I don't know if he's working on anything right now but another generous bout of touring would be amazing since I'm yet to see them live.
I'm basically just happy he's still alive.
As anyone who's been frequenting this music forum for a while will have noticed,
American Water is one of those albums I insist everyone must obtain a copy of. It's certainly my favourite of the Silver Jews albums I've heard - I like
Starlite Walker, but it's a bit patchy.
Tanglewood Numbers is amazing, but it almost starts too brightly: "Punks in the Beerlight" is so white-hot that the rest of the album can't help but feel like a come down from that. A pretty great way to come down, though.
But
American Water is spot-on. I'm not going to say it's perfect, because (A) I've never highly valued perfection, especially in art; and (B) the whole appeal of artists like Dave Berman is their roughness, their imperfections, their sheer humanity. (This is the same reason I prefer William Carlos Williams to T.S. Eliot.) It's basically an album you can really sink your teeth into, one of those ones that you can taste for weeks after you've sat through it. And I'd rate Berman up there with Will Oldham as a songwriter: in a way he's the mirror image of Oldham - with Oldham all the sin and turmoil and badness is so up-front that it usually obscures how (very darkly) funny a lot of his lyrics are, whereas in Berman's lyrics the humour is at the forefront, with all the pain pushed to the background. For instance, the lyrics that CmonMiracle and I just quoted, which are the opening lyrics from
American Water - but then later on in the same song Berman sings, to the same melody, "I asked my friend why the highways were all painted black/He said Steve it's because people leave and no highway will bring them back." Wonderful.
