David Berman, chief singer, songwriter, cook, and bottle washer of Silver Jews, has never been easy to pin down. On "Living Waters," off the early Starlite Walker album, a quizzical Berman muses, "Now people are good/and people are bad/and I'm never sure which one I am." Four albums and 12 years later, he's just as reluctant to describe himself. "Classifying yourself," he says, "is like punching yourself in the face. It's hard to get any power behind it."
Berman formed Silver Jews with Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich in 1989 while the three were students at the University of Virginia. There was little structure at first, with the band improvising songs into their friends' answering machines. The Jews' first few efforts on Drag City (The Arizona Record and Starlite Walker) found Berman intermingling lo-fi country with fuzzed-out rock and the occasional bout of spastic noise. The Natural Bridge, from 1996, sounded cleaner with Berman's literate, quirky lyrics taking center stage. The sparkling, laid-back American Water and 2001's uneven Bright Flight (Berman admits to having "let up on side two") cemented his position as one of American music's foremost lyricists.
When I ask him about writers who have influenced his songwriting, Berman replies, "Chuck Berry for the clarity, King David for the charity, and William Faulkner for the singularity," but on musical influences, he's cagier, neatly sidestepping the question, saying "Jimmy Buffett has been a negative influence on my writing and the writing of others."
There's very little Jimmy Buffett on the newest Silver Jews album, 2005's Tanglewood Numbers, which begins with a few rockers. "Punks in the Beerlight" opens with a late-Pavement-style guitar line and then leads into the bouncy rave-up "Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed." The record oscillates between twin poles of rock and country, and Berman is ably backed by a band that includes Malkmus and Nastanovich, as well as Berman's wife, Cassie, Will Oldham, and Bobby Bare Jr.
Silver Jews' trademark evocative, sometimes humorous lyrics ("I've been working at the airport bar, it's like Christmas in a submarine" from the lilting "I'm Getting Back into Getting Back into You") are still present, but Berman says he "feels the songs are more declarative and less decorative. Not informed as much by place [as in past albums] as by personalities."
It's impossible to listen to the record without hearing echoes of Berman's struggles with depression and addiction. In a 2005 interview, he describes 1999 through the end of 2003 as "a long, suitcase-battering journey of subaqueous intoxication" from which he resurfaced in 2004 to enter rehab. Listening to the measured stomp of the record's penultimate track, "The Farmer's Hotel," I sense a dark undercurrent of unnamed fear and dread. It's a relief when Berman takes us away from "that rank abattoir," saying only, "things so unclean are best left unseen. Please keep away from the Farmer's Hotel." Enigmatic to the end, he feels no imperative to name the horror, instead inducing it through implication and allusion.
Having safely returned from his harrowing journey, Berman launched the first-ever Silver Jews tour earlier this year. I asked him what prompted him to go out on the road after nearly 15 years of refusing to tour. "There was some rigorous inner coaching along with a perceived landslide of imperatives from the upper world to 'get out and do something.' Also, it was the last on my list of things to do before turning 40."
Something must have gone right because he reupped for an eight-country overseas swing. The most memorable moment? "The two shows we did in Tel Aviv were unreal. At the show in Jaffa, Caesar and Napoleon had walked down the street the theater was on. And Jonah had been sold some bad drugs in the alley behind the club right before his whale trip."
I ask him whether he has time to write while traveling, but he says no. "Ideas don't just come up on me. I have to be actively lying in wait for them." So after this brief West Coast tour he's going back to Nashville to settle down for the winter and lay some traps for new ideas. What's important now, though, is that Silver Jews are coming to town. So don't worry too much about figuring David Berman out; just go and see him. And stay away from the Farmer's Hotel. 
