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David Berman, reclusive musician who fronted the indie rock band Silver Jews – obituary
David Berman, who has died aged 52, was a musician and poet who led Silver Jews, a band whose lo-fi sound encapsulated a melancholy, poignant strain of American indie rock; while they never came close to being chart-toppers, they built up a devoted cult following.
Berman’s work was underpinned by his preoccupation with the lyrics. “I couldn’t rock out harder than everybody, or overpower people with mastery like Jack White of the White Stripes, so why try?” he explained. “That’s why I’ve always worked harder on words.”
He was born David Craig Berman on January 4 1967 in Williamsburg, Virginia, and was brought up in Texas (in 2015 he changed his middle name to Cloud following the death of a friend and fellow-musician, Dave Cloud).
When David was seven his parents divorced, and he moved to Dallas with his father, who worked as a lobbyist for tobacco, alcohol and firearm companies. Richard Berman was once described on the television programme 60 Minutes as “the booze and food industries’ weapon of mass destruction”; his calling would cast a long shadow over his son’s life.
David attended the University of Virginia, where he met Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. They formed a band, Ectoslavia, which fused melodic pop with distorted electronics.
After graduating, they moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, Berman working as a security guard at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. In 1989 they renamed themselves Silver Jews and began recording offbeat, haunting tracks.
Malkmus and Nastanovich formed a second band, Pavement, with more of an eye on the big time, and they began cutting a swathe through the American indie scene (eventually also making their name in Britain).
Silver Jews, meanwhile, recorded some well-received ultra lo-fi EPs, and Berman enrolled in a graduate writing programme at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In 1994 Silver Jews’ first album, Starlite Walker, was released, and there were five more over the next 14 years, though mainstream success was never on the cards given Berman’s reluctance to play live.
While recording the second album, The Natural Bridge (1996), Berman, who was struggling with drug and drink problems, had to be admitted to hospital suffering sleep deprivation; the band’s drummer at the time, Rian Murphy, recalled him as looking like “a man who was being haunted by ghosts while he was singing”.
In 1999 Berman published a well-received poetry collection, Actual Air, but in 2003 he nearly died of a drugs overdose while staying in the hotel suite in which Al Gore had awaited the result of the 2000 presidential election. “I want to die where the presidency died,” Berman said at the time.
Although Berman did eventually tour with Silver Jews, including dates in Britain and Ireland, in 2009 he split up the band – in protest, he said, at his father’s work, which was, he said, “my gravest secret”, “worse than crack addiction”. The band, he said, was “too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused”.
Silver Jews’ farewell gig took place in a cave 300ft below ground at McMinnville, Tennessee. Berman thereafter retreated into the life of a recluse, devoting much of his time to writing a blog, “Menthol Mountains”.
He re-emerged in 2019 with a new project, Purple Mountains, backed by the indie-folk band Woods, and was due to embark on a tour on August 10.
Berman, who committed suicide, is survived by his wife Cassie (née Marrett), who played bass guitar on Silver Jews’ later records, but from whom he separated last year.
David Berman, born January 4 1967, died August 7 2019