Eulogy for David Berman

My greatest living hero killed himself several days ago, so I'm going to break the tradition of the monthly random updates and tell you a bit about him if you have a few minutes.

When I was in my teens there were these file sharing clients called Bearshare and Limewire, etc. One day I accidentally downloaded a track called Blue Arrangements by a band called Silver Jews and thought, What the hell is this. 

A few days later and I chanced on it in my downloads folder and listened to it again and thought, Mmmm, all right.

A few more days later and something hit me. Their music suddenly sounded better than fucking Christmas. It sang all the colours my soul would sing if my soul could sing.  You can hear the original track here. 

I'd never been into country music in the slightest, but their weird mix of existential blues and slide guitar got me interested.

I listened to everything they'd ever done, demos, proper albums, all of it - and it was all fantastic, and most of it was in part due to the lead singer, David Berman - writing the lyrics. He had the most wonderful way with words like, "I've been working at the airport bar, It's like Christmas in a submarine." That's exactly what working in the airport bar must feel like, surely.

I was hooked. More than I'd ever been on anything before. Every track had some subtle hiding lesson in there about the sad stains on the human soul. This was a man who'd properly been down to the bottom and come back up a while to tell the rest of us about it.

I never stopped listening to his stuff, not through all my musical phases.  He sang about love properly, he sang about loss properly, he had this incredible talent for not just getting down the feeling, but the feeling of the feeling, and I tried to imitate him for years.

He wrote a book of poetry called Actual Air which defined my years as a uni student. If we were hammered enough at parties I'd pass it around and if people liked it, I tried to keep them around as friends.

I saw his band in York when I was 21 and it was one of the best days of my life. They played great, and he was his usual self-deprecating self, and it was as close to a spiritual experience as I suspect I'll ever get.

Some bands are passing love affairs and you get bored easily. Others you fall in love with for life. His was the latter, and his lyrics were the latter. I've listened to lots of music over the last few decades, I'm sure you have too. I've watched people get all teary eyed with the death of celebrities and while I saw it was unfortunate from the outside, it didn't make much sense personally, because you didn't fucking know them. 

In this one case though, in this one rather unique case - which I hope you'll forgive me for laying on you here - I think our species just lost a gem. I don't know why he killed himself, and I don't really want to think about it. I was days from making a video specifically about how much his music meant to me, and perhaps that's why this is such a strange situation. I've been writing the script in my head for months. He's now apparently not among the living and I have no idea what to do with this information. I cannot, cannot fucking believe the thing.

So what I'd like to do is share the stuff I loved of his with you. You might not like it and that's totally fine of course, taste is taste. But I originally downloaded something of his from a blog I stumbled on years ago as a 16 year old, and subsequently stumbled on the man himself with P2P sharing, and if only one of you has the same stumble in serendipity and sees what I saw in the man, well that would make me extremely happy. Below is the best stuff I think David Berman and his band ever wrote and it's carried me through the darkest periods in my life and then some. If you've ever enjoyed my stuff online, it's in large part because I was ripping off David Berman. I would quite like to have written to him and told him that, and I thought about it lots, and I always delayed the thing. And I rather wish I had written to him. Lots. 

Well Dave, godspeed and thank you ever, ever, ever so much for the music. You will be missed more than I can ever, ever, ever possibly put down in words.

As mentioned, these are the tracks that stayed with me the longest. I still listen to them regularly and I hope you like them too.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBAVX1oslEM 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIKVJRMv1T4 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tWmPFwYRk8 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-yfDo0V8co 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvtRtDh3-Z8