exegesis in a thousand years from now will be reading, in quotes, a completely different text
00:44:57
Speaker
than the one we're reading today based on the relative level of our spiritual development. So why bring all of this seemingly unrelated tangential stuff up? Because I'm not so sure it's unrelated and tangential.
00:45:10
Speaker
DCB had an existential spiritual crisis that compelled him to engage intensely with the Jewish faith. The name of the band is on the one hand playful and funny, but on the other hand, and as much as DCB himself came to relate to the band's name as somewhat of a burden, is also not a joke.
00:45:29
Speaker
I think we must not discount how seriously DCB's Jewish faith was to him, and therefore, I think it's arguably more correct to read the band name as both playful and funny as well as serious and in earnest. By extension and seen through the filter of the serious side of the band name,
00:45:48
Speaker
Berman himself is signaling his own participation as one in a long line of Jewish commentators engaging in a kind of biblical exegesis, both as a spiritual prerogative as well as the only means by which to illuminate this text. Finally, he seems to be tying himself to the Jewish mystical tradition by not only engaging in a kind of exegesis, but in calling into question the biblical narrative itself.
00:46:15
Speaker
which would, by extension, put him in the mystical camp, thus making Berman himself, at least in the eyes of the orthodoxy, a heretic. Let me just end this, man, and then I promise I'm done with this part of it.
00:46:28
Speaker
He still goes further when he sings, as you repeated. He also lived in the garden, but he had no mouth or eyes. One day Adam came to kill him and he died beneath these skies. For one, if the man before Adam had no mouth or eyes, oh yeah, eyes again.
00:46:45
Speaker
Are we to understand this as a golem that God never finished? DCB refers to him implicitly as a man based on the line's construction. Adam was not the first man, though the Bible tells us so. Based on this, it seems safe to assume this man before Adam was in fact definitely a man, or in other words, a human being.
00:47:10
Speaker
One day Adam came to kill him and he died beneath these skies. We get no background information regarding the reasons why Adam came to kill this man with no eyes to your point.
00:47:21
Speaker
However, I think it says somewhere in the Bible that murdering people is not a cool thing to do. In fact, if I'm remembering correctly, I think the Bible states that murdering people is a very bad thing to do, or, to use a more technical term, a sin. Therefore, Adam commits the sin of murder while in the Garden of Eden. This is a revision of the Garden of Eden narrative, therefore placing original sin not on Eve's shoulders,
00:47:48
Speaker
with the whole eating the apple from the tree of knowledge, even though she knew they weren't supposed to stuff, and on to Adams. Without having engaged in a close reading of the Old Testament, I know enough by simply having grown up in a culture with deep Judeo-Christian roots that this radically revises the biblical narrative in such a way that it would have profound ramifications for the entire biblical text.
00:48:15
Speaker
In essence, by revising this one detail, one in turn is forced to revise and re-envision the entire Old Testament.
00:48:24
Speaker
Furthermore, and I do think that there's quite possibly a self-conscious feminist undercurrent in this re-envisioning, that original sin is the fault of Adam and by extension men as opposed to original sin being the fault of Eve and by extension women because knowing DCB's bottomless love and affection for his mother
00:48:46
Speaker
I love being my mother's son, right? And conversely, his seemingly bottomless contempt and hatred for his father. It makes sense at the micro individual subjective level why Berman would engage in an original sin revision such as this, where the guilty party is reversed from the woman Eve mother to the man Adam father. What do you think? I don't disagree with you.
00:49:15
Speaker
I'm not going to go as far as to say you've persuaded me, but that's partially because this is the first time I'm hearing that argument and I just haven't had any time to think about it. I'm open to the idea definitely that this is shifting the blame in the Garden of Eden story onto the man's shoulders and that that can be tied back to Berman's own family.
00:49:46
Speaker
I'm open to that idea. I think that as you pointed out the exegetical possibilities of
00:49:58
Speaker
anything are practically infinite, but certainly Jewish scripture, right? And certainly Jewish scripture when seen through certain Jewish traditions, right? That there is just this endless possibility for analysis and reanalysis and
00:50:17
Speaker
that Berman in his writing, he is often preoccupied with the idea that God is withholding information from us. What I'd give for an hour with the power on the throne. 50 Gates of Understanding, 49 are closed. The idea that there is a God out there and that God has a purpose and that God has information.
00:50:45
Speaker
and that God is either deliberately withholding the information from us or he has given us the information, but we're too stupid to figure it out ourselves. And clearly, first of all, that is present to a certain degree in this song. Secondly, it means that anything can be understood in any way.
00:51:09
Speaker
That's sort of the essence, speaking as an atheist who is raised deeply Christian, but now looks at religion from outside. I look at all religions from outside, right? I would say that's one of the big problems with religious texts is that because they are actually written by people and they are not divinely inspired, they are deeply contradictory and they do not actually possess very much explanatory power at all.
00:51:36
Speaker
but our need for explanation is so great and our desire to believe in these texts is so great that we will literally spend lifetimes trying to reconcile unreconcilable contradictions in these texts because we think
00:51:52
Speaker
they all come from one divine author and they contain truth, so therefore we have to twist and twist and twist and dig and dig and dig until we find a way to make these things fit together. And that's a really dangerous path, I think, to go down when it comes to trying to find the truth about the universe, right? But I think that Berman really did want to find truth in these traditions and truth in these texts. But like you pointed out, he's not afraid of
00:52:18
Speaker
saying heretical things. He's not afraid of rewriting the narrative or creating his own version of the narrative. All of that is a long-winded way of saying, if you apply the techniques of Jewish mysticism to David Berman's song lyrics, there's no end to the amount of analysis and speculation that might be possible. But it also means that multiple things are happening at the same time, probably.
00:52:48
Speaker
in his writing. And so I think the idea that he is evoking Jewish tradition on the one hand, maybe even self-consciously referencing somebody like Gersham Sholem, right? On the one hand, but he's also writing in a much more literal and direct way about his own family, I am totally open to that.
00:53:14
Speaker
And I also think you used a construction that might be the perfect one, which is reconciling the irreconcilable. I think that some of the biggest questions that we grapple with, right, are those kinds of questions or questions that are inflected with the
00:53:35
Speaker
impossible seeming tension of reconciling the irreconcilable, whether we're looking at war, whether we're looking at human exploitation, um, whether we're looking at fights for human rights, but also I think, uh, at the, at the, uh, micro level, right? Family, inner family. How do you reconcile the irreconcilable differences between father and son?
00:54:02
Speaker
I think that that's there. I think it's there. And until you brought it up, I wasn't reading much of this album as being about his family, but there is the line, I'm a man who has a wife, who has a mother, who married one, but she loved another. And that's not Berman speaking literally about himself on some level. As far as I know, he was not married at the time of this album. He did not have a wife.
00:54:25
Speaker
He certainly had a mother, and I did wonder if there was a suggestion there that his mother had actually loved another man when she married his father. I don't know, but seems relevant now to this conversation. I think back to the album's title. I don't have a clear view of it yet completely, but bridges are very potent symbols.
00:54:49
Speaker
They're supposed to bridge a gap between one place and another, or perhaps produce a bridge between the reconcilable and the irreconcilable. I think that that's not to be totally discounted. There's more going on with that title than we think. Back to pet politics with the time we have left. He sings, I find it so amazing how I go where I'm led.
00:55:19
Speaker
And he then repeats that four times. I think that this plays with the narrow narration or perspective in such a way that we're not quite sure back to your point who the I is in this statement. Is it an unnamed human narrator or actually is it a pet.
00:55:37
Speaker
I go where I'm led is certainly what our most loyal non-human friends happily do for us from time to time. Or could it be a reference back to your point with pet politics, the human proclivity to follow perhaps uncritically where a leader tells us to go? I think it's left ambiguous, but I'm curious how you feel about the perspective at this point. Well, but now that you've got me thinking about it in this way, I'm wondering if it's again,
00:56:07
Speaker
in part a reference to his father and his father's politics. And there are people, and I think arguably his father is one of these people, who treat politics as nothing more than a utilitarian tool in the same way that some people treat pets that way. I have a dog for purely practical purposes. I have a hunting dog or
00:56:29
Speaker
I have an animal that does work for me and that's all there is to it. Some people who are particularly shallow, manipulative, amoral, whatever, see politics the same way, that it's simply a game, it's simply a tool to an end. Expediency. Yeah, expediency, and I can imagine, and again, this is pure speculation. I never met David Berman, I've never met his father, but I can imagine them having a conversation
00:56:56
Speaker
where his father is trying to defend his actions based on that kind of principle of expediency, right? And treating politics as nothing more than a sort of a service animal, as it were, in the pursuit of wealth or power or whatever.
00:57:14
Speaker
I think that's an astute observation or a good way of tying it to the previous theories, right? That we floated out. So then he ends, right? And he's good at this, both with album endings, starts and ends, but also with certain songs that start and end in a bookend fashion. So his final line in this is, I suspect we could be losing now. Please guard my bed.
00:57:40
Speaker
And then he repeats that four times, which of course is the book end of Guard My Bed is the opening line to this song. But I'm just curious, like, how do you understand this line? Is it tied to something theological, spiritual? Is it potentially referencing something else? What does it mean to be losing now? Is it losing now or is it losing out? I suspect we could be
00:58:12
Speaker
no you're right you're right um i'll edit that out um no problem so what do you make of like i suspect we could be losing now please guard my bed it just seems like back to the um
00:58:26
Speaker
man before Adam, like explicitly theological stanza. I feel like now and time and all this stuff I can't help but associate it back to where I hear a sort of theological inflection in that, but I don't know if even if that's true what it's pointing to. What's your take? Does it strike you as a quasi-religious statement or
00:58:52
Speaker
I mean, everything Berman says. This is not good. This is not a good take. This is not good content. But I don't know what that line means. It is a song that is a deeply frustrated song.
00:59:11
Speaker
So within that very broad context of being deeply frustrated, for him to say, I suspect we could be losing now makes perfect sense. But I couldn't even tell you if he means literally in the moment we are losing or if he means we are losing the concept of now. I don't think it's the latter, but I couldn't tell you that it's not.
00:59:36
Speaker
So there's only one thing I can say about now that we're talking about it explicitly, and while Sholem is fresh on the mind with Jewish mysticism and Benjamin, yada, yada, Benjamin became completely obsessed via his exposure to this stuff through Sholem, the notion of the messianic return.
00:59:58
Speaker
Are you aware of? Because I think that that can actually cut across both Jewish and Christian worldviews. But do you know about the Messianic return? I do. So the way that Benjamin frames it from a Jewish mystical standpoint is every moment is the straight gate, S-T-R-A-I-T, as in the opening. It's a potential opening by which the Messiah can return.
01:00:27
Speaker
And that means that every moment in a way is pregnant with the potential for that to happen. And in the Jewish mystical conception of that, from what I know as a dilettante, that's actually when history, like real history begins.
01:00:44
Speaker
All of this other crap is the prehistory, the nonhistory, the yet to be because of our idiotic ways of organizing ourselves. But once the return occurs, that's when all that has been smashed has made whole again.
01:01:01
Speaker
So I don't know. I think it's possible that he's playing with now in the messianic Jewish mystical sense of like any moment is pregnant with the potential for the Messiah to come back and make whole what has been smashed. That's interesting, man.
01:01:25
Speaker
I'm totally open to that interpretation. Messiah is one of those words where I think the meaning of that word has changed a lot over the last 2000 years and there are different meanings to it. But without getting into any of those potential meanings, just the idea that the messianic return represents a
01:01:50
Speaker
making whole what had been broken or the resumption of the story, the elimination of confusion and the resumption of the story in a way that makes all this shit make sense. Yeah, I'm totally with you on that.
01:02:08
Speaker
What's also interesting in terms of bringing in some leftist secularization of the messianic return, keeping in mind that Benjamin himself was certainly on the left. These things can coexist, but I think that Marx did in some way make clear, and certainly many socialists and communists after him in the Marxian tradition,
01:02:30
Speaker
I think were, I mean, some of them actually went the determinist route, right? Which is, no, I mean, Marx spelled out the inherent contradictions of capitalism. If we take a macro view that the social economic formation itself at a systemic level will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, and we need not do anything, right? That'll just happen. And that was offset by some pretty hardcore folks that thought otherwise, like Rosa Luxemburg and
01:03:00
Speaker
You know, some, we could come up with a laundry list of names. I know you fucking morons. Like it doesn't mean we get to chill in the waiting room while capitalism or whatever you want to call it, the systemic ills of our world collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. We have to lay that groundwork.
01:03:18
Speaker
which means that it's an active process, which means that even if any moment the Messiah could return, we actually do need to lay down the carpet. And so that means we need to be actively engaged in the world and trying to make it better. And back to your point about his father, right? We could be losing now. You're losing, it's slipping through your fingers the preparations that you need to make to usher in a more humane world when you have these kinds of people
01:03:46
Speaker
that are behaving in such openly violent ways towards human beings, I think. Yeah, I think that's fair. As we're recording this, Israel is bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age if it wasn't in the Stone Age already.
01:04:06
Speaker
they're fully supported by the American right as they do that. And there's a bizarre mixture of antisemitism and rabidly pro-Zionist sentiment on the American right. And part of the source of that contradiction has to do with this eschatological belief among certain kinds of American Protestants that certain things have to happen
01:04:31
Speaker
in the Middle East before the second coming of the Christian Messiah will happen. And so therefore, Israel has to be supported so that bad things can happen to Israel or in Palestine so that Jesus can come back. Right, shoot me in the head now, shoot me in the head now. Exactly, exactly. But it's interesting now that you bring that up how far that line of thinking extends.
01:04:59
Speaker
And the way that those Jewish ideas have been co-opted by Christians, we don't really need to go down that road, but it's just interesting that all those things tie together. I would even say, and we've discussed this, I think just glossed it at certain points, like the unfortunate moments when the left and the right touch. And I think if you look at, let's say, even the voluminous writings on utopias,
01:05:26
Speaker
which I think is eminently reasonable to write about that shit. What looked impossible in 1861 is now looked at as absolutely common sensical in 2023, right? Our utopian. So we need people to do that work. But yeah, you look at the Nazis, they're all about pre-capitalist, volkish utopia, right? A pre-industrial agrarian return to some
Contrasting Themes and Musical Influences
01:05:53
Speaker
Edenic golden age of Nordic Aryan blonde blue eyed pieces of shit. And the left also has secularized their own utopian visions.
01:06:07
Speaker
This stuff gets taken up for better or worse, or can be taken up by any political party and re-envisioned or positioned for their own purported political ends.
01:06:24
Speaker
I don't think that corrupts the notion of utopia completely, but it's a bit of a warning, isn't it? We have to be more cautious than just treating utopia in and of itself as intrinsically leftist or progressive. It's not always. Yeah, I think that's a very good point.
01:06:43
Speaker
And you know what? I don't know how you feel, whether any of what we said is on point or not, and I guess we might never know on some level, it's undoubtedly a masterpiece of a song, right? It's just a fucking good song. Okay. Black and brown blues.
01:07:01
Speaker
Baby, let's get dressed up. I got two hairs of shoes. Darling, you look so beautiful when your hair's all gone in jewels. And sometimes I find it really hard to choose.
01:07:26
Speaker
Between a pair of black and a pair of brown shoes When I'm high on bad wings, up by the silvery wind
01:07:53
Speaker
Talk to me, man. How do you feel about this? What were your thoughts?
01:07:58
Speaker
This is probably the least enigmatic song on the album in some ways. It's framed around the idea of if you cannot even choose between wearing brown shoes or wearing black shoes, how can you possibly manage any of the rest of this? How can you manage to live much less to figure out the secrets of the universe if
01:08:23
Speaker
you cannot decide between a pair of black and a pair of brown shoes. And this is Berman maybe in, you know, I mentioned at the beginning that this has a country sound to it. And I don't think Berman, while I know, Berman was still living in Charlottesville, Virginia.
01:08:45
Speaker
When this was recorded, he would go on to live in Nashville, and he would record much more overtly country songs with a country sound. He's even got a song called Tennessee, right?
01:09:02
Speaker
If I had to guess, I would say that one of the differences between Malcomus and Berman may have been their interest in country music. Berman was fond of traditional American country music. We're not talking about the modern sound that I think of as Nashville beige. We're not talking about that. We're talking about the sort of now largely forgotten country music of the 50s and 60s and 70s. And I think this is him
01:09:33
Speaker
sort of making his first attempt on some level to write a country song.
01:09:38
Speaker
Yeah, even though Starlight Walker has some of those country song twangy arrangements, like even Rebel Jew has, I don't even know what the instrument is called, or what the effect is. Yeah, there's a pedal steel or a lap steel, but certain key moments on that record for sure. Right. But that's an interesting question. Maybe this is his first official sort of country song.
01:10:05
Speaker
that's really heavily country genre inflected. Favorite lines? Okay. I wasn't sure if I was going to pick this, but I think I have to pick when I go downtown, I always wear a corduroy suit because it's made of a hundred gutters that the rain can run right through. Fuck. Yeah. So good. So good.
01:10:27
Speaker
Next lines, but a lonely man can't make a move if he can't even bring himself to choose between a pair of black and a pair of brown shoes. Earlier in the song, we have references to rub out the village. Why don't people think of who they use? When there's trouble, I don't like running
01:10:53
Speaker
But I'm afraid I've got more in common with who I was than who I am becoming. Well, okay, let me back up. That's a classic country song line. I'm afraid I've got more in common with who I was than who I'm becoming. The kind of self-deprecating
01:11:12
Speaker
existentially despairing wit. But anyway, there are references in this song that are to deathly serious things. But he ends with, I can't even choose what shoes to wear. Yeah.
01:11:34
Speaker
I think it's the most easily intelligible. It's the song that you can imagine on the radio, people getting into without having to figure out what the hell he's talking about. I'd say thus far that this one would count for what you just said.
01:11:51
Speaker
float the argument that Dallas is closer to a Radio Ready song than this, but I agree. Musically, for sure. I think Dallas is a catchier pop song than Black and Brown Blues. I'm basically going to reiterate much of what you've brought up in terms of what you liked so much about what's going on here. My favorite line, just very quickly,
01:12:15
Speaker
fake IDs and honey bees, the jagged skyline of car keys, fucking amen. That was incredible. So let me ask actually about that line because that line stuck out to me the very first time I heard the song and it's immediately intelligible. But then if you think about it a little bit, it becomes a little bit mysterious because
01:12:38
Speaker
There are very few situations in which car keys are actually arranged in in their natural setting in a way where they're gonna look like a skyline right usually car keys are hanging down or they're just like in a. In a jumble on the table or something they're not upright like a skyline is one of the few times they are.
01:13:00
Speaker
is if you're about to get into a fight and you've put the keys through the spaces between your fingers when you make a fist, because you're about to go fuck somebody up. Yeah, I don't know. I never made that association that it could be in reference to an actual fight where the keys are used and then therefore positioned in such a way that they would mirror a skyline of sorts. It's interesting.
01:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's probably wrong. It's one of those lines where it seems so simple and then the more I think about it, I'm like, wait a minute, am I missing something here? Yeah, that's a fucking good question. I mean, in a way, as we've discussed, he's the king of non-sequiturs on some level, or if we want to put it in a more complimentary way, he's the king of haiku.
01:13:51
Speaker
or even of associative poetic combinations. So like fake IDs and honeybees, the jagged skyline of car keys, I never knew a bird could fly so low. I'm not exactly following the train of scenes as they're stitched together in that line, but knowing that he opens with baby let's get dressed up. And then he talks about the anguish of not being able to decide between black or brown shoes.
01:14:20
Speaker
Let me give you my take on what's going on here thematically and loop it back in to that line.
01:14:29
Speaker
So I think like you in a fairly uncomplicated way, this song is about, at least in part, depression. If you like black and brown blues. But there's also so much joy in this song. Even an ecstatic Walt Whitman like, I'm alive and being alive is good sort of ecstasy.
01:14:51
Speaker
And there's also an obvious playfulness, right? Even with the ever looming or always potentially re-emergent melancholy that's there. And so in this song, or at least in this line, I feel like Berman's almost playing a game with the blues rather than the more aggressive routes. This is actually interesting with what you brought up, of fighting against the blues.
01:15:13
Speaker
At least that's how I like to interpret the line. Why don't you try and come and get me black and brown blues? It's kind of like a game of tag with depression. And so I just love that you have these deadly serious themes that are there in the shadow of the blues and the paralysis of not even being able to choose between a pair of fucking shoes, which is a beautiful way of rendering what it feels like to be down in the dumps.
01:15:41
Speaker
And yet there's joy. And that's again, I think such a wonderful element in his artistry is like, I would say it arguably, you tell me if you disagree and not to make a negative comparison, they're just different artists like Jason Molina, who I know we both love. I mean, he might be one of the king of the blues. He certainly, I mean, the blues,
01:16:08
Speaker
He asked what comes after the blues, but sadness is so central to all of that music, nearly all of it. Joy is not as present. Playfulness, I would argue, is not as present. And maybe that would count, right? I'm not trying to turn this into like a boxing match between the two artists, but maybe this is a point in Berman's favor.
01:16:35
Speaker
you know, that whoa, he can get at the same depth, right, the same profundity of what it's like to be so low,
Wonder and Humor in Everyday Life
01:16:43
Speaker
and yet still find those magical, ecstatic, joyful elements that are sort of always there as well. Yeah, I remember you told me one time that there's no humor anywhere in Molina. And it kind of
01:16:59
Speaker
It brought me up short because I was like, that can't be right. As much as I have a dark turn of mind, I'm not drawn to things generally speaking that don't have a sense of humor. But I remember thinking about it and thinking,
01:17:19
Speaker
I think you're right. There's not humor in Melina, and there isn't really joy there either. I mean, maybe if I really thought about it, if I really poured over the songs, I could come up with a couple exceptions. But just to quote from Black and Brown Blues here, what we're talking about, darling, you look so beautiful when your hair's all hung in jewels. The water looks like jewelry when it's coming out the spout. Nothing could make me feel better than a wet kiss on the mouth.
01:17:47
Speaker
Which is so healthy, right? Those are such healthy experiences and impulses. Yeah, exactly. And so you're absolutely right that there is.
01:17:57
Speaker
and often in Berman, but we haven't really touched on it until now, there is a joy and a mischievousness and a playfulness. It's sunny in 75, it feels so good to be alive kind of energy that is contrasted with the depression and the existential angst and all the stuff that he struggled so mightily with.
01:18:19
Speaker
Yeah, and I think even back to your point of the jagged skyline of car keys, like whether or not it might be in reference to putting it between the webbing of your hands for a fistfight.
01:18:30
Speaker
He had enough sort of curiosity while looking at such a commonplace object to make an association like, oh, this is kind of sort of like a skyline. And I think it is an invitation the same way photos do that. Maybe all art at its best. One of the things it does is it invites you to look a little more. And I love that I'm getting a little choked up.
01:18:57
Speaker
he's able to, there's such a curiosity about the world. You need to be curious in order to pick up on these kinds of details and it invites you to do the same. Well, I think that's part of why there's so often an association between melancholy and poet sensibility because you're right, in order to be a good writer, a good poet, you have to be observant.
01:19:27
Speaker
But the more observant you are, the more you see the world as it is, the more you're going to see things that disturb you to your core that you are going to want to try to explain that you can't explain or you can't explain in a way that makes you feel better about anything. There's no natural law to explain what I saw. Exactly, exactly.
01:19:55
Speaker
the same sensibility that lets you look at car keys and notice that they could look like a skyline from a certain angle or that makes you... I actually have a lot to say about the line, the icy bike chain rain in Portland, Oregon, but we can get into that when we eventually make our way to that album. But the same sensibility that allows a poet to make the unexpected observations or juxtapositions
01:20:23
Speaker
allows them to see things that a lot of people would rather not see. And I think that a lot of people probably spend a lot of time trying not to see. And so I wonder if just inadvertently we've hit on the connection between being a poet and being a mopey bastard. I don't know. Well, I have a plug for that for my own tie-in for that that I think will fit nicely with that observation.
01:20:53
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, you're right. It's two sides of the same coin.
01:20:58
Speaker
And in spite of that, in its most joyful ecstatic moments, there is a kind of re-enchantment of the world, right? Because all of a sudden, what I picked up 10,000 times and did so much, I no longer see it. Oh, he's helping me see a little bit more the magic in the everyday, in the mundane. And that is a tremendous gift, right? That's a MasterCard commercial. That is a priceless gift.
01:21:27
Speaker
poets give to us in reenchanting our ability to look at the world in a fresh way. Yeah, and I also think that Berman, and this might be a good place for us to sort of wind down and conclude part one, but I brought this up a little bit with Starlight Walker, but he is fond of corny jokes, and we'll get some of the later songs on this record, we'll get into that a little bit more, but
01:21:55
Speaker
You know, the thing about the gutters in corduroy, you know, corduroy, the the whales, I think is the term in corduroy, being gutters that the rain runs through. It's it's a great line and it makes you smile. And it's also deliberately a corny joke, like he loves to embrace this corny kind of humor, which is really delightful because it's set off against this
01:22:26
Speaker
incredibly serious, potentially Gersham-Scholem level of wrestling with the angel. Definitely. Well, if you don't mind, let's get to the end of this song because I have a couple more details I want to bring up and then we'll call it for the day.
01:22:47
Speaker
So the other thing I wanted to ask you about are the locations that get mentioned throughout the album. For instance, with the line, it's raining triple sec in Chula, and the radio plays crazy trains. And I put in parentheticals across the sea. But I read in a
01:23:07
Speaker
some natural bridge review some time ago that brought this to my attention with the locations. Do you even know where Chula is? Don't look it up. Do you know where it is? I do, but I only know where it is because I did look it up at one point in the past. Okay. Do you know where it's at? What's that? Go ahead. Chula is a town in Mississippi.
01:23:30
Speaker
Good. Yes. One point for Brandon. What about Albemarle Station? Do you know where that is? I actually don't. And I don't know why I don't because every time I've ever heard that song, I'm like, I need, I mean, there's an Albemarle Virginia, I think, but I don't know if that's where Albemarle Station is.
01:23:48
Speaker
There might be two, but this one is the one when I looked it up, it was North Carolina. So still, you know, Southern United States. So LA, right? It gets a mention in the same song of Albemarle with Colonial Watts, but Colonial Watts, mind you.
01:24:07
Speaker
And so thinking about rock music in general, right, and some of the most famous rock songs that are location-specific, I feel you almost never hear names like Chula. You hear about people, for instance, getting head in unmade beds in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, or about lovely places with purportedly lovely faces like Hotel California, but Albemarle? Never.
01:24:35
Speaker
Maybe I'm simply revealing my provincial Yankee roots here, but I think it's noteworthy that these are surely for many listeners obscure places in the United States. And certainly there are places that are not traditionally where we mythologically or not perceive the real action to be taking place for music in US, right? And maybe that's exactly the point, right? He's tying himself like Faulkner tied himself geographically to the South.
01:25:04
Speaker
or to the sort of out of the mainstream locations. You're not wrong, although in country music, there is a tradition of naming towns that would otherwise be unremarkable. I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari to Hatshepe to Tonopah. I would venture to say that a lot of people who do not live in Nevada
01:25:32
Speaker
have only ever heard of Tonopah because of that song. Probably a lot of people who do not live in New Mexico have only ever heard of Tucumcari because of that song. There are a lot of location specific references like that in country or country adjacent songs. And I think Berman was deliberately tapping into that literary tradition. But I think he was also in cases like Chula or Albemarle Station, I think he was deliberately choosing ones that had not been used before.
01:26:01
Speaker
Good. Okay. Good deal. That was helpful. How about the there's a quadroon ball in the beehive hanging out in the rain? Did you do you know what that's referencing at least in part? Tell me. Okay, I can't believe you didn't know this.
01:26:16
Speaker
After spending all of 2.5 seconds researching this on the web, I came across a 2008 undergraduate dissertation from the highly esteemed, and I'm assuming or at least hoping now graduated Noelle Volt's senior honors thesis entitled, Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation, Quadroon Balls and Placage Relationships. Here's a quote from the abstract of her thesis.
01:26:43
Speaker
In 1805, a New Orleans newspaper advertisement formally defined a new social institution, the infamous Quadroon Ball, in which prostitution and placage, or placage, I think it's pronounced, I'm doing it terribly, was a system of concubinage, and it converged. So again, like he's constantly making both overt and covert references to the southern United States,
01:27:09
Speaker
And to these historical, you're making these like real historical references. So quadroon ball was a reference to the thing by now, like clearly totally racist term to reference the hierarchy that was established in places like New Orleans that were tied to the African slave trade.
01:27:34
Speaker
So anyway, that's what that's at least partially historically linking up with. Yeah, no, he definitely situates himself in the South and he definitely, you know, the jacket photograph of actual heir is him with what looks like a custom made t-shirt with a Confederate general on it. Starlight Walkers recorded in Oxford, Mississippi, which of course is Faulkner country.
01:28:03
Speaker
Faulkner, of course, has very problematic history with race. I mean, the entire United States is basically defined by its incredible racism, but, you know, obviously in the South, it's unique. And there are, he definitely identified, I think, with the South in some way. And there are times when he's obviously
01:28:25
Speaker
wanting to explore those problems and those contradictions, but being David Berman, he does it in a kind of elliptical way. But also, he was a white guy who was born in the 1960s. He's going to have his blind spots.
01:28:47
Speaker
I think that's something we haven't really touched on very much, but we might as we go further into this, especially as his sound gets even more heavily influenced by country, we might have more opportunities to explore that kind of thing further. I agree. I agree. So just to cap the song and to reiterate, I think your main point, like I think anyone who's felt down in the dumps, I think we've all felt that at some point or other, knows how the blues can quite often be negatively complemented by profound and painful indecision.
01:29:17
Speaker
And so I think this is Berman's way of doing with astonishing haiku like economy, you know, crystallizing the agonized feeling of blues fueled indecision with a simple line about the mental paralysis from something as insignificant as deciding which color shoes to wear.
01:29:36
Speaker
And I just wanted to add, did you notice there's a bit of an echo with Purple Mountains? On occasion, we all do battle with motivational paralysis from storyline fever. So again, I think they're all in conversation in different ways. So that's what I got for this one.
01:29:57
Speaker
Well, thank you everybody for being here. We hope you've enjoyed this and we will be back in two weeks with the second half of Natural Bridge and we'll see you there.