Actual Air in the Purple Mountains: An Interview With David Berman

Editor's Note: On August 7, 2019, poet and singer-songwriter David Berman died at the age of 52, three weeks after the publication of this interview.

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It’s been a tough 21st century for David Berman. Over the past two decades, the poet and cult musician has OD’d, attempted suicide, quit his band, gotten sober, gotten married, quit his band again, relapsed, gotten divorced, played a farewell concert in a cave, picked a public fight with his Republican super-villain father, and then, in a haze of Johnny Paycheck references on blogspot.com, disappeared into the Nashville suburbs.

Tough times.

Not that it hasn’t been tough all around, and not that Berman wants your pity (okay, maybe just a little bit), but now, in the summer of 2019, David Berman has re-emerged with a new album under a new band name, Purple Mountains, and Drag City has re-issued his first and only book of poems, Actual Air, in hardcover. David himself is back, even if, as he says on the record’s first single, all his happiness is gone. Over the past few months Berman and I have corresponded about his new music, his old poems, and the broken stuff of his life that’s dreaming of repair. The Purple Mountains album is officially out today.

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Travis Nichols: I’ve been thinking of James Tate a lot lately, since his death and in anticipation of his last book of poems, The Government Lake. Re-reading Actual Air, it feels informed by his work, but not overwhelmed. The poems are able to transform his surreal “American which cats and dogs can read” into something that at the time seemed newer and now just seems its own thing. Looking back, how much influence did Jim and his work have on the writing of these poems? How much do you feel like he influenced your songwriting?  

David Berman: Starlite Walker and part of Natural Bridge were written when he was at large in my life. 

I remember giving him Starlite Walker and he wasn’t too impressed and/or didn’t like the idea of me abandoning poetry, as his only comment was laughingly remarking, “Don’t quit your dayjob!” when that was still a fresh expression.

Joe Pernice was in the program at the same time and I think Tate was a bit discomfited by the idea of his protégés crossing over to another field.

Anyone who knows the Silver Jews and reads him for the first time will be able to judge the degree of influence better than I can.

Speaking of direct influences I was shocked and humbled to go back to Ben Katchor’s comics “julius knipl, real estate photographer” et al, which I used to read in the New York Press Weekly in the years between college and University of Massachusetts (when I was working at the Whitney), to see how derivative my style and sensibility was of his work. 

One thing I took from Tate was his overwhelming cheerfulness. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional but I was pleased to see his new/last book is called The Government Lake, which is a remark from “Classic Water” [from Actual Air].

I would put amusical influences down to Tate, Russell Edson, Kenneth Koch, Ben Katchor, the art I was guarding (Bruce Nauman, Basquiat, Sherri Levine, Louise Lawler), but I would be remiss not to mention the influence which pre-dates all these others, Charles Wright.

TN: Wright was your teacher at University of Virginia?

DB: Yes. He used to visit the Whitney when he was in town. I sent him poetry I’d been working on, hoping he would invite me to apply to the UVA program. He told me UMass was the place for me. I hadn’t read his friend “jim tate” at that point and was kind of heartbroken. I had never been north of New York and just the idea of Massachusetts creeped me out. America’s scary attic. I expected cobwebs (and got them).

TN: What do you hope happens with the Purple Mountains songs out in the world?

DB: Before I can think of any other hope I have to hope the music will not bother or disgust other people who are in earshot when it’s played.

I’m not complaining. Some people like my singing. But it sounds like bad singing to a lot of other people. Anyone who knowingly plays my music to alienate someone they know won’t like it is out of the Hope Club cause you obviously don’t Hope the first Hope.

The second hope is that it gets to those isolated individuals who really are bound to like it.

TN: For you has the inspiration to create, and then the ability to follow through, changed much since when you wrote the poems in Actual Air? 

DB: I’m looking at a book, Art and Artist by Otto Rank. He talks about the artist-type and the neurotic-type, who are each possessed by an inner conflict:

the neurotic fails thru incessant vacillation

the artist succeeds in giving shape and form 

to the conflict and ejects truth and beauty.

I would definitely class myself as a constipative, whose mental health and quality of life would undoubtedly improve if I were more regular.

That the records are my own true blue life experiences distilled and dramatized in song only seems true of the work since 2001. The first three records and the book, those were make-believe. That was world building by a young romantic artist trying to do his part of the necessary re-enchantment of the world.

TN: As someone with a terrible voice, I’ve never had the courage (if that’s what it is) to find my range. I’ve always strained to hit acceptable notes, and those just don’t sound right coming out of my mouth. What I’ve always admired about your voice—beyond the pleasure I take in listening to it—is how well it suits what it expresses. You know your range, and it’s one I didn’t know existed before, and it’s opened space for that range to exist in the wider world. I think this is true of your writing as well—you make choices within a different range of what had before seemed reality. Those choices shifted my perception of what’s happening and what’s possible. It’s a kind of make-believe that has helped make the real world more real. But do you think that wasn’t enough to keep you going as an artist? You needed something more directly connected with your life? 

DB: Yes. In the years before 2000, I was like a maker of dollhouses. And a lot of the furniture was collected during that mellow interlude in western Massachusetts. I lived in a garret beside a Puritan graveyard. Where Thomas Jefferson’s spirit presided over Charlottesville, Emily Dickinson’s did Hampshire County.

When I was 30 I was in Charlottesville finishing the writing of Actual Air and putting together American Water, but spending a lot of time in New York. Rob Bingham and I had become friends and he loved the poems I wrote like no one had before or since. If it hadn’t been for his insistence, the book wouldn’t exist. He published them in Open City and pushed me to make a manuscript that he could give his mother, who was an editor at Grove Press. When the poetry editor rejected it he started Open City Books to put it out. It only occurred to me just recently that he may never have submitted the manuscript at all.

But hanging out with Rob was one of the funnest times in my life. He was hilarious and headstrong and extravagant in his ways. That opened my life to chaos.  And my whole art-ideology shifted. I became a heavy drug user and toxic party animal, meaning, I became a man of action; disastrous action.

I o.d.’d in NY in 2001. I came in from Nashville, was with a group of friends, after a tiny record release party for Bright Flight that was held in a hot dog joint off St. Mark’s. I keeled over dead after insufflating it off a countertop when everyone was in the other room. None of my friends had any idea where and when I’d had time to buy it. My tolerance was low and the drug was strong. The first thing I wanted to know when I got back from the hospital was where the nine other bags were. I needed to relax. The neighbor across the hall had them and I, having by then been demoted by all to identified patient, held no sway. 
 

TN: A lot of our narratives around creativity and imagination set up the idea of human sacrifice for art—literally that artists should punish themselves and others in order to create, or possibly for the sin of having tried to. To create means to insufflate. I’m not sure it’s true, but the way you’re talking about that time makes me wonder. Looking back, would you rather have been sober during those years than to have made the art you made? 

DB: I don’t wish I’d been sober. No. Not with the way the world has turned out. I have some regrets. When I was given the honor of being asked to read at my high school, I stayed up the night before smoking drugs beneath the expressway. That was bad. 2003. I smoked my last in the parking lot and stumbled in to greet my old English teacher, wild-eyed and coated in dust, after 18 years, without a copy of the book of course.

TN: Has sobriety changed how you make things? 

DB: It’s hard to say. I was only 100% sober for Tanglewood Numbers. Touring made me a daily pot smoker. It was the only way I could cordon myself off from the fuss, and endure the boredom. 

I was a daily smoker from 2006-09. I could never drink hard and long without cocaine. Alcohol on its own doesn’t appeal to me much. I went to a 1940s Polynesian restaurant on Sunday and really tried to get wasted on the sweet drinks, but having to rely on your arm, absent thirst, bringing the glass to your face, and straw to the lips, over and over at such an abnormal frequency. I couldn’t get enough down. And it’s not like bliss lies on the other side of .1% !

TN: Well, this can be for the interview or not, but I’m really sorry to read about you and Cassie. I remember first meeting you at the Caledonia in Athens for the Actual Air reading and meeting her, too. She was very drunk and talking about, I think, the drummer for Iron Maiden? I was very charmed. Anyways, it seems from the outside that you tried hard to make it work and share some kind of life together. I had wondered, listening to the new song, if she was part of that gone happiness. Living with people. Difficult. 

DB: It’s sad. We love each other and never fight. But the way we’d like to spend out next 10,000 nights are completely different. And saying that out loud, when you don’t have kids, it naturally follows.....

But being in the middle of it is painful.

We own our house together. When I come home, like I am now, she is my family. We’ve been here 20 years in Nashville. (the grotesquefiction of Nashville over the last seven years, makes leaving easier). It hurts most when you fall into a sentimental frame of mind.

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.

TN: Will you leave Nashville altogether?

DB: Yes. Maybe the U.S. too. I have nothing holding me here. It never crossed my mind, foreign soil, before. But being in Vancouver was illuminating. I rented this place for a month when I first got out West. I thought at the end of that month I’d be ready to record. Dan Bejar was going to help me make it. But I couldn’t get the words right. I decided to go somewhere else. Another place I found in Joshua Tree. That way I’d still be out West. Then I still wasn’t done. Cassie came out for my 50th. We rented a place in Malibu, then drove to Portland and rented another place. This time for three months to be sure I was done.

That was one of the hardest times of my life.

TN: How do you know when the words are right?

DB: When no line is a waste of time. For the listener. I will waste lots of time getting it right, of course. I have to write a hundred dumb lines to get to the right one it seems. This used to be more like 5-1 or 10-1 when I was younger.

This makes songwriting a much more grueling task for an older man. I was always curious why it is a veritable impossibility for Willie Nelson or Paul McCartney to write a great song (today or any day over the past 40 years). I think it has to do with enduring this much greater volume of bad ideas. It is hard to be terrible day after day and stick with it.

TN: I remember when you read at UMass almost 15 years ago there were new poems. Have you thought about a new book?

DB: I may have a book of odds and ends someday. First, I’d like to put together a book about coming of age in Dallas 1983-85. 

TN: That would be an incredible book. How would you do it?

DB: I’ve got a million autobio notes I assembled 2009-1014, but that period cuts to the heart of everything.

TN: I was reading something that brought up Tristan Tzara’s paper bag method for poems (cut out the sentences in a newspaper, put them in a paper bag, shake, empty = poem) and then the corollary idea that there’s no such thing as “automatic writing” because your interests and sensibilities will come through no matter what, even in a paper bag poem. So when you say that up until 2001 you were producing “make believe” and since then you’ve been trying to distill and dramatize your real life, I wonder if that’s a false dichotomy. That either way your sensibility is making the arrangements, so the content doesn't matter as much as you might think it does. Or does it matter just enough to help you keep going?

DB: Maybe I should wear a paperbag during long days in the van to reproduce my homelife. I see what you’re saying. My counter would be, isn’t the treatment of similar material plainer and to the point? That would seem to denote a commitment, a seriousness that a lot of earlier stuff lacked.  That commitment would be to lived experience.

TN: A friend recommended this book Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Jozef Czapski and in it he writes, “Goethe said that in the life of a creative man, biography can and must be considered only up to the thirty-fifth year, after that it’s no longer his life story, but his struggle with the substance of his work that must become central and, more and more, increasingly absorbing.”

It seems in some way like the opposite for you, that you were pushing the paint around early on, and now you’re committing to a distilling and clarifying of lived experience. So if you’re trying to write a song like “I Loved Being My Mother's Son” and you happened to write a line like “The rainbow hardened into pentameter,” you’d cut it now, whereas in 1999 you might have kept it? 

DB: It’s not the kind of line that would make it into these songs I’ve written. But I’m not ruling out writing songs it could make it into. I have no established preference for auto-biographical songs, it just so happened that I’d been psychologically stranded in a place where the songwriting got a boost through an alchemic transmutation of life into art. It made my misery more bearable; knowing it could yield something useful.

TN: Well, for the record, I like that line and wasn’t throwing it in as an example of a kind of horror. I just flipped through Actual Air to see if I could find something that seemed different. Is some of this why you wanted to move on from the name Silver Jews?

DB: Some of the reason. There are so many reasons.

TN: I guess it seems sort of silly to ask a person why he changed his band name from “Silver Jews” to anything. The better question is why Silver Jews in the first place, but you’ve covered that before. It’s interesting to see from the first couple of reviews that people seem into the transformation. 

DB: Do you know the backstory to “America the Beautiful”?

A depressed poet and social outsider traveled out West for the first time, and after a day up Pike’s Peak (the original purple mountain) wrote the poem that is the lyric for “America the Beautiful.” It was a popular poem for a long time before someone set it to music. It’s often said that the reason it became so popular as the unofficial national anthem is because anyone can sing it. That’s what makes it so democratic (and cool).