Dead straight

“I wish I had a thousand bucks/ I wish I was the Royal Trux/ But mostly I wish…/ I wish that I was with you/When I was summoned to the phone/I knew in my bones that you had died alone.” – from ‘Death Of An Heir Of Sorrows’ by Silver Jews’

There’s no easy way to write about death and loss and sadness. David Berman of the Silver Jews knows this. He hasn’t tried to anaesthetise raw pain by employing fancy metaphors or glib euphemisms. He just lays it on the line, straight, no chaser.

Yet out of depths of sorrow, sweetness follows. Berman has chosen to call the album Bright Flight. It’s a title that radiates positivity and possibly transcendence. Indeed, Bright Flight is an album to marvel and wonder at; a tender work that has wonderfully esoteric and poetic moments as well as scoring direct emotional hits.

But let’s get back to the extraordinary ‘Death Of An Heir Of Sorrows’. Can David explain the circumstances in which it was written?

“Two of my best friends died,” he answers, “one about two years ago, and one the night before we started recording. So there was a lot of death in the air and that made it onto the record.”

Were they tragic deaths?

“Both of my friends OD’ed. All the rock’n’roll people die.”

Was it a cathartic experience to go in and record the album after such a tragedy?

“No, not at all. I had to hold it all in because of the death that happened the day before we started recording. It was too fresh. You can’t be working out death the next day in a recording studio. It was actually the opposite. It was very hard to perform, you know, because a lot of the lyrics to the last song (‘Death Of An Heir Of Sorrows’) had been written for a friend of mine who had died two years ago.

“The night before my second friend died in August, I played her this song. I had just written it. It really touched her. And it killed me that two days later this song – all of the lyrics – applied to her in exactly the same way. It was exactly the same experience: the phone rings, you pick up the phone, it’s the friend of the person... They say my name and I can hear in the tone of their voice – before they say anything – I know that person’s dead. It happened both times. So the song got double dedicated by accident.”