Time Capsule: Silver Jews, Tennessee

Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at the companion EP to Silver Jews’ fourth studio album, a collection of four tracks about the fruits of domesticity, fixing horse races, bedding librarians, hating your family and making your own luck.

In 1998, Silver Jews made one of the greatest albums of all time, American Water. Songs like “Smith & Jones Forever,” “Random Rules” and “The Wild Kindness” remain emblematic in indie rock’s canon—and they remain emblematic of David Berman’s talents as a songwriter (“bluebirds lodged in an evergreen altar” still lingers in my dreams). The American Water Band—Berman, Stephen Malkmus, Mike Fellows, Tim Barnes and Chris Stroffolino—sounded tighter than ever then, but Malkmus and Stroffolino wouldn’t return for the next Silver Jews LP, Bright Flight, in 2001. Malkmus had to go and make the last Pavement album, Terror Twilight, and put out his eponymous debut solo record in the time between.

Bright Flight is a good record, but it’s not as good as American Water. Truth be told, few records are as good as American Water. But it’s the album that introduces a new voice into the Silver Jews universe: Cassie Berman, David’s wife. I am somewhat of a romantic when it comes to the collaborations between the Berman spouses. To make Bright Flight, they moved to Nashville and drank in the city’s country scene. Malkmus’s absence could be felt, as Bright Flight was the first Silver Jews album that sounded like a David Berman solo album. And that was okay! “When God was young, he made the wind and the sun,” he sang. “Since then, it’s been a slow education.” It’s a staggering introduction to a wistful erudite’s linguistic playground. Having Cassie appear on songs like “Slow Education,” “Let’s Not and Say We Did” and “Tennessee” made Bright Flight sound like the lo-fi indie version of a Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris record.

“Tennessee” was a particular standout on Bright Flight. A four-minute song that pauses midway through as if beginning a new story, it was such a profound, shaking track that Berman elected to name an EP after it. The song is meta and familiar, as Berman riffs on his and Cassie’s move to Nashville, talking about living in “Nashville and I’ll make a career out of writing sad songs and gettin’ paid by the tear.” He gets cute in the chorus. “Marry me and leave Kentucky,” Berman goes. “Come to Tennessee, ‘cause you’re the only 10 I see.” When Berman repeats the “you’re the only 10 I see” bar, the track kicks into gear through Paul Niehaus’s pedal steel guitar. Cue Cassie’s unmistakable doubling voice in the post-chorus: “I’ve looked through offices and honky-tonks for men man enough to be Mister, Misses Tennessee.” A love song, “Tennessee” is not without Berman’s commonplace phrasings: “Punk rock died when the first kid said ‘Punk’s not dead,’” he tackles on verse three; “We’re off to the land of club soda unbridled, we’re off to the land of hot middle-aged women; off to the land whose blood runneth orange” goes the fourth verse. All Vols references and age preferences aside, Tennessee’s namesake is some of Berman’s prettiest work.

Tennessee was meant to serve as a compliment to Bright Flight rather than exist as an afterthought or some B-sides. The other three songs don’t act so saloon-door and dreamy, but there’s something to be said about their chameleonic skins. “Long Long Gone,” which rips and roars as if Malkmus is manning the guitar-playing (he’s not), is as grungy as Berman has ever been. He sings about cars running on teardrops, changing the pattern of the stars, his mother slowly losing her looks and a father who’s come back from the dead. “Some of us are broke and having problems,” he admits after asking the Lord to return from the mountain, backed by Cassie’s wail. Berman sings about hitting a superfecta bet, which is one of the least successful wagers in horse betting, to get out of debt. He knows he’s a bit unlucky (“We are not one with everything”) but there’s still something in this life worth gambling for (“Even though we were poor, the sun still shined on our door”).

The track from Tennessee that most of us cite 23 years later is “I’m Gonna Love the Hell Out of You,” which features some of Berman’s gutsiest linework (“In a lonely Swedish bookstore banging a librarian, the sound of rain and lightning was my cue”). With a throbbing bassline from Mike Fellows and a slight tinge of tambourine shaking while Berman deploys a bluesy, drop-tuned guitar, “I’m Gonna Love the Hell Out of You” is a hedonistic ditty that is, as David lets on, “sentimental as a cat’s grave.” He’s 19 and “dead from the neck up,” oggling over a Christian rock starlet whose body “broke my eyes.” Flickers of brandy wine, android crosses, bankrupt swans and a propensity for doing rails of cocaine come and go, Berman confesses to fixing the Preakness Stakes. But then comes a revelation: “I learned there’s no imagination in the blues,” Berman sings, contradicting his own language on the EP altogether.

Tennessee concludes with “Turn Your Guns Around,” a hypnotic, slurring, absurd portrait of a drunk man stumbling and jaunting around a bar. “Hey man, would you mind if I ruined your life tonight?” Berman asks everyone and no one all at once. “I know you’re not supposed to say bad things about the mother of your children, but that bitch—that hag—makes me feel like killing.” One’s reading might suggest that “Turn Your Guns Around” is a mean song, but it’s more embarrassing than it is menacing. Berman’s protagonist admits that he’s “not the deadest man in town” before saying that he’s “sick of being your credit card.” “You know, you make it really, really hard,” he continues. “I do as good as I can every day.” With a lone piano sputtering around him and a faint, droning synth flatlining in the distant backdrop, Berman pleads to any ear willing to listen: “True love ain’t about getting yelled at on weekends.” And then, at once, the narrator collapses and the arrangement churns into inaudible static, clutter and sharpened noise. I guess Nashville ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

After Tennessee, Silver Jews would make two more albums together—Tanglewood Numbers and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea—before calling it quits in January 2009 via Drag City’s online messageboard. Berman was considering retiring from music altogether, looking forward to a potential career pivot to screenwriting or muckraking. “I always said we would stop before we got bad,” he wrote. “If I continue to record I might accidentally write the answer song to ‘Shiny Happy People.’” Berman wouldn’t make another album for 11 years, not until his surprising return as Purple Mountains in 2019 and the July release of the project’s eponymous album just four weeks before his suicide that August. Between then, he’d lost his mother and friend Dave Cloud (Berman would change his middle name from Craig to Cloud after), separate from Cassie after 20 years and take stints living in the Miller Beach neighborhood just off the Lake Michigan shore near Gary, Indiana.

Though Berman died in New York City, Nashville was his home. He decamped there after Silver Jews’ disbandment and spent “a hundred nights” unsure whether or not he would make it to the morning. He met The Black Keys’ frontman Dan Auerbach there and they worked on some projects together that never became anything—though Auerbach nabbed a songwriting credit on the Purple Mountains song “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” which he performed a version of with his side project The Arcs in 2016. Berman would leave Nashville and spend time working in Joshua Tree, Portland, Vancouver and Point Roberts with Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, David Carswell and Malkmus, but he found the act of writing lyrics for music a rigid, unwelcoming and impossible experience. It wasn’t until he returned to Nashville and re-wrote all of what would become Purple Mountains that his problems “solved themselves.” Maybe Berman was right all those years ago, when he sang about him and Cassie moving to Tennessee to make a career out of writing sad songs and gettin’ paid by the tear. For all I know, he’s someplace still cashing those checks. Or, maybe, Berman is off somewhere still fixing the race.