David Berman
I made records for 20 years, I lived off it. But people would say I made so many mistakes, I did so many things you're not supposed to do. I had a band name nobody could say. I didn't play live. I never practiced, I never got better at my instrument.
All my songs were made at the end of the neck, 'farmer's corner' chords.
I'm not a good singer.
I don't have religion or culture. I don't have anything I can believe in when I'm really scared. When I play the songs, I feel the fear disappear.
I'm not the type to demand affirmation or to worry that I'll be forgotten. I'm more the type to dare the world to forget me.
I want so many artists that I care about to go away and grow up, and have been amazed at how hard that is for some people to do.
I try every day and every night to find a movie or a TV show that I can watch, but I just can't make it past ten minutes of anything.
I've never been a big movie person, but I used to watch movies regularly in my life, and sometime in the '90s I just stopped. I certainly never was an educated moviegover.
My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.
That's the way I've always been, between the albums: For two- or three-year gaps I wouldn't pick up a guitar. And when I don't pick up a guitar for a year or two, that's when the songs fall out.
I don't think any songwriter who comes up through playing clubs can really claim to have independently developed their art. All along the way so much information is coming, the writer inside the performer unconsciously reacts to all of that. By the time they get to be thirty, the writer is gone.
Fan reaction is so out-sized and hyperbolic in rock music compared to other arts.
My great grandfather was the last practicing Jew in my family. He died in 1982.
I always had a background belief in God. In other words, instinctually I've never doubted that we are not alone.
I ask myself when I see a new album: 'Is this an album that they needed to make, or do they need to just keep making albums?'
I guess when I was younger, I'd have assumed that in 2008 music would be full of great writers following in the tradition of the young great writers of the '60s and '70s, but it hasn't turned out that way, or at least there are no other writers around that I look at and think: 'Wow, I'm outclassed, I need to get out of this business.'
My whole life I've tried to find the thing I can do that other people can't do, and invest in that, and the one thing I can do is write narratives and build characters. I can do that.
I mean, I wasn't fortunate enough to have ever experienced starting out with a band and sticking with them, so that would be interesting to me. People whose bands start out like that, when they break up it's always terrible.
It frustrated me at college that all the acts in the Top 10 were like The Moody Blues and Phil Collins. It was like why did we get stuck with the last generation's music, why can't we have our own?
When people tend to be happier they have more interest in the world around them.
For the first 12 years of recording I would finish the album, then on the day it came out I'd never hear the songs again.
Some people like my singing. But it sounds like bad singing to a lot of other people.
I've had to stop going to the nearest grocery store that seems to play Shania Twain's 'Forever and For Always' whenever I'm there. It's hard to shop for frozen entrees through cold-air blasted tears. Feels good on a flushed face though.
I think reporters think that they can get something extra out of a person face-to-face, but in reality people just give stock answers because there's a social situation going on.
In an email... like I did 100 interviews, and I never repeated one story. That's impossible to do when you do face-to-face interviews, because your brain locks and you say the same thing over and over again.
I hear luxury brand names, I cringe.
I guess on all Silver Jews records, it's extremely male-centric.
There are enough really good love songs and I don't even know if I could write one if I tried.
I am not only neither Christian nor Jewish, but said to be in between, and I feel the same way about being from the South and being from the North. I write with my left hand but I throw a ball with my right hand.
I've never done much to try to build an audience.
I have this Martin electric/acoustic that's made of black formica. Really cool.
In the beginning, because of the Pavement thing, we were able to sell a certain amount of records. We were able to sell not such a great amount of records, but enough to live on. So there was no incentive to do what didn't come naturally.
Obviously there was the idea that we could sell more records if we played live, but I guess I didn't care enough to sell more records to do that.
In 2004, I don't think any Silver Jews fan was probably expecting another record.
A lot of the Jews I met in Israel, almost all of them are secular. They get turned off by their religion, in the same way that Americans get turned off Christianity by people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.
If they told me I couldn't leave the radius of six miles from my house, I really wouldn't care. There's nowhere I really want to go.
I still believe in putting something out and not asking people to buy the record, then buy a ticket to my show and then buy a t-shirt and then a, like, copy of the show they just saw on CD. That's undignified to me.
I've never been from a certain group. I've always reserved a space for myself where I'm unattached to any group, but the part of Judaism that I really take away, that means something to me, is the part about community.
I used to consider myself weak.
When you can't see you become very timid about space and moving. You become less aggressive and less tenacious. Lots of things that shouldn't be affected by vision really are. And you don't even know what they are until they become unstuck.
The songs of mine that don't work, the ones that I wouldn't consider playing live for instance, fail to integrate their idiosyncracies. It's not that they fail because they're boring, but because they overreach.
Definitely in everything I do, the comic is a part of it.
In a lot of ways, I wouldn't be an artist in another time. I need to exist in a time where high and low art mix easily.
The rules changed for art around 1989. We were all loosed upon the canon to clip and paste and borrow and update. Only thing is, unless you were in New York or in a cultural studies program, that new paradigm probably wasn't going to sink in until the Internet arrived.
The overlap between Pavement's fan base and people who liked Silver Jews was total. In my mind, even a local band with 20 fans had more unqualified support.
I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.
I have always had a blank spot where my regret is supposed to be.
Ever since I was a little kid, I've always felt un-trusted.
When I started the band, the name 'Silver Jews' had no literal meaning - it was just an abstraction.