After a weekend in NYC, the Silver Jews hit Cambridge Sunday afternoon on a tour in support of Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City), their fifth album in 12 years. Frontman David Berman came to the stage downstairs at the Middle East sleepy but happy, shy but courageous. Not a bad look for a guy widely known for his struggles with stints in rehab. The sold-out show would be the eighth on the tour — not just any tour, but the first ever Silver Jews tour. Until Tanglewood, Berman had never planned to take a band on the road. He preferred staying home in Nashville, recording in private, even as he became increasingly well-known as an eccentric outsider artist with a gift for gorgeous songs sung in a lonely, broken voice. That he’d once played with the guys in Pavement and had worked in a morgue during college only secured his aura of mystery.
So after 15 years of writing songs and poetry but not touring, he’d accumulated a fierce cult of fans hungrier than he’d expected to hear him perform. “Many things are compelling me now,” he wrote in response when I emailed him about touring. “Before, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have made it back alive. I didn’t see how I could leave this narrow way I’d found to live.”
The Middle East crowd offered a warm welcome. “I’m afraid I’ve got more in common with who I was than who I am becoming,” he sang, the band holding steady behind him as his voice shook around the notes. Old songs found room alongside new ones, pitting the uncertain, fragile, and vulnerable Berman of his early material against the one we were seeing on stage, the one singing summery up-tempo melodies and happy to be fronting a band. He looked solemn but self-assured, in love with his songs, his band, and his wife, bassist Cassie Marrett, who’s been singing in Silver Jews since before they were married. There were still panicked moments, but Berman’s new material seems to have him looking back at the storm from a safe distance for the first time instead of standing in the eye of a hurricane.
“Sorry it took so long for us to get out on tour,” he told the crowd in a sheepish voice after a haunting version of “Pet Politics.” “I had some things to get out of the way. And now they’re out of the way.” He laughed, proclaimed, “I love you all,” and promised to come back next year. “The era of looped reflection is past for me,” he had written cryptically when I asked how his songwriting had changed on the new album. “Decisiveness is my machete, and I have a taste for progress that I haven’t had in a long time.”
We’d planned to have coffee before the show, but after soundcheck Berman asked if we couldn’t please put it off till the following day so he could grab a nap. He gave me his wife’s cell-phone number and told me to get in touch the following day. It would have to be a breakfast meeting, and somehow I couldn’t picture him getting up early enough. So I asked Bob Nastanovich — the Silver Jews tour manager and former Pavement member — to try to get him ready by 9 am. “Don’t worry, boss,” was Nastanovich’s easy response.
Six hours later, I was still awake, listening to the tape I’d made of the show, waiting for Nastanovich’s call, which wouldn’t come till 10, too late for deadline. I remembered how Berman had leaned over his guitar during every song, flipping pages on his music stand, turning his back to the crowd whenever he solo’d. He’d joked that the most humiliating part of the “whole live thing” was the encore charade. Nevertheless, the Silver Jews played two Sunday, and as the final note of the second one faded, the overhead lights dimmed and the room was left illuminated by two moon-like yellow spotlights mounted on either side of the stage. Soon those faded, and for a moment, just before the house lights came up, the only illumination in the entire downstairs was the tiny lamp of Berman’s music stand, a stark sign that the show so many fans had waited for had come to a close.
