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With wry songs full of black humor, his band became an underground favorite in the 1990s, and a new group, Purple Mountains, was set to tour.
David Berman, the reluctant songwriter and poet whose dry baritone and wry, wordy compositions anchored Silver Jews, a critically lauded staple of the 1990s indie-rock scene, died on Wednesday. He was 52.
His death was announced by his record label, Drag City, which released music by Silver Jews and Berman’s latest band, Purple Mountains.
A spokeswoman for Drag City declined to provide any further details about Berman’s death. In a statement on Thursday, Richard Berman, his father, said, “Despite his difficulties, he always remained my special son. I will miss him more than he was able to realize.”
As the sole constant member of Silver Jews, which sometimes included well-known musicians like Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, Berman released six albums using the band name, beginning with “Starlite Walker” in 1994 and continuing through “Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea” in 2008, before disbanding the group the next year.
Berman’s association with Pavement — he had founded Silver Jews in 1989 with Malkmus, once a fellow student at the University of Virginia — brought him a certain level of underground fame in the early 1990s. He also earned the respect of critics, who saw Berman as a rare poetic voice in the snarky, noisy world of ’90s rock. Rolling Stone once called him “a wandering honky-tonk bard murmuring feverish, fractured one-liners in his handsome country-rock drawl.”
David Berman: Hear 12 Essential Songs
In time, Berman came to be nearly as well known as a poet. His book, “Actual Air,” published in 1999, became a minor hit.
“I couldn’t rock out harder than everybody, or overpower people with mastery like Jack White of the White Stripes, so why try?” Berman said in an interview with The New York Times in 2005. “That’s why I’ve always worked harder on words.” (He also explained the genesis of his band’s name: a sign he spied from a window that said “Silver Jewelry,” “but from my angle you couldn’t see the end.”)
Berman’s lyrics could be cryptic, but with moments of black humor or tender clarity. “Is the problem that we can’t see or is it that the problem is beautiful to me?” he sang in “We Are Real,” a song from the Silver Jews album “American Water.”
The music website Pitchfork ranked “American Water,” released in 1998, the 12th-best album of that year, calling it “the pinnacle of a certain strain of indie rock: smart but unpolished, grounded but opaque, the down-home sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival and the country side of the Rolling Stones executed by college boys raised on punk.”
David Craig Berman was born in Williamsburg, Va., on Jan. 4, 1967. His mother, a homemaker, became a schoolteacher after his parents divorced when he was 7. His father, Richard Berman, was a labor lawyer for the United States Chamber of Commerce who went on to become a high-powered and widely feared lobbyist for the tobacco, oil and soft-drink industries, and would later serve as a foil in Berman’s songwriting and other creative pursuits.
“My father is a despicable man,” Berman wrote in 2009 while announcing that he was disbanding Silver Jews. Citing his father’s attacks on environmentalists and unions, Berman described their estrangement and how it led to his search for meaning in Judaism, and away from music.
“There needs to be something more,” he wrote. “I’ll see what that might be.”
[An illustrator offers her take on lines from David Berman’s poetry.]
Berman, who was open about his struggles with drugs, alcohol and depression, was often referred to as reclusive — he had all but resisted touring until 2005, long after his band’s creative peak — but he had recently resurfaced publicly. Purple Mountains released a debut album, called simply “Purple Mountains,” last month, and the band was scheduled to begin touring on Saturday. Drag City called those shows “a (potentially) once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Speaking to The Ringer last month, Berman was typically self-effacing about his return to music: “I’m not convinced I have fans,” he said. “In my whole life, I’ve had maybe 10 people who have told me how much my music means to them.” But, referring to his own elusiveness, he added that he had come to “take pride in the fact that I can walk away from things.”
“My willingness to walk away has protected me, I realize that now,” Berman said. “I found the power in not composing. I found a shadow side that I can be in dialogue with. ‘No’ is always on the table. There’s some magic in working with the negative.”
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter with a focus on pop music. His work seeks to pull back the curtain on how hit songs and emerging artists are discovered, made and marketed. He previously worked at New York magazine and The Village Voice. @joecoscarelli
Ben Sisario covers the music industry. He joined The Times in 1998, and has contributed to Rolling Stone, Spin, New York Press and WFUV. He also wrote “Doolittle,” a book about the Pixies. @sisario