I was half-listening to WTMD while doing chores and when this song came on, it struck me as the saddest song I’d ever heard. “Oh,” is all I thought when I looked up who sang it.
“Lately I tend to make strangers wherever I go…All my happiness is gone…I confess I’m barely hanging on…No way to last out here like this for long….” It’s all right there in the lyrics.
I went on to listen this song maybe 20,000 times in a row (sorry, neighbors!). Please don’t be worried about me. It’s just an excellent song, dark poetry set to the peppiest little Joy Division/The Cure-y synth-y riff. I know it’s a song ostensibly bereft of happiness. But to me, when David Berman sings “Ten thousand afternoons ago/All my happiness just overflowed,” it’s like my own heart is spilling out and I go back to moments when I felt just like that.
I wish I had known about him way before this, because I went and bought the Purple Mountains album based on this song alone. “I’ve always worked harder on words,” he told NYT, and my God, it shows. I was prepared to be depressed, yes, but not to laugh out loud (“ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude?”). He tosses off lines that I couldn’t write in my wildest dreams. I need to dive into the whole Silver Jews catalog, but I can already tell that David Berman saw the human condition and he pinned it down into something we could sing along to.
