12. Silver JewsAmerican Water
I wanted to pick something from Drag City and I went with Silver Jews because I think David Burman is such a great lyricist. It’s funny when someone is alive, it’s almost as if you’re not allowed to say that about people. He’s one of the best writers around. This record starts with the line ‘in 1984 I was hospitalised for approaching perfection’ [pauses] How much better of a first line can you have on your record?!
I have a hobby of taking words and mixing them around. I can do that for a whole day, just taking four words and moving them around and mixing them up, just to find a combination that I think evokes something emotional, but David Burman is on another level. He takes language – nothing that’s complicated on the surface – and puts it together in such amazing ways. He’ll say things like ‘Her hair was shiny like video tape’ or ‘the water looked like jewelry coming out of the spout’, weird things you’d never thought of until he said them but they ring true. When you hear his records, he makes you feel like you’ve never seen the world before. So I commend him. This record is his Americana record, and I wish this is what people talked about when they use that term. He’s a brilliant author explaining his vision of America to you – that should be Americana instead of some weird sappy throwback thing.
