Silver Jews: Tanglewood Numbers - 10/18/05
07-11-05, 08:58 AM
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Silver Jews: Tanglewood Numbers - 10/18/05
Tracklist:
1. Punks In the Beerlight
2. Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed
3. K-Hole
4. Animal Shapes
5. I'm Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You
6. How Can I Love You If You Won't Lie Down
7. The Poor The Fair and the Good
8. Sleeping is the Only Love
9. The Farmer's Hotel
10. There Is a Place
Contributors: Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, Will Oldham, Mike Fellows, Bobby Bare Jr., Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle), Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard), and Cassie Berman.
Apparently, the album has been leaked.
This is one of my most anticipated albums still due this year. October can't come soon enough!
Anybody else a fan?
Last edited by auto; 10-21-05 at 10:43 AM.
07-11-05, 09:37 AM
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Great album, different (read more upbeat) than their others.
That tracklist you have is different from the leak's tracklist. The leak only has 10 songs. The chorus of Punks in the Beerlight is hilarious.
That tracklist you have is different from the leak's tracklist. The leak only has 10 songs. The chorus of Punks in the Beerlight is hilarious.
08-08-05, 09:30 PM
#3
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pitchfork interview:
Mon:08-08-05
Interview: Silver Jews
Story by Ashford Tucker
David Berman is an author/poet and the principal songwriter behind the Silver Jews. I say "behind" because the band, generally mislabeled a Pavement side-project due to a shifty lineup often featuring Stephen Malkmus and/or Bob Nastanovich, rarely (if ever) performs as a physical entity, much less with Berman out in front. In fact, the best way to see Berman perform live over the past several years has been to catch him at one of his infrequent poetry readings. And until Drag City recently revealed that the Silver Jews would be releasing a new album, the highly amped Tanglewood Numbers (due in October), any word of concerts was to be taken with a bag of salt.
This interview took place via email over the course of a month. It is the meeting of what Berman dubbed "college journalism sports section vigor" and his own "cool mist of non-fiction." He was kind enough to go on record with damn near anything I could think to ask. So I was kind enough at times to inquire of familiar stories or Nashville locales, and avoid follow-up questions relating to his near-suicide. His responses reveal a confident, serious writer excited by prospects of commercial viability and a possible breakout record, but somewhat befuddled by the current level of e-scrutiny aimed at his beloved songs.
* * *
Early Life and "The Stranger"
Pitchfork: Where were you born?
David Berman: Williamsburg, Virginia. I was nine pounds, 11 ounces. I heard this orderly go, "Dang!"
Pitchfork: Where did you grow up? We'll define where one grew up as where one lived when he had his first beer.
Berman: When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do. Dallas in that time-- especially '79-85-- you'd never believe how interesting that place was.
I drank my first pitcher with two twins, Tim and Kim, after work. The bar manager liked to give us beer and then punish us later. We were busboys at a polo club. I remember "One Thing Leads to Another" by the Fixx was constantly playing on the radio that fall and it sounded amazing on the fry-cook's boombox washing down the floors at the end of the night. The twins, at high school they would be called "ropers." Guys who wore cowboy boots and listened to ZZ Top-- farmboys or imitation farmboys. It was just another category like "headbanger."
Pitchfork: How long have you lived in Nashville? Where did you live before that, and what prompted the move?
Berman: Cassie [Marrett, Berman's wife] and I moved here in 1999. I'd been living in an apartment colony called Mallard's Crossing beside an office park on the outskirts of Louisville. When I looked out my window, I wasn't necessarily in "sour old Louisville," an idea of a town with which I had an antagonistic relationship. The surrounding mallscape, it could have been anywhere-- Falls Church, Plano, Toledo.
In my beery mind this display of exurban contempt was the equivalent of a lone "boo" during the silent section of a live Rodan set. Sure my neighborhood bar was a BW-3, but at least I didn't have to deal with the sullen and homely hippy women that make up so a large portion of that town's rock scene. The day after Cassie graduated from college we left. It was the Titans' inaugural season. It was a great time to move to Nashville.
Pitchfork: What made Louisville so sour for you?
Berman: Listen to the song "Van Lear Rose" on Loretta Lynn's last album, and for the words "Johnson County" replace with "Louisville," and for "miners" put "local rockers." Cassie is the Van Lear Rose. I'm the stranger who comes to town. Sprinkle in a lot of wide-bottomed hippy women.
* * *
On Poetry, Performance, and Finances
Pitchfork: When's the last time you played your songs live?
Berman: I played a couple songs in March with Chestnut Station backing me up at an event in Chicago. I think about it a lot.
Pitchfork: You're a poet and a songwriter, and at last year's reading in Charleston, South Carolina, you read prose...?
Berman: Actually, you're right. The University of Charleston. I thought it was an extraordinarily large-breasted student body. I was off my game.
Pitchfork: Have you ever read Jeff Tweedy's poetry? Or Billy Corgan's?
Berman: I haven't read Jeff Tweedy's poems. I leafed through Billy Corgan's but not long enough to make a judgment. These guys are professional musicians. It's kind of like football players in the 70s who started endorsing ballet lessons. Who am I to argue against sharpening agility?
All musicians should write poetry or at least read it if they want to improve their game. Except for people who believe lyrics don't matter. This is the Brian Billick theory of songwriting: Defense (the music) not offense (lyrics) wins championships (Grammys). The best teams of course have both. And the Ravens were very dull and unlikable. They weren't built to last. My songs are built to provide years of shadowplay.
Pitchfork: Why do you refuse to perform songs at readings?
Berman: I was not born to be the center of attention in a crowded room. I am trying to make my name as an acute observer, as a witness. I think I have always had my heart set on a certain kind of body of work I would like to leave behind. I believe that intermittent live performance has cut short the writing lives of touring musicians. If you are making an argument with history you don't waste your energy and brain cells on sales, publicity, relentless travel, and other adjoining tasks. The less my body moves, the more energy my brain has to write.
Pitchfork: I wanna hear "Send in the Clouds" live. Ever thought about that?
Berman: Okay, but you might have to travel. I read about the Christian exodus to South Carolina. It must be such a helpless feeling to see it happening.
Pitchfork: Does a new record that's more consistently upbeat rock 'n' roll than previous ones makes you want to perform live or tour?
Berman: I don't know if the record makes me want to play live so much as it makes me want to play the songs again through a loud amp with a drummer there and some other players going off around me. Whether or not you plan some big "event" around that. I don't know.
Pitchfork: Financially, how do you afford not to?
Berman: Last year, I made about $16,000 from the four records that are in print. Drag City takes care of its own. Everybody who makes records for Drag City is getting the most money possible. The Silver Jews have never bought an ad. Ever. Well, once in Alternative Press in 1994, for The Arizona Record, but it was in the back and...
The last year I made a record, 2001, I made $45,000 from Drag City. This upcoming year I hope it will go up to that level again. In addition, I read at colleges multiple times a year at $1,000 a shot. Various writing projects bring in money. Actual Air brings in $1,000 a year nowadays. I get a dollar a copy, and they've sold a goodly number. And Rob Bingham gave me a $10,000 advance to finish it.
BMI checks are a couple thousand a year. Another couple thousand from foreign licensees. I made a movie with the artist Jeremy Blake last year. There are a couple movies with [Silver Jews'] songs in them that keep playing on Scandinavian cable at 3 a.m., apparently for the last four years.
I've never gotten a grant. Well, that's not true. I had a fellowship to go to graduate school. I never had to pay for tuition while I was there and teaching paid your other living expenses. My father paid for my undergraduate tuition. There's this famous story in my family of when my father took me out to eat when I was 18. I had been too lazy to apply to college so he'd had his secretary apply for me late. To the University of Texas and the University of Virginia (because I romanticized Virginia as a kid).
Well, I got into both (Texas was automatic). The tuition difference was large. UT back then was $350 a semester. Virginia was, what $12,000 a year? My dad likes to make games of things. He told me he wanted me to go to UT so I'd be closer to home and said that if I went to UVA he'd pay my tuition but that would be it until death. And four years of health insurance, I guess. Instead, if I chose Texas he'd pay for that plus give me the difference between the two schools' tuitions to live on. I am frankly amazed I chose Virginia. I don't remember my reasoning.
I worked in the morgue at the UVA hospital all through college to pay my rent. In the 15 years since I've graduated he's loaned me $5,000 two times when I was in trouble. The first one in my 20s, which he kindly absolved, and a second one last year trying to get back on my feet. I still owe him that one and I hope this album will enable me to pay him back because he holds it over my head every single time we get into an argument.
I guess I should add that he did pay for my rehab, which I let him, figuring at the time it was his fucking idea, and what did I care? Also, when I got out, this organization called Music Cares at [The National Academy of the Recording Arts and Sciences] helped me pay bills. It's a charity, and hopefully I'll be able to send some money back their way once America starts paying me a living wage. It probably goes without saying that I've got a credit card rotisserie system that would dazzle the ancients.
* * *
On Y2K, Minnesota, and a Mitzvah
Pitchfork: You allude to personal crises of chemical habit in your songs pretty regularly. The more official pictures one can find (Drag City site, in pink shirt and ballcap, standing at what appears to be the jukebox of the legendary Nashville shithole, Springwater) make you look either shitfaced or crazy. And you are now sober, in the land of "club soda unbridled," as you once put it. How is it?
Berman: My Y2K party lasted four years longer than I expected it to. It was fun. Not the last year. The last year was bad. I went to rehab. Relapsed a couple of times. Doing good now. I went down in 1999 for a long, suitcase-battering journey of sub-aqueous intoxication, only resurfacing on January 1, 2004 in a tiny Minnesota village. There is a recent Fader article that does a good filmic version of my time away. After that article came out, I read someone on the internet who felt betrayed, by me; that I'd become a cliche. There's nothing I can do about that. The problems of performance have begun already.
Pitchfork: I've never been underwater for five years and ended up in Minnesota.
Berman: There were many phases, but the final one (and the one that takes you down fast, no matter how long you've been juggling powders and pills and think you're above the lowliest drug of all) [was] crack. And Dilaudid when I needed to sand the edges off the horrorscape. Also vodka. Always and everywhere vodka. The vodka is how you clean yourself. I actually thought it was cleaning my organs.
[I took] every drug in every way from 15 on. I smoked love boat [PCP] every day my sophomore year of college. At the end it was down to crack, vodka, and binges of I.V. Dilaudid and cocaine. All backrounded by heaps of nerve-soothing pills.
Pitchfork: Did you ever really try to kill yourself?
Berman: Yes.
Pitchfork: Is staying busy the key to happiness?
Berman: It can stave off unhappiness. Which may be the stopgap solution until you get some internal joy going inside you.
Pitchfork: Can you give us a lesson?
Berman: I would like to turn it into a mitzvah-- be useful, maybe to a reader in trouble. Somehow. Not about drugs, about how to be strong in the face of trouble. So I gotta draw up some lessons. But in the meantime, know this: Even if there is only a one in a million chance, you better respect that chance.
* * *
On Dead Tapes and Tanglewood Numbers
Pitchfork: Tell me about the arrangements on the new record. How big a role did Stephen Malkmus play?
Berman: Steve is always amazing. To me, he is the best guitarist in the world. If I could convince him just to play guitar for me, I'd never kick him out of the band again. Everybody writes his own parts. I showed them the songs the week before recording started. We practiced in my basement. Low-hanging pipes were cracking everybody on the head except [drummer] Brian Kotzur. The rest of us were literally collapsing on the floor with cracked skulls. On the last day of practice I bought everybody hats.
Pitchfork: When did you kick Malkmus out?
Berman: I've never really kicked him out. It was all about the publicity. I wanted to show my critics at US Weekly that I know how to run my band.
Pitchfork: I heard a tale of you and Malkmus popping in a Grateful Dead tape and noodling over it for an NYC audience years ago. When was that? How did it go over?
Berman: It was awesome. I had us practicing for American Water by jamming with John Oswald's Grayfolded CDs. Since any one moment on those CDs might have 50 different Jerry Garcias playing 50 guitar lines, we just became 51 and 52. We turned ourselves up a little louder than the stereo and practiced wandering amidst the tumult.
One night we took it to the stage, a place called Baby Jupiter. It was packed via word of mouth. The soundman put on the CD, turning it up to concert volume. Malk and I did our thing with two amps and two guitars. People had fun but it was disappointing, the noodling, for those who came expecting a secret Silver Jews set.
Pitchfork: The breakdown in the new record opener, "Punks in the Beerlight", particularly smacks of Malkmus, to my ears.
Berman: Mike Fellows thought of doing that breakdown. It really brings in the dry ice. An evil lobby vibe.
Pitchfork: The band on this record is huge. It takes three hands to count them all. Was there an interview process?
Berman: Malkmus, Fellows, and Nastanovich were in from the get-go (I started writing the record in earnest last summer). Kotzur has been my favorite drummer in town since 1999 when I first saw the Brian Kotzur Band and was blown away. I saw every single Brian Kotzur Band show until it became [known as] Tim, Chad & Sherry, which is even better than BKB. He also runs a brand new metal band called Falcon. He can sing and play drums. He tours with Bobby Bare Jr. and cuts costs by playing drums, bass, and keyboards at the same time.
Now I'm going to tell you a trade secret: Tony Crow. He is the most imaginative keyboard player I know, for my tastes. He'll decorate your song like a Christmas tree if that's what you want, or he'll apply the fattest, whitest worm of a sick bottom to your rock if you need it. I'd like to pay Tony Crow in diamonds and other jewels. I also had Will [Oldham] come down and play rhythm guitar on some songs, maybe half. Azita came down from Chicago and played over half.
Last was Paz [Lenchantin]. We've been really close friends for only a year. I was sick when she came to Nashville from L.A. I knew how great she was going to be and I told her to just go over to [producer Mark] Nevers' and play banjo and violin for two days and I'd use what was great during mixing. She is maybe the first fundamentally mystic person that's ever played in the band. By the way, there are a lot of tracks burning down there that never made it. Some amazing stuff.
Pitchfork: There's lots of Mrs. Berman on the new record. How did you two first meet? How did she get involved in making records with you?
Berman: I had seen a picture of Cassie in Melody Maker. She was playing bass with M somewhere in Europe. I really got a heavy feeling looking at the picture. There's probably a German word for it. A couple months later I saw her at a crowded party in Louisville. I walked up to her with no fear and said, "Hi, Cassie." She was on her way to buy some more beer for the party. She asked me if I wanted to walk to the store with her. We've been walking to the store ever since.
Cassie has always been a better guitarist than me. She takes lessons. She has a disciplined writing schedule. She works full-time as an editor but still gets a lot of playing and writing in. "The Poor the Fair and the Good" used to be what we called her first good song. It went by the name of "The Jacket Song". I had an idea for the new words.
Pitchfork: Did you two ever figure out how to screw on your feet?
Berman: Not unless "screw" means "wallpaper," and "on your feet" is code for "your dining room."
Pitchfork: Where exactly is Oldham on this album? Does he sing?
Berman: The only singers are myself, Cassie, and Bobby Bare Jr.'s backing vocals on track five ["I'm Getting Back into Getting Back into You"]. Around the ninth second of the first track ["Punks in the Beerlight"], you can hear a subdued guitar chirring beneath and after the big blaring guitar, across the pause. That's Will. His rhythm guitars sound like him at his most benevolent.
Pitchfork: What guitar rig do you use? Still with the [Fender] Mustang?
Berman: Mustang. I used this effects pod Will gave me last year to write the new songs. You know, write to the sound of the guitar. I'm in the market for a [Gibson] SG to write the next album. Bright Flight was written on a Baby Taylor acoustic. It wasn't so popular. My fault. I let up on side two.
* * *
From Private Life to San Simeon
Pitchfork: What did you think about the Fader piece?
Berman: I don't dislike it at all, but there wasn't enough context in it to explain why I was doing the things I did in 2003. It's uncomfortable to reveal to strangers what happened to me. The whole time I was making this record I was talking about this with my rabbi. Afterwards, when I had to do press, I wondered how was I going to talk about my life.
I don't kid myself that it's gonna be about music. It never is. And I am bored when I lie or hide the truth of my life from another person, who, presumably, means no harm. But I didn't want to tell the story many times and relive it every time. I just wanted to tell it once. When the interview request came in I was just finishing the record. I had been praying for what to do, how to handle this part of the job. I took the opportunity of them coming to interview me as the time to tell it.
Considering all that, do I like [the story]? I don't know. It wasn't the solution or we wouldn't be going over this. I'd just refer you to the article. Giving people the information, well, you wonder if that makes you more vulnerable to attack. Still, it would be ridiculous to put out a record like this, with real biographical strata, and act like your New Criticism methodology disallows you from living openly as who you've been. And they're all, "That sounds like..." And you're like, "Fuck fuck fuck!!!"
Pitchfork: You have a rabbi?
Berman: Rabbi Kanter. Left our congregation last month to go teach at a rabbinical school in Ohio. "I Lost My Rabbi to Cincinnati" has been my song of woe this summer.
The cantor, Lisa Silver, is one of the most beautiful singers. I've secretly bootlegged some of the services to listen to on Fridays when I can't make it out there. I am not sure if it's kosher to make these recordings, but the beep on the digital recorder is barely noticeable except during the most silent prayers. Recently we found out that Lisa co-wrote "40 Hour Week" by Alabama, a song that always cracks me up when it comes on the radio. You'd never believe this pretty little birdlike Jewish woman wrote that number.
Pitchfork: Do you follow the message boards on Silver Jews-related websites?
Berman: Cassie has put all music sites on block filter on the computer. As of yesterday. All those instant opinions. People get on there and start nitpicking. It's maddening. It no longer seems self-evident that it's "just" their opinion. A couple listens to some mp3 and John K. Internet is ready to go public with what he thinks. One jackass writes, "There's too much reverb on Berman's vocals. Also, I'm not sure about Cassie's role on the record." Hey, let me know when you figure it out. Cause I want you to be sure.
I don't get that. Cassie's presence is not a contingency. There is no record without her on it. If there was less reverb... what? That song will never exist. If you don't like the song, great. But you're not Walter Pater, frosh. You're not even Bob Greene. Ugh.
Pitchfork: The barrage of sophomoric rock critics is part of your game these days, from the loner lashing out on a message board to the small-time guy hitting deadlines for a website. I'm not saying you're obliged to read and respond to posts or reviews, but it sounds like you take these comments pretty seriously. This sort of heat is guaranteed when you're putting out records for the philosopher-clerk demographic, right? Not saying you picked the audience, either, but those folks are mainstays by now and surely their erroneously self-important opinions don't shock or hurt you, do they?
Berman: I don't know anyone who doesn't take criticism seriously. I was trying to get nasty in this interview. Would you ask a rapper to stop hating his rivals? You seem to have a problem with me hating who I hate? You say the "heat is guaranteed" but it sounds like you're saying, "You will take the heat and like it." Fuck that rule. If Hitler didn't like my record I'd be hurt.
Pitchfork: Well, look, I've got no problem with the hating, and I much prefer you being nasty. Of course, you should care and you don't have to "take" anything-- I just question your defense. When you care out loud for the world to see, when you let the message-boarders see you sweat, it lends their opinions an undue validity. If everyone's calling you self-absorbed, you prove them right by taking any and all opinions on your work so seriously. Are you being serious about the Hitler bit? Is every layman's opinion capable of getting your proverbial goat?
Berman: The reason I don't play live is because I don't want to let them see me glow under heroic lighting. Of course I'm vulnerable to attack, as I said above. That's why we put the filter on. You will be the last person to see me sweat if this works out.
Drag City doesn't send me reviews anymore. I don't want to get gassed by the plaudits anymore than I want to give strangers the power to aggravate me. The first concern is for my work. Artists who travel the world and see hundreds of fans cheering their work nightly might be a bigger danger to your talent, becoming a consumerist hero of the new cyber marketspace. That's not what I wanted to be when I grew up.
The reason I've been trolling message boards and lurking is because I haven't gotten any feedback on Tanglewood Numbers besides about 10 one- or two-second comments from people I know. These in between times you just sit around and wait to find out if the plans you laid are generating the response you projected. I have a real desire to communicate to people outside this demo. I don't want the sourballs to shoot it down after one listen on an mp3. Of course, I can only control things on this end. Thus, the filter block. I won't even be able to read this interview when it comes out (my loophole is the library).
But I don't think I'm self-absorbed. Compared to who? Grover Norquist, Mariah Carey? I'm a decent guy. I do Meals on Wheels. I am the kind of friend who would rather talk about your life. I spend 90 percent of my day absorbing ideas and images from the visible world.
Pitchfork: Judging by what I read it seems that some folks might even craft their posts in the hopes that you will read them and be hurt/respond in interviews like this one, etc. So my point earlier, which you mistook for some sort of peacemaking hooey, was: The quickest way to get the guys on the playground to stop calling you a big ***** is to quit acting like one in public. But I guess there's an honesty issue there for you?
Berman: So the guys are right. I am exactly what I've been called and the only way to deal is make the corrections demanded of my public persona. To project "uncaring" like Malkmus. I'm not that Episcopalian. If it starts getting in the way of my work, I cut it out. Whatever that thing is. The boards got in my head this week. So that's gone.
You are witnessing the switch from regular guy to San Simeon resident. I unlisted my phone number after five years. I got a P.O. Box. Look, I'm changing into the above-it-all asshole who tours the world and hears nothing but praise and strokes. This remedy should have me writing dreck like "Everybody Hurts" by 2007.
* * *
That Graveyard Scene from Easy Rider
Pitchfork: Do you own a dog? Does it lack discipline?
Berman: Yes. His name is Miles. His good nature is a dream I have for myself. When the Buddha achieved enlightenment he was said to have been "like a deer in a deer park." Surfing on the edge of time.
Pitchfork: Does anyone else notice that Joanna Newsom sings like a methadone-addled flapper girl?
Berman: I get Emily Dickinson sauteed in Olive Oyl. Somehow that makes Bill Callahan Popeye/Hawthorne. Smog Popeye Hawthorne, a private school for the children of rich burnouts. Any day now, Joanna Newsom's debut record will pass Pavement's Westing (by Musket and Sextant) as Drag City's all-time bestseller and [label president] Dan Koretzky will finally be able to show his face in church again.
Pitchfork: What do you have to say about the Church of Scientology preaching that we should replace anti-psychotic medicine with vitamins?
Berman: Tom Cruise made a crucial miscalculation by giving a name to his deformity. He will never be able to play the role of a non-freak ever again. Sometimes I wonder if Scientology isn't just a decoy religion, created and maintained by the Church of Latter Day Saints to distract Americans from all the freaky things the Mormons do in their temples.
Pitchfork: If Scientology is right, will Drag City conspire to suppress the truth to preserve its target audience of moping, jaded, no-*****-getting wimps?
Berman: If they couldn't suppress the truth about the Suntanama, I don't see them getting very far with this project.
Pitchfork: When Faith No More first made it big, do you think Mike Patton had any idea of the effect he would have on pop culture? I often think of him as the benevolent black scientist from Terminator 2 who facilitated the development of A.I. and unwittingly brought about doomsday, except with rap-rock and the long-on-top/shaved-all-around underneath hairdo that the real rollercoaster rednecks still sport.
Berman: Joe Funderburk, the guy who mixed this album, has that haircut. He's around 50 and he takes the long gray hair and rubberbands it so it's like a gray geyser coming out of the top of his skull. Then it's shaved. Joe is a white witch from Gulfport, Mississippi. During mixing he would have to take days off to go in the woods with the other witches and warlocks. One day he invited [Steve] West and I. I did not want to go, but we were just getting to know Joe and his wife, Rowena, and both of us wondered if we insulted them by not attending their rituals [whether] they would cast some curse on the record.
So I made West go. Apparently, he danced naked in the woods. He was gibbering and covered in blood when he returned. I made him promise never to tell me what happened that night. Joe is also a very sweet man and a hard rock/blues genius who engineered the first Judds album way back when. "Captain Midnight" on Tomahawk's first album is about him, to bring it back to Mike Patton.
Pitchfork: Travis Henry for a third-round pick sounds like good news. Thoughts?
Berman: I'm very unhappy about the Titans' offseason moves. If Floyd Reese has some secret victory plan involving scuttling the team, losing [Derrick] Mason and Kevin Carter, and bringing in that punk Pacman [Jones], he better give us a sign or something. We go to about four home games a year. Towards the end of the season, when it gets cold and the team's not winning, people start giving their tickets up cheap.
Pitchfork: Man vs. Himself: As a poet, do you feel like the musician in you errs on the crass side? Likewise as a musician, do you find your inner poet to be a bit soft?
Berman: I am not bicameral in that way. I'm an integrated self.
Pitchfork: Are you a betting man?
Berman: I do bet at the track just in a social way but it's not a pull for me. Horseracing fundamentally bores me. Cassie and I went to Las Vegas for our honeymoon and I just played the slots. Won $500 on one which enabled us to rent a car and go see L.A. My first time.
Pitchfork: Have you ever had the cappicola and egg at Piranha's on 2nd Avenue? Jesus God, is that fucking sandwich good.
Berman: I will try that. I like their sandwiches a lot. I didn't think I would. One thing I realized this year, and I've been trying to tip off my younger single friends: Women don't like men who are closed-minded about food. If you order a cheeseburger on a date you might as well ask for cookies and milk for dessert. This is a turn-off, I believe.
Right now, I'm always thinking about this place on Gallatin. Eastside Fish. They have a sign says the "crunkest fish in town." The crust is fuckin' out of control.
Pitchfork: Something I've long wanted to ask you: Seventeen doctors couldn't decide whether you should be allowed in the... what?
Berman: Game. The guys dared me to pronounce it like Jagger would: "Gime." I relive that dumb hectoring style that drunk friends have when they're daring you to do something every time I hear that line.
Pitchfork: Can we do the AIM thing this week? I wanna knock out some real-time questions as well before I turn this thing in. The deadline's fast approaching. Actually, I'm a day or so late.
Berman: My arguments against AIM:
1. It's gay.
2. You got a lot of stuff already.
3. The finish line was July 31.
Why drag this out any longer? You already got more detail out of me than a grand jury.
Mon:08-08-05
Interview: Silver Jews
Story by Ashford Tucker
David Berman is an author/poet and the principal songwriter behind the Silver Jews. I say "behind" because the band, generally mislabeled a Pavement side-project due to a shifty lineup often featuring Stephen Malkmus and/or Bob Nastanovich, rarely (if ever) performs as a physical entity, much less with Berman out in front. In fact, the best way to see Berman perform live over the past several years has been to catch him at one of his infrequent poetry readings. And until Drag City recently revealed that the Silver Jews would be releasing a new album, the highly amped Tanglewood Numbers (due in October), any word of concerts was to be taken with a bag of salt.
This interview took place via email over the course of a month. It is the meeting of what Berman dubbed "college journalism sports section vigor" and his own "cool mist of non-fiction." He was kind enough to go on record with damn near anything I could think to ask. So I was kind enough at times to inquire of familiar stories or Nashville locales, and avoid follow-up questions relating to his near-suicide. His responses reveal a confident, serious writer excited by prospects of commercial viability and a possible breakout record, but somewhat befuddled by the current level of e-scrutiny aimed at his beloved songs.
* * *
Early Life and "The Stranger"
Pitchfork: Where were you born?
David Berman: Williamsburg, Virginia. I was nine pounds, 11 ounces. I heard this orderly go, "Dang!"
Pitchfork: Where did you grow up? We'll define where one grew up as where one lived when he had his first beer.
Berman: When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do. Dallas in that time-- especially '79-85-- you'd never believe how interesting that place was.
I drank my first pitcher with two twins, Tim and Kim, after work. The bar manager liked to give us beer and then punish us later. We were busboys at a polo club. I remember "One Thing Leads to Another" by the Fixx was constantly playing on the radio that fall and it sounded amazing on the fry-cook's boombox washing down the floors at the end of the night. The twins, at high school they would be called "ropers." Guys who wore cowboy boots and listened to ZZ Top-- farmboys or imitation farmboys. It was just another category like "headbanger."
Pitchfork: How long have you lived in Nashville? Where did you live before that, and what prompted the move?
Berman: Cassie [Marrett, Berman's wife] and I moved here in 1999. I'd been living in an apartment colony called Mallard's Crossing beside an office park on the outskirts of Louisville. When I looked out my window, I wasn't necessarily in "sour old Louisville," an idea of a town with which I had an antagonistic relationship. The surrounding mallscape, it could have been anywhere-- Falls Church, Plano, Toledo.
In my beery mind this display of exurban contempt was the equivalent of a lone "boo" during the silent section of a live Rodan set. Sure my neighborhood bar was a BW-3, but at least I didn't have to deal with the sullen and homely hippy women that make up so a large portion of that town's rock scene. The day after Cassie graduated from college we left. It was the Titans' inaugural season. It was a great time to move to Nashville.
Pitchfork: What made Louisville so sour for you?
Berman: Listen to the song "Van Lear Rose" on Loretta Lynn's last album, and for the words "Johnson County" replace with "Louisville," and for "miners" put "local rockers." Cassie is the Van Lear Rose. I'm the stranger who comes to town. Sprinkle in a lot of wide-bottomed hippy women.
* * *
On Poetry, Performance, and Finances
Pitchfork: When's the last time you played your songs live?
Berman: I played a couple songs in March with Chestnut Station backing me up at an event in Chicago. I think about it a lot.
Pitchfork: You're a poet and a songwriter, and at last year's reading in Charleston, South Carolina, you read prose...?
Berman: Actually, you're right. The University of Charleston. I thought it was an extraordinarily large-breasted student body. I was off my game.
Pitchfork: Have you ever read Jeff Tweedy's poetry? Or Billy Corgan's?
Berman: I haven't read Jeff Tweedy's poems. I leafed through Billy Corgan's but not long enough to make a judgment. These guys are professional musicians. It's kind of like football players in the 70s who started endorsing ballet lessons. Who am I to argue against sharpening agility?
All musicians should write poetry or at least read it if they want to improve their game. Except for people who believe lyrics don't matter. This is the Brian Billick theory of songwriting: Defense (the music) not offense (lyrics) wins championships (Grammys). The best teams of course have both. And the Ravens were very dull and unlikable. They weren't built to last. My songs are built to provide years of shadowplay.
Pitchfork: Why do you refuse to perform songs at readings?
Berman: I was not born to be the center of attention in a crowded room. I am trying to make my name as an acute observer, as a witness. I think I have always had my heart set on a certain kind of body of work I would like to leave behind. I believe that intermittent live performance has cut short the writing lives of touring musicians. If you are making an argument with history you don't waste your energy and brain cells on sales, publicity, relentless travel, and other adjoining tasks. The less my body moves, the more energy my brain has to write.
Pitchfork: I wanna hear "Send in the Clouds" live. Ever thought about that?
Berman: Okay, but you might have to travel. I read about the Christian exodus to South Carolina. It must be such a helpless feeling to see it happening.
Pitchfork: Does a new record that's more consistently upbeat rock 'n' roll than previous ones makes you want to perform live or tour?
Berman: I don't know if the record makes me want to play live so much as it makes me want to play the songs again through a loud amp with a drummer there and some other players going off around me. Whether or not you plan some big "event" around that. I don't know.
Pitchfork: Financially, how do you afford not to?
Berman: Last year, I made about $16,000 from the four records that are in print. Drag City takes care of its own. Everybody who makes records for Drag City is getting the most money possible. The Silver Jews have never bought an ad. Ever. Well, once in Alternative Press in 1994, for The Arizona Record, but it was in the back and...
The last year I made a record, 2001, I made $45,000 from Drag City. This upcoming year I hope it will go up to that level again. In addition, I read at colleges multiple times a year at $1,000 a shot. Various writing projects bring in money. Actual Air brings in $1,000 a year nowadays. I get a dollar a copy, and they've sold a goodly number. And Rob Bingham gave me a $10,000 advance to finish it.
BMI checks are a couple thousand a year. Another couple thousand from foreign licensees. I made a movie with the artist Jeremy Blake last year. There are a couple movies with [Silver Jews'] songs in them that keep playing on Scandinavian cable at 3 a.m., apparently for the last four years.
I've never gotten a grant. Well, that's not true. I had a fellowship to go to graduate school. I never had to pay for tuition while I was there and teaching paid your other living expenses. My father paid for my undergraduate tuition. There's this famous story in my family of when my father took me out to eat when I was 18. I had been too lazy to apply to college so he'd had his secretary apply for me late. To the University of Texas and the University of Virginia (because I romanticized Virginia as a kid).
Well, I got into both (Texas was automatic). The tuition difference was large. UT back then was $350 a semester. Virginia was, what $12,000 a year? My dad likes to make games of things. He told me he wanted me to go to UT so I'd be closer to home and said that if I went to UVA he'd pay my tuition but that would be it until death. And four years of health insurance, I guess. Instead, if I chose Texas he'd pay for that plus give me the difference between the two schools' tuitions to live on. I am frankly amazed I chose Virginia. I don't remember my reasoning.
I worked in the morgue at the UVA hospital all through college to pay my rent. In the 15 years since I've graduated he's loaned me $5,000 two times when I was in trouble. The first one in my 20s, which he kindly absolved, and a second one last year trying to get back on my feet. I still owe him that one and I hope this album will enable me to pay him back because he holds it over my head every single time we get into an argument.
I guess I should add that he did pay for my rehab, which I let him, figuring at the time it was his fucking idea, and what did I care? Also, when I got out, this organization called Music Cares at [The National Academy of the Recording Arts and Sciences] helped me pay bills. It's a charity, and hopefully I'll be able to send some money back their way once America starts paying me a living wage. It probably goes without saying that I've got a credit card rotisserie system that would dazzle the ancients.
* * *
On Y2K, Minnesota, and a Mitzvah
Pitchfork: You allude to personal crises of chemical habit in your songs pretty regularly. The more official pictures one can find (Drag City site, in pink shirt and ballcap, standing at what appears to be the jukebox of the legendary Nashville shithole, Springwater) make you look either shitfaced or crazy. And you are now sober, in the land of "club soda unbridled," as you once put it. How is it?
Berman: My Y2K party lasted four years longer than I expected it to. It was fun. Not the last year. The last year was bad. I went to rehab. Relapsed a couple of times. Doing good now. I went down in 1999 for a long, suitcase-battering journey of sub-aqueous intoxication, only resurfacing on January 1, 2004 in a tiny Minnesota village. There is a recent Fader article that does a good filmic version of my time away. After that article came out, I read someone on the internet who felt betrayed, by me; that I'd become a cliche. There's nothing I can do about that. The problems of performance have begun already.
Pitchfork: I've never been underwater for five years and ended up in Minnesota.
Berman: There were many phases, but the final one (and the one that takes you down fast, no matter how long you've been juggling powders and pills and think you're above the lowliest drug of all) [was] crack. And Dilaudid when I needed to sand the edges off the horrorscape. Also vodka. Always and everywhere vodka. The vodka is how you clean yourself. I actually thought it was cleaning my organs.
[I took] every drug in every way from 15 on. I smoked love boat [PCP] every day my sophomore year of college. At the end it was down to crack, vodka, and binges of I.V. Dilaudid and cocaine. All backrounded by heaps of nerve-soothing pills.
Pitchfork: Did you ever really try to kill yourself?
Berman: Yes.
Pitchfork: Is staying busy the key to happiness?
Berman: It can stave off unhappiness. Which may be the stopgap solution until you get some internal joy going inside you.
Pitchfork: Can you give us a lesson?
Berman: I would like to turn it into a mitzvah-- be useful, maybe to a reader in trouble. Somehow. Not about drugs, about how to be strong in the face of trouble. So I gotta draw up some lessons. But in the meantime, know this: Even if there is only a one in a million chance, you better respect that chance.
* * *
On Dead Tapes and Tanglewood Numbers
Pitchfork: Tell me about the arrangements on the new record. How big a role did Stephen Malkmus play?
Berman: Steve is always amazing. To me, he is the best guitarist in the world. If I could convince him just to play guitar for me, I'd never kick him out of the band again. Everybody writes his own parts. I showed them the songs the week before recording started. We practiced in my basement. Low-hanging pipes were cracking everybody on the head except [drummer] Brian Kotzur. The rest of us were literally collapsing on the floor with cracked skulls. On the last day of practice I bought everybody hats.
Pitchfork: When did you kick Malkmus out?
Berman: I've never really kicked him out. It was all about the publicity. I wanted to show my critics at US Weekly that I know how to run my band.
Pitchfork: I heard a tale of you and Malkmus popping in a Grateful Dead tape and noodling over it for an NYC audience years ago. When was that? How did it go over?
Berman: It was awesome. I had us practicing for American Water by jamming with John Oswald's Grayfolded CDs. Since any one moment on those CDs might have 50 different Jerry Garcias playing 50 guitar lines, we just became 51 and 52. We turned ourselves up a little louder than the stereo and practiced wandering amidst the tumult.
One night we took it to the stage, a place called Baby Jupiter. It was packed via word of mouth. The soundman put on the CD, turning it up to concert volume. Malk and I did our thing with two amps and two guitars. People had fun but it was disappointing, the noodling, for those who came expecting a secret Silver Jews set.
Pitchfork: The breakdown in the new record opener, "Punks in the Beerlight", particularly smacks of Malkmus, to my ears.
Berman: Mike Fellows thought of doing that breakdown. It really brings in the dry ice. An evil lobby vibe.
Pitchfork: The band on this record is huge. It takes three hands to count them all. Was there an interview process?
Berman: Malkmus, Fellows, and Nastanovich were in from the get-go (I started writing the record in earnest last summer). Kotzur has been my favorite drummer in town since 1999 when I first saw the Brian Kotzur Band and was blown away. I saw every single Brian Kotzur Band show until it became [known as] Tim, Chad & Sherry, which is even better than BKB. He also runs a brand new metal band called Falcon. He can sing and play drums. He tours with Bobby Bare Jr. and cuts costs by playing drums, bass, and keyboards at the same time.
Now I'm going to tell you a trade secret: Tony Crow. He is the most imaginative keyboard player I know, for my tastes. He'll decorate your song like a Christmas tree if that's what you want, or he'll apply the fattest, whitest worm of a sick bottom to your rock if you need it. I'd like to pay Tony Crow in diamonds and other jewels. I also had Will [Oldham] come down and play rhythm guitar on some songs, maybe half. Azita came down from Chicago and played over half.
Last was Paz [Lenchantin]. We've been really close friends for only a year. I was sick when she came to Nashville from L.A. I knew how great she was going to be and I told her to just go over to [producer Mark] Nevers' and play banjo and violin for two days and I'd use what was great during mixing. She is maybe the first fundamentally mystic person that's ever played in the band. By the way, there are a lot of tracks burning down there that never made it. Some amazing stuff.
Pitchfork: There's lots of Mrs. Berman on the new record. How did you two first meet? How did she get involved in making records with you?
Berman: I had seen a picture of Cassie in Melody Maker. She was playing bass with M somewhere in Europe. I really got a heavy feeling looking at the picture. There's probably a German word for it. A couple months later I saw her at a crowded party in Louisville. I walked up to her with no fear and said, "Hi, Cassie." She was on her way to buy some more beer for the party. She asked me if I wanted to walk to the store with her. We've been walking to the store ever since.
Cassie has always been a better guitarist than me. She takes lessons. She has a disciplined writing schedule. She works full-time as an editor but still gets a lot of playing and writing in. "The Poor the Fair and the Good" used to be what we called her first good song. It went by the name of "The Jacket Song". I had an idea for the new words.
Pitchfork: Did you two ever figure out how to screw on your feet?
Berman: Not unless "screw" means "wallpaper," and "on your feet" is code for "your dining room."
Pitchfork: Where exactly is Oldham on this album? Does he sing?
Berman: The only singers are myself, Cassie, and Bobby Bare Jr.'s backing vocals on track five ["I'm Getting Back into Getting Back into You"]. Around the ninth second of the first track ["Punks in the Beerlight"], you can hear a subdued guitar chirring beneath and after the big blaring guitar, across the pause. That's Will. His rhythm guitars sound like him at his most benevolent.
Pitchfork: What guitar rig do you use? Still with the [Fender] Mustang?
Berman: Mustang. I used this effects pod Will gave me last year to write the new songs. You know, write to the sound of the guitar. I'm in the market for a [Gibson] SG to write the next album. Bright Flight was written on a Baby Taylor acoustic. It wasn't so popular. My fault. I let up on side two.
* * *
From Private Life to San Simeon
Pitchfork: What did you think about the Fader piece?
Berman: I don't dislike it at all, but there wasn't enough context in it to explain why I was doing the things I did in 2003. It's uncomfortable to reveal to strangers what happened to me. The whole time I was making this record I was talking about this with my rabbi. Afterwards, when I had to do press, I wondered how was I going to talk about my life.
I don't kid myself that it's gonna be about music. It never is. And I am bored when I lie or hide the truth of my life from another person, who, presumably, means no harm. But I didn't want to tell the story many times and relive it every time. I just wanted to tell it once. When the interview request came in I was just finishing the record. I had been praying for what to do, how to handle this part of the job. I took the opportunity of them coming to interview me as the time to tell it.
Considering all that, do I like [the story]? I don't know. It wasn't the solution or we wouldn't be going over this. I'd just refer you to the article. Giving people the information, well, you wonder if that makes you more vulnerable to attack. Still, it would be ridiculous to put out a record like this, with real biographical strata, and act like your New Criticism methodology disallows you from living openly as who you've been. And they're all, "That sounds like..." And you're like, "Fuck fuck fuck!!!"
Pitchfork: You have a rabbi?
Berman: Rabbi Kanter. Left our congregation last month to go teach at a rabbinical school in Ohio. "I Lost My Rabbi to Cincinnati" has been my song of woe this summer.
The cantor, Lisa Silver, is one of the most beautiful singers. I've secretly bootlegged some of the services to listen to on Fridays when I can't make it out there. I am not sure if it's kosher to make these recordings, but the beep on the digital recorder is barely noticeable except during the most silent prayers. Recently we found out that Lisa co-wrote "40 Hour Week" by Alabama, a song that always cracks me up when it comes on the radio. You'd never believe this pretty little birdlike Jewish woman wrote that number.
Pitchfork: Do you follow the message boards on Silver Jews-related websites?
Berman: Cassie has put all music sites on block filter on the computer. As of yesterday. All those instant opinions. People get on there and start nitpicking. It's maddening. It no longer seems self-evident that it's "just" their opinion. A couple listens to some mp3 and John K. Internet is ready to go public with what he thinks. One jackass writes, "There's too much reverb on Berman's vocals. Also, I'm not sure about Cassie's role on the record." Hey, let me know when you figure it out. Cause I want you to be sure.
I don't get that. Cassie's presence is not a contingency. There is no record without her on it. If there was less reverb... what? That song will never exist. If you don't like the song, great. But you're not Walter Pater, frosh. You're not even Bob Greene. Ugh.
Pitchfork: The barrage of sophomoric rock critics is part of your game these days, from the loner lashing out on a message board to the small-time guy hitting deadlines for a website. I'm not saying you're obliged to read and respond to posts or reviews, but it sounds like you take these comments pretty seriously. This sort of heat is guaranteed when you're putting out records for the philosopher-clerk demographic, right? Not saying you picked the audience, either, but those folks are mainstays by now and surely their erroneously self-important opinions don't shock or hurt you, do they?
Berman: I don't know anyone who doesn't take criticism seriously. I was trying to get nasty in this interview. Would you ask a rapper to stop hating his rivals? You seem to have a problem with me hating who I hate? You say the "heat is guaranteed" but it sounds like you're saying, "You will take the heat and like it." Fuck that rule. If Hitler didn't like my record I'd be hurt.
Pitchfork: Well, look, I've got no problem with the hating, and I much prefer you being nasty. Of course, you should care and you don't have to "take" anything-- I just question your defense. When you care out loud for the world to see, when you let the message-boarders see you sweat, it lends their opinions an undue validity. If everyone's calling you self-absorbed, you prove them right by taking any and all opinions on your work so seriously. Are you being serious about the Hitler bit? Is every layman's opinion capable of getting your proverbial goat?
Berman: The reason I don't play live is because I don't want to let them see me glow under heroic lighting. Of course I'm vulnerable to attack, as I said above. That's why we put the filter on. You will be the last person to see me sweat if this works out.
Drag City doesn't send me reviews anymore. I don't want to get gassed by the plaudits anymore than I want to give strangers the power to aggravate me. The first concern is for my work. Artists who travel the world and see hundreds of fans cheering their work nightly might be a bigger danger to your talent, becoming a consumerist hero of the new cyber marketspace. That's not what I wanted to be when I grew up.
The reason I've been trolling message boards and lurking is because I haven't gotten any feedback on Tanglewood Numbers besides about 10 one- or two-second comments from people I know. These in between times you just sit around and wait to find out if the plans you laid are generating the response you projected. I have a real desire to communicate to people outside this demo. I don't want the sourballs to shoot it down after one listen on an mp3. Of course, I can only control things on this end. Thus, the filter block. I won't even be able to read this interview when it comes out (my loophole is the library).
But I don't think I'm self-absorbed. Compared to who? Grover Norquist, Mariah Carey? I'm a decent guy. I do Meals on Wheels. I am the kind of friend who would rather talk about your life. I spend 90 percent of my day absorbing ideas and images from the visible world.
Pitchfork: Judging by what I read it seems that some folks might even craft their posts in the hopes that you will read them and be hurt/respond in interviews like this one, etc. So my point earlier, which you mistook for some sort of peacemaking hooey, was: The quickest way to get the guys on the playground to stop calling you a big ***** is to quit acting like one in public. But I guess there's an honesty issue there for you?
Berman: So the guys are right. I am exactly what I've been called and the only way to deal is make the corrections demanded of my public persona. To project "uncaring" like Malkmus. I'm not that Episcopalian. If it starts getting in the way of my work, I cut it out. Whatever that thing is. The boards got in my head this week. So that's gone.
You are witnessing the switch from regular guy to San Simeon resident. I unlisted my phone number after five years. I got a P.O. Box. Look, I'm changing into the above-it-all asshole who tours the world and hears nothing but praise and strokes. This remedy should have me writing dreck like "Everybody Hurts" by 2007.
* * *
That Graveyard Scene from Easy Rider
Pitchfork: Do you own a dog? Does it lack discipline?
Berman: Yes. His name is Miles. His good nature is a dream I have for myself. When the Buddha achieved enlightenment he was said to have been "like a deer in a deer park." Surfing on the edge of time.
Pitchfork: Does anyone else notice that Joanna Newsom sings like a methadone-addled flapper girl?
Berman: I get Emily Dickinson sauteed in Olive Oyl. Somehow that makes Bill Callahan Popeye/Hawthorne. Smog Popeye Hawthorne, a private school for the children of rich burnouts. Any day now, Joanna Newsom's debut record will pass Pavement's Westing (by Musket and Sextant) as Drag City's all-time bestseller and [label president] Dan Koretzky will finally be able to show his face in church again.
Pitchfork: What do you have to say about the Church of Scientology preaching that we should replace anti-psychotic medicine with vitamins?
Berman: Tom Cruise made a crucial miscalculation by giving a name to his deformity. He will never be able to play the role of a non-freak ever again. Sometimes I wonder if Scientology isn't just a decoy religion, created and maintained by the Church of Latter Day Saints to distract Americans from all the freaky things the Mormons do in their temples.
Pitchfork: If Scientology is right, will Drag City conspire to suppress the truth to preserve its target audience of moping, jaded, no-*****-getting wimps?
Berman: If they couldn't suppress the truth about the Suntanama, I don't see them getting very far with this project.
Pitchfork: When Faith No More first made it big, do you think Mike Patton had any idea of the effect he would have on pop culture? I often think of him as the benevolent black scientist from Terminator 2 who facilitated the development of A.I. and unwittingly brought about doomsday, except with rap-rock and the long-on-top/shaved-all-around underneath hairdo that the real rollercoaster rednecks still sport.
Berman: Joe Funderburk, the guy who mixed this album, has that haircut. He's around 50 and he takes the long gray hair and rubberbands it so it's like a gray geyser coming out of the top of his skull. Then it's shaved. Joe is a white witch from Gulfport, Mississippi. During mixing he would have to take days off to go in the woods with the other witches and warlocks. One day he invited [Steve] West and I. I did not want to go, but we were just getting to know Joe and his wife, Rowena, and both of us wondered if we insulted them by not attending their rituals [whether] they would cast some curse on the record.
So I made West go. Apparently, he danced naked in the woods. He was gibbering and covered in blood when he returned. I made him promise never to tell me what happened that night. Joe is also a very sweet man and a hard rock/blues genius who engineered the first Judds album way back when. "Captain Midnight" on Tomahawk's first album is about him, to bring it back to Mike Patton.
Pitchfork: Travis Henry for a third-round pick sounds like good news. Thoughts?
Berman: I'm very unhappy about the Titans' offseason moves. If Floyd Reese has some secret victory plan involving scuttling the team, losing [Derrick] Mason and Kevin Carter, and bringing in that punk Pacman [Jones], he better give us a sign or something. We go to about four home games a year. Towards the end of the season, when it gets cold and the team's not winning, people start giving their tickets up cheap.
Pitchfork: Man vs. Himself: As a poet, do you feel like the musician in you errs on the crass side? Likewise as a musician, do you find your inner poet to be a bit soft?
Berman: I am not bicameral in that way. I'm an integrated self.
Pitchfork: Are you a betting man?
Berman: I do bet at the track just in a social way but it's not a pull for me. Horseracing fundamentally bores me. Cassie and I went to Las Vegas for our honeymoon and I just played the slots. Won $500 on one which enabled us to rent a car and go see L.A. My first time.
Pitchfork: Have you ever had the cappicola and egg at Piranha's on 2nd Avenue? Jesus God, is that fucking sandwich good.
Berman: I will try that. I like their sandwiches a lot. I didn't think I would. One thing I realized this year, and I've been trying to tip off my younger single friends: Women don't like men who are closed-minded about food. If you order a cheeseburger on a date you might as well ask for cookies and milk for dessert. This is a turn-off, I believe.
Right now, I'm always thinking about this place on Gallatin. Eastside Fish. They have a sign says the "crunkest fish in town." The crust is fuckin' out of control.
Pitchfork: Something I've long wanted to ask you: Seventeen doctors couldn't decide whether you should be allowed in the... what?
Berman: Game. The guys dared me to pronounce it like Jagger would: "Gime." I relive that dumb hectoring style that drunk friends have when they're daring you to do something every time I hear that line.
Pitchfork: Can we do the AIM thing this week? I wanna knock out some real-time questions as well before I turn this thing in. The deadline's fast approaching. Actually, I'm a day or so late.
Berman: My arguments against AIM:
1. It's gay.
2. You got a lot of stuff already.
3. The finish line was July 31.
Why drag this out any longer? You already got more detail out of me than a grand jury.
