Five Years Without David Berman

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TW: This essay contains mentions of suicide.

On this day in 2019, I was sitting in a bathtub in Chicago’s Hyatt hotel downtown. It was night one of a road trip my mom and I were taking across the Midwest, in the summer before my senior year in college. I was considering going to grad school at either Notre Dame or the University of Iowa, so the plan was to visit those campuses across a weeklong trek. We’d been driving for hours and Chicago was, really, just a stopgap in our journey to Minneapolis. After deciding to make it a night in, Mom found a place in town that made gluten-free deep dish pizza and I, against my better judgement, figured a soak might make for a nice reprieve before hitting the road again in the morning. Mom warned me about getting into a hotel bathtub, but I ignored it. After stewing in the water for just a few moments, it became clear that the bleach the housekeeping crew used to clean the tub was still fresh. But I powered through the burning, even if my arms were turning a concerning shade of red and starting to itch.

In the hotel room, Mom watched an ambulance pull up to the front doors downstairs. Paramedics rolled a stretcher inside and out of sight; she called at me from afar: “Are you still alive in there?” Checking Instagram on my phone, I told her “yes” in a “that’s such a stupid question” kind of way and then caught the news on Pitchfork’s page: “David Berman Dead at 52.” Admittedly, I had no idea who David Berman was. I didn’t know what Silver Jews was, nor had I heard much about Purple Mountains at all. I hadn’t yet made the voluntary choice to live in such close proximity to the music industry; keeping tabs on every new release was still far beyond me. I was going to go to grad school and get an MFA in poetry. In hot water slowly cooling around me, I scrolled through a world grieving, something that gets more common each year. Of course, the body taken out of the Chicago Hyatt in August 2019 was not David’s. I don’t know whose it was. But you never get used to an ambulance’s whir. It shakes you awake, even when you’ve been up for hours.

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Truthfully, most of the people in David Berman’s niche were foreign to me too. I wasn’t familiar with Drag City and had only just recently gotten into Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Songwriters like Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Joanna Newsom, Bill Callahan and Stephen Malkmus were just names I’d likely scrolled past without considering. That picture in the Pitchfork article, of this slender white guy with purple-tinted glasses, sunken eyes and a receding hairline—it was a portrait that lingered. David wasn’t looking at you. He was looking through you. He looked like the kind of person you never wanted to become, maybe someone you once knew. Maybe he looked like somebody who was already inside you.

Reading any obituary about David Berman offered a crash-course on his career. Outlets summed up 30 years of performing in a few paragraphs, touching on how he formed Silver Jews in the 1980s with Malkmus and Bob Natanovich and how Silver Jews never kept a consistent lineup across 14 years and six albums. David was a poet himself, having put out his debut collection Actual Air a year after Silver Jews released their era-defining album American Water. In 2008, David canned his longtime band and “quit music.” He feared that, if he stuck with it, he’d stop being good. He resented his father Rick Berman, who’d been nicknamed “Dr. Evil” for his corrupt lobbyist agendas, and believed that his songwriting could never undo the damning deeds of his father’s own corporate greed. He loved George Strait one-twos and, after kicking a punishing drug habit, became a devout Jew. During his time away from music, David huddled in his Nashville home and read lots of books.

This was all a part of the brief on David Berman. In July 2019, he stepped out of the shadows under a new moniker, Purple Mountains, and had an eponymous record to share. A month later, he was gone. You never want to say it was “as simple as that,” because it never is, but if you didn’t know him or his music or his writing, that’s what it was. In that bathtub, alone, I played the 10 most popular Silver Jews songs on Apple Music. “Random Rules,” “Dallas,” “Smith & Jones Forever” and “Punks in the Beerlight” showed up, and then it was “How to Rent a Room” and “People.” I was transfixed, but not in love. In the same way Stephen Malkmus’s vocal took some getting used to, David’s singing was an acquired taste. But his lyricism was like a mash-up of Paris, Texas and Frank O’Hara, skirting across the underbellies of Americana while stopping to marvel at the ephemeral in the meantime. I listened to Purple Mountains and I liked it enough.

At 7 PM on August 7th, 2019, Drag City broke the news on social media of David’s passing. “We couldn’t be more sorry to tell you this,” the record label wrote on Twitter. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt the world stop on behalf of someone you never knew, but you don’t feel it any less just because they’re a stranger. It was odd to me then, how the world was mourning David while, on a different floor of my hotel, someone else’s death was packed into the back of an ambulance van to the tune of city noise and nothing else. The way I move through loss is much different now than it was before all of us became overwhelmed by a rising daily death count. I am numb to the sheer volume of goneness, but I remember every brushstroke of sadness that washed over me in that Chicago bathtub—for somebody whose music was weird but not yet wonderful to my ears. Thousands and thousands of people, including myself, spent some time with David on August 7th. I hummed the “a blizzard flew in through the door, and little glowin’ cum buckets in her ankles” line while Mom and I drove to Minnesota on August 8th; I thought about the concept of nitrogen afternoons and wondered if they looked like the acres and acres of flat, empty farmland that eclipsed both sides of me.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t know who David Berman was or what his music sounded like. And I say this as someone who revisits Purple Mountains all the time in 2024. I treasure the Tennessee EP with my life. 99% of my poetry bookshelf is packed up and sitting in storage, but Actual Air has a place in my room with the novels and the nonfiction I might one day revisit. David was soft-spoken and had a dry wit about him that existed beyond his songwriting. His exigency was rivaled only by his implausible sense of retreat. Romance had a place in his music, but so did glints of extra-terrestrial breakage. Build an altar on a summer night, he told us. Smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch, he immediately added. In David’s eyes, human existence was rarely anything more than a measurement of senseless things sensibly colliding. You could love someone to the max, but sometimes it gets really, really bad. “I’m just letting the day be what it is: a place for a large number of things to gather and interact—not even a place but an occasion, a reality for real things,” David wrote in the poem “Self-Portrait at 28.” I hold onto that.

When I say that I wish I’d never learned about David Berman, what I mean is I wish I had never gotten so intimate with someone who could, so effortlessly, telegraph the suffocation of living. Everyone’s symptoms of clinical depression are different. For me, I have always felt tailed by this unshakable, looming sense of endings. Strangers may call that having suicidal ideations, but I am not actively thinking about taking my own life. Rather, I often find myself considering different ages and whether or not I will make it to them. The answer is usually no. Purple Mountains is one big ending mulled over through subtle acts of gentleness. That trip to the Midwest in 2019 felt like it would be my last. I could sense that time was running out. My chronic pain had been flaring up worse than ever, and I didn’t know if whatever life was waiting for me after graduation would even be worth rising up to in the first place.

Driving through Minnesota and Wisconsin and Iowa felt like my last opportunity to see something new with the only person I would feel bad about leaving behind. But it was like seeing a bunch of variations of Ohio, as the road signs arrived in different shapes and the towns went by different names. I wanted juxtapositions. I wanted cautionary tales. I wanted to see the Dells and the Twin Cities and wonder why God made them look like that. I wanted to find out if, when the sun sets in the places I don’t call home, everyone else still looks beautiful in the light. But interstates aren’t that poetic. “People leave and no highway will bring them back,” David wrote so we wouldn’t feel so alone.

After COVID-19 hit, life went on pause and, suddenly, thousands of graduates like me got their degree on a video chat screen and had no clue where they were going next. Campus shut down and I moved back in with my folks. Grad school was off the table; I didn’t want to go anymore anyway. The English department gave me its outstanding senior award remotely and I spent the next five months selling most of my possessions to make a little cash. My girlfriend got a job in Columbus and we agreed it was time to move in together, even though I was jobless and probably more mentally ill than I’d ever been. Still, we found a shoebox in the Clintonville neighborhood for a grand a month. The bathroom had a pink toilet and bathtub.

My girlfriend worked from our one-bedroom studio, in a closet we took the doors off of so she’d have space for a desk. All day she’d type away, writing travel articles for a magazine you could only get in grocery stores. And there I was, holding court on the couch and then the bed and then the couch again. I spent the rest of 2020 in Columbus editing my first poetry manuscript while doing a graphic design hustle on the side. I made a couple hundred bucks a month running social media accounts for a coffee company. We rarely left the house and I got COVID from the mailman. There’s so much to say about the pandemic and all of the ways it fractured this country and this planet and our lives and our collective and personal health, but I find myself often thinking about the ways it broke my relationship in half—how my auto-immune disorders fastened disastrously into a lockdown-induced anxiety disorder and turned me into an agoraphobic-in-training. And through all that time, I thought it was love that could withstand a lopsided income ratio and a global crisis. As I learned, and as David Berman suggested in his music time and time again, you need so much more than just love.

I forgot about David’s work until the autumn of 2020. Streaming had become a refuge during lockdown, and I started watching Ozark at the behest of my girlfriend, who wanted me to join in on it with her before season four’s eventual release. It was a period of my life defined by the act of sitting still, but we’d make tofu chicken nuggets and alfredo and watch Ozark together for a few hours every night. In episode six of season three, a Silver Jews song played in the background of a pivotal scene between my two favorite characters, Ruth (Julia Garner) and Ben (Tom Pelphrey). “Grass grows in the icebox, the year ends in the next room,” David’s voice let out behind them. “It is autumn and my camouflage is dying.” When the episode was over, I searched those lines on Google. The results told me it was “The Wild Kindness,” the American Water song I thought about while surveying the Midwest a year earlier. Nitrogen afternoons had returned once again. Forever was now delayed.

With no job to go to, I listened to every song David Berman ever wrote that was available to stream. I consumed every Silver Jews album in order, then I went backwards and listened to Tennessee over and over. I slowly crawled back to Purple Mountains, which I hadn’t heard since Chicago the year before. All of the usual suspects presented themselves beautifully again—“All My Happiness is Gone,” “Margaritas at the Mall,” “Snow is Falling in Manhattan.” It was magic and misery doing a two-step with each other across a 44-minute waltz. On “I Loved Being My Mother’s Son,” David sealed his momma’s boy identity in amber. The story goes that, after his mother died in 2016, he picked up a guitar again and started strumming that song, which eventually became the first conclusive piece of Purple Mountains.

Because I grew up 15 minutes from my college’s campus, moving to Columbus was the first time I ever really left home. Growing up an only child, the one thing I always dreamed of was getting far away from home. And then I did and I hated it. I missed my mom greatly. And being an only child, I know she worried about me every second I was away. When I was younger, she used to say that, if anything bad ever happened to me, she would kill herself because she couldn’t live without me. “When the dying’s finally done and the suffering subsides, all the suffering gets done by the ones we leave behind,” David once reckoned. I used to resent her for saying a thing like that, for somehow guilting me into living just so she could continue living, too.

I thought it wasn’t very kind to put pressure like that on your own kin, to wager that a destiny isn’t worth a damn if this person you created out of thin air doesn’t live long enough to see yours completed. But then I heard the “I wasn’t done being my mother’s son” line for the first time, and it made sense. I was an only child with no siblings and, sometimes, no friends to speak of. Like David, I loved (and still love) my mom to the maximum because. For 25 years, I loved being her son. For this past year, I’ve loved being her child. And David, in a rare occurrence, was direct and blunt about it: He missed his mother. And, on a record like Purple Mountains, which sometimes sounds like David telling us why he took his own life, that innate sense of maternal yearning feels all the more crushing—a bleak, soured fit, in which we navigate the oft-immovable trenches of our worst abasements and cry out for our mothers just like we did when a doctor took us away from them for the first time. She was, she was, she was.

David had a unique way of creating his own language. He was a neologist at heart (he did coin the “slanted-and-enchanted” phrase, after all), having made his living off tapestries of philosophy, addiction, fantasy and heartbreak. When he wrote poetry, he wrote about sin and gravity working in tandem. Through songs, he offered pints of wisdom to pair with the cruelty of the hand you’re dealt. “An anchor lets you see the river move,” he cheekily sang on “How to Rent a Room,” before settling back into his role as a guy who sang about ghosts as if they were in the same room clutching the same microphone. Marc Hogan once called David a “man too brilliant for his own health.” I think Marc Hogan was right.

Almost four years have passed since I heard Purple Mountains for the second time, and I consider myself a reluctant David Berman fan now. He layered his tragedies like lasagna, stacking irony on top of itself while doling out notes of wit, luck and love. He was a wistful erudite who could sing of hot middle-aged women and getting out of debt as effortlessly as he could lying, houses dreaming in blueprints, B.B. King guest-starring on General Hospital, the dangers of Kentucky towns and God creating the sun and the wind. There are songwriters who can write well about the fruits of living, and there are songwriters who can write well about the snags of wanting to die. Then there is David Berman, who could do both. Like David once sang: “Songs build little rooms in time.” His final stage name was Purple Mountains but he left off the “majesty.” The beauty became a bruise. And, truth be told, that still scares the living hell out of me.

My girlfriend and I broke up in early 2022 and, a month later, I moved out of Columbus. Rather than find a new place to stay in the city, I accepted the truth: I needed my mom. So, I moved back in with her and my dad. Well, I moved into the house next to them. But it was close enough, and I could tell Mom was happy to have me home, to not have to worry so hard anymore. David Berman sang “everything in this room right now is a part of me” just six months after I was born and now, as I share a house with my mom, she tells me that she sometimes worries about me even when I’m in the next room. I think about that night in Chicago a lot, how she saw ambulance lights and her first thought was to check on her child. I have never been very good at the act of survival, and my history of being a flight risk was once measurable enough that sirens turned curiosity into worry. But I am much happier these days. And in my dreams, my mom still comes to the bathroom door and asks if I am alive. And in my dreams, just as David wrote in “Serenade for a Wealthy Widow,” I tell her “yes,” but I tell her “yes” in an “I am here and I am still here” kind of way.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Everything in This Room Right Now is a Part of Me: Five Years Without David Berman

Five years ago today, David Berman passed away. In 2024, we're still untangling how he could so effortlessly telegraph the suffocation of living and dole out notes of wit, luck and love while stacking layers of irony.