The chords for the songs are included with the album's liner notes, and his label, Drag City, hosted a contest in which musicians were asked to record a video covering a song from Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea feels like an honest, existential jaunt in which occasional duets between Berman and his wife, Cassie, come across as giddy and even goofy. Throughout the album, other songs such as "Strange Victory, Strange Defeat," "Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer" and "We Could Be Looking for the Same Thing" move with a greater sense of focus and eloquence that transcends the darkness of Tanglewood Numbers but still bursts with concealed meaning. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is rife with lyrical references to ancient Jewish texts, Emily Dickinson poems and presidential addresses – all boiled down to fine but puzzling personal anthems. The album's opening song, "What Is Not But Could Be If" rings with a clarity that shows off his baritone voice and vision while shedding the karaoke-like awkwardness that hangs over previous Silver Jews albums. But if Tanglewood Numbers was an attempt at exorcism, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea turns over a new leaf. The album was a dark affair that brandished deep scars from battles with substance abuse, suicide attempts and various other bouts with psychological turbulence. People wanted to know why would someone who had what he had going for him throw it all away? And of course that's a question that is sometimes asked of me."īerman released his fifth Silver Jews full-length, Tanglewood Numbers, in October 2005. I was thinking about a friend who had taken his life at the peak of his life as a very successful artist with all the recognition and reward that comes with that. "A lot of thinking is going on about what supposedly can't happen. "'Candy Jail' is a contradictory image of course," Berman explains. But upon closer examination, he's not just singing about sweets. On the surface, allusions to a cornucopia of peppermint-flavored jail bars, peanut-brittle bunk beds and marshmallow walls seem like nonsense.
"Living in a candy jail/where the guards are gracious and the grounds are grand/and the warden really listens and he understands," Berman sings. Just listen to his double-edged lyricism in "Candy Jail" from his latest release, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea ( Drag City). Like his interviews, Berman's lyrics have their own internal sense of logic that reveals all sorts of hidden meaning. His responses simultaneously feel conversational and elusive, and getting inside his head is virtually impossible.
He relegates interviews to e-mail, both in the interest of clarity and to maintain the cryptic shield that surrounds Silver Jews records, it seems. He has the ability to write lyrics rife with symbolism and that resonate with a universal sense of truth, but are grotesque in their painful honesty. Nor does he carry the weighty, country-boy mystique of Will Oldham. Unlike his friend and sometimes bandmate Stephen Malkmus, Berman doesn't fit the mold of an ironic hipster. He is also one of the hardest to understand. David Berman is one of the most lauded characters in the canon of indie-rock songwriters.
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