People love to treat American Water like a fluke, the record where David Berman finally wriggled out from Pavement’s shadow and stumbled into genius. But flukes don’t age into scripture. This is the moment Berman weaponized his wit, forged his grief into quips, and started speaking in aphorisms so undeniable they feel less written than overheard at a bus stop. American Water isn’t a detour — it’s the main road, even if the asphalt is cracked and smoking.
“But, baby, there’s no guidance when random rules.”
The record’s reach is hard to overstate. Waxahatchee carries his instinct for cloaking confession in humor. MJ Lenderman borrows his trick of making pratfalls sound like psalms. Destroyer practically built a career off Berman’s notion that irony could function as prayer. And Courtney Barnett, with her deadpan wit and habit of turning trips to the corner store into dispatches from the abyss, might be his clearest heir. Outside of music — poets, painters, cartoonists, anyone who ever felt marooned in America’s broken funhouse — saw in Berman a crooked lighthouse showing you how to survive by leaning just a little off-center.
The leap from Ectoslavia — the cacophonous UVA art-student racket Berman, Stephen Malkmus, and Bob Nastanovich once made in their free time, unbeknownst to even their most ardent alt-music-loving classmates — to American Water is the story of chaos getting house-trained. The early noise was what happens when you throw a tape deck in a blender. By 1998, Berman had figured out how to bend that entropy into Credence-inspired song-shapes rooted in country and classic rock, forms sturdy enough to hold words that land like a sucker punch. His gift wasn’t abandoning the chaos but sharpening it into sentences.
Malkmus is everywhere here, though never in the spotlight. His guitar licks play like sly rejoinders, half in-joke and half punctuation, the sound of an old roommate who knows when to step forward and when to hang back. Their chemistry is telepathic: Berman supplies the gravity, Malkmus the helium. The friendship hums underneath every track, balancing indulgence with revelation, wordplay with groove. The result is a record that swings like Beggars-era Stones but cuts like a tax audit.
What makes American Water endure is how Berman looked at America like a relative he couldn’t quite forgive — intimate with its secrets, allergic to its sentimentality, equal parts Lou Reed sneer and Townes Van Zandt ache. On “Random Rules,” he sets the tone with “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection,” and you understand instantly: this is a nation drunk on its own absurd ambitions. On “Smith & Jones Forever,” two characters witness an execution with all the urgency of channel-surfing. It’s satire so deadpan it doubles as prophecy: the casual cruelty of a nation that treats capital punishment like entertainment programming. “Send in the Clouds” captures the way malaise creeps into everyday life with a shrug so casual it stings, while “Buckingham Rabbit” reads like scripture scribbled in crayon, surreal Americana elevated into holy nonsense.
Berman specialized in lines that looked like jokes until they lodged in your throat for years. Dylan painted murals of America; Berman scrawled bathroom graffiti on its psyche. And somehow the graffiti said more.
Even the cover art — a minimalist road stretching toward a jagged horizon — serves as metaphor and warning. America as geometry: vast, indifferent, waiting to swallow you whole. There’s no promised land at the end of this road, just more road. Berman understood that was the point.
The best setting for American Water? A kitchen table in Emory Highlands past midnight, beers going warm, ashtray overstuffed, conversation ricocheting between bad jokes and worse confessions. It’s not soundtrack music. It’s survival music for people who suspect they’re the extras in someone else’s movie.
Twenty-seven years later, American Water reads like a handbook for surviving American absurdity: stay awake, laugh harder than the propaganda, and remember — despair only wins if it gets to the punchline first.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Blue Arrangements”. Berman and Malkmus’ nonchalant, too-cool-to-care singing styles have the ability to draw a listener in the same way you might stick around too long at late-night karaoke while two drunk dudes keep signing up to sing duets. They may not sound professional by any means, but you can’t look away.
The track starts off in a slow sway that melts into a faster tempo, as if the singers started the song with no actual idea about where they’d end up. Within the lyrics, you can imagine snapshots from a coming-of-age era — your childhood crush at the local country club and wanting to talk back to your drunk dad, but not being old enough to. There’s pain and anger, but there’s also young love and lust laced into the calm moments in between.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m watching the world
and the world isn’t watching me back.
But when I see you, I know I’m in it too.
The waves come in and the waves go back.
The kids in the corner all covered in dirt.
Caught trespassing under the moon.
My father came in from wherever he’d been
and kicked my shit all over the room.”
There isn’t a prominent hook or melody in this track, and there doesn’t need to be when the lyrics carry enough baggage to lure you in. The idea of running away from the “blue arrangements” might be a compartmentalization of the pain in one’s upbringing — tossed to the sea only to float to the surface again one day. As these pains bubble back up by the end of the track, you’re left with a haunting, yet groovy guitar riff to lull you into a daydream of your own blue arrangements and crashing waves.
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “People,” a song that takes Berman’s deadpan and bends it toward grace. Over a loping country shuffle, he drops the kind of casual profundity that doubles as a personal creed: “Moments can be monuments to you, if your life is interesting and true.” It’s the rare Silver Jews track that sounds almost like a pep talk, though one delivered in Berman’s sly, half-smiling Texas drawl.
What makes it hit even harder are the harmonies — Malkmus slipping in behind him, crooked and slightly off-kilter, the perfect foil. Their voices don’t blend so much as lean against each other, like two friends on a late-night walk sharing secrets and asides. The effect is moving without ever tipping into sentimentality: proof that even in a country that often feels indifferent, people — messy, flawed, funny, alive — are still worth singing about.
Silver Jews can be found on Bandcamp, all streaming platforms and most places where records are sold. You are likely to find their songs played on SiriusXM stations SiriusXMU, The Spectrum, and The Loft. In addition to the full Silver Jews catalog, you should check out Berman’s farewell project, Purple Mountains’ self-titled album from 2019, one of the most critically acclaimed records of the last ten years.
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