David Berman Quotes

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.

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.

Bobby Braddock is great.

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.

I guess on all Silver Jews records, it’s extremely male-centric.

I grew up the son of a businessman. And I didn’t get into music to be a businessman.

In 2004, I don’t think any Silver Jews fan was probably expecting another record.

My only advice would be to someone right now, is if you’re in a position in your life where you need to make a change, this is the best time.

I believe that intermittent live performance has cut short the writing lives of touring musicians.

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.

The world of commerce is a kind of a purgatory itself.

I take pride in the fact that I can walk away from things. My willingness to walk away has protected me, I realize that now. Being able to walk away from sessions, from poetry, from dreams of being a poetry professor.

If I believed in fate I’d be very curious why I picked the name Silver Jews.

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 the beginning, it was meant to be like a faceless art piece. Then I did the first record and it received enough notice to satisfy my needs. I questioned the procedure out of fear. The Silver Jews was never meant to be recreated live.

Some people like my singing. But it sounds like bad singing to a lot of other people.

I was not born to be the center of attention in a crowded room.

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 trust myself.

I can’t imagine putting my name on a t-shirt. For someone to wear my name? Me? It’s ridiculous.

Fan reaction is so out-sized and hyperbolic in rock music compared to other arts.

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.

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.

Nashville only thrives when talented people from out of town move here from somewhere else.

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.

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 hear luxury brand names, I cringe.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always felt un-trusted.

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.

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 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.

You don’t meet too many actors in Nashville.

Natalie Maines has a voice for the centuries.

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.

When people tend to be happier they have more interest in the world around them.

I heard Springsteen was an unhappy person. I don’t know, I haven’t read his biography. But a lot of people in my field should be a lot more unhappy than they are.

I have always had a blank spot where my regret is supposed to be.

Lyrically, country music is the most satisfying music for me.

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.

I have bad vision, but it’s not distorted. It’s low power!

Definitely in everything I do, the comic is a part of it.

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.

Piece by piece I sent my first book of poems to American Poetry Review and was rejected one by one.

The greatest thing about Nashville is that it’s welcoming.

It’s a Gen X thing to be okay with going unnoticed or unrated or untouched. To be free from strangers’ expectations, or anger. People got angry at me when I stopped making music because it seemed I was devaluing everything.

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.

I read Henry Miller’s ‘Nexus,’ ‘Sexus’ and ‘Plexus’ the summer after I graduated from college. It cemented my decision to spurn any and all careers.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through – the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

I’m not convinced I have fans.

Silver Jews was always a coolection of old friends. Uncoolection.

Little Wooster, Ohio and gargantuan Dallas, Texas formed the municipal cocktail of my life up till age 18. That drab, weird little town and the glitzy big one shaped me for sure.

My father is a despicable man.

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?

I’m not a good singer.