“What is not but could be if, what could appear in the morning mist, with all associated risk, what is not but could be if.”
Lyrics from “What Is Not But Could Be If.”
Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
Silver Jews
The Silver Jews’ new CD Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea contains a collection of songs that begin in a “hangover kind of mood,” says David Berman ’95G. Berman describes Lookout as two halves of a whole: “The first half is the problem while the second offers the solution.”
The recording marks a departure from his first five albums. Berman says the new album is more direct than the others, and the songs carry a tenor of “outwardlookingness.” It’s been 10 fruitful years since Berman hung out at Bartlett Hall while a student in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers.
Berman has produced a fine body of work that extends boundaries of genre and medium, with six studio recordings of music and one book of poetry.
On campus, Berman studied under Dara Wier, James Tate, and the late Agha Shahid Ali.
“To me they existed as the rarest thing in nature,” Berman says of his professors, “and they did so in the most dignified way. Beyond their advice and critique, the example of their lives made the one I’ve found seem possible.”
In 1999, Berman published a book of poems, Actual Air, which Tate described as “narratives that freeze life in impossible contortions.” Since then, he has focused on music and the Silver Jews. “I’ve held back on another book until I can be sure that it will offer something new,” he says.
The Jews are an ever-shifting cast of musicians, each adding idiosyncratic embellishments to Berman’s intelligent songwriting. Country-rock rhythms and anthems of small-town despair mix with anxious, urban work-ups to form a sonic landscape.
Berman’s deadpan voice drags across an expanse of ocean, echoing an inner turmoil.
“In my experience, writing poetry is the emotion and intellect working together to create some new spirit in the world,” says Berman. “Songwriting starts somewhere lower in the body, and has farther to go but gets there quicker by bypassing the intellect… sometimes.”
