Not Fade Away
Sep 19, 2019
4 minutes
ROB HUGHES
DAVID BERMAN
Silver Jews commander (1967-2019)
TALKING to Uncut earlier this year, David Berman explained that writing some of the more autobiographical songs for his latest venture, Purple Mountains, helped him through some bad fixes: “I forced myself to see that I preferred the future where the bad thing happened and the song got written, to one where I would be spared the suffering yet had nothing to show for it.”
Suffering for his art wasn’t new to Berman. He struggled with depression for most of his adult life, exacerbated by bouts of substance abuse. Yet the observational songs he wrote for Silver Jews, the New York collective he co-founded in 1989 with Pavement duo Stephen Malkmus and
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