A few hours ago, my best friend send me a text with a link to listen to “All My Happiness Is Gone,” the first single from David Berman’s new band Purple Mountains. We’d been excited to hear the tune since it was announced last week. It’s been over a decade since Berman’s last record, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea came out, and I’ve missed his voice. The six records the Silver Jews put out between 1994 and 2008 were formative to me. I remember each distinctly as evocations of time and place, the songs on each record emotional spaces different versions of me inhabited.
I’ve listened to “All My Happiness Is Gone” about half a dozen times now, and listened to the two remixes of it a couple of times too. I really like the song—it’s sad and moving, a song about aging and friendship and, uh, despair, a song that opens with, “Friends are warmer than gold when you’re old / And keeping them is harder than you might suppose.”
When we were 15, my best friend, the one who texted me a link to listen to “All My Happiness Is Gone” a few hours ago, we were between bands. Or really, we were calling the music we made together in our bedrooms a band. We’d soon hook up with a drummer, and then another drummer, other players, and so on, different iterations of an amateur psych art rock band that played shows in clubs and smaller clubs, houses, record stores, art galleries and you get the idea. Anyway, when we were 15, between bands, we recorded what we called an “album” (an album!) on my then-girlfriend’s older brother’s 4-track. The tape we made is and was awful, but we covered the Silver Jews’ song “Trains Across the Sea,” all two chords of it, with what I still think of as a kind of clumsy grace, my best friend delivering the lead vocal with an admirably faulty feigned maturity. We even adapted the line “In 27 years I’ve drunk 50, 000 beers” to better suit our own then slim duration, even though we had to stretch the syllables in “15” a bit too far for the meter. Over the past 25 years I’ve recorded hundreds of hours of music, a lot of it with this friend, and that cover of “Trains Across the Sea” is maybe my favorite thing we ever did.
Wait—didn’t I say that this was a blog about “All My Happiness Is Gone,” a new song by the band Purple Mountains? I did, I know—but I can’t write about music. Sorry. It’s better to just hear the song, right? Here it is:
The first two minutes of this video aren’t part of the single edit, but I like the way Berman’s plunky guitar meanders around the melody and rhythm of the song before the canned orchestra propels us into the sad sad sad lyric. The intro also balances out the end of the song, which doesn’t so much conclude as it slows into near-collapse, stretched thin like the spirit of the song itself: ” …the fear’s so strong it leaves you gasping / No way to last out here like this for long.”
Berman’s albums with the Silver Jews were always tinged with melancholy or even outright depression, but there was always, at least in my estimation, a leavening irony. Take “Honk If You’re Lonely,” from American Water, for instance, in which Berman celebrates and sends up classic country tunes, and, ultimately connects to his audience: “Honk if you’re lonely tonight / If you need a friend to get through the night.” Two decades later in “All My Happiness Is Gone,” Berman sounds like the one who needs a friend:
Mounting mileage on the dash
Double darkness falling fast
I keep stressing, pressing on
Way deep down at some substratum
Feels like something really wrong has happened
And I confess I’m barely hanging on
The music is simple and sweet, moving between two chords for the most part—the second chord lingering just a bit longer before the chorus hits, the same trick that Berman pulled off in “Trains Across the Sea.” The chorus, in which Berman repeats the titular line with a plaintive sadness that hurts me, hangs around a melody that reads like a country goth cribbing of Modern English’s “I Melt with You.” It’s a bit of an emotional apocalypse, which is kinda maybe what you want from a sad song, but the sadness seems so sincere, the despair so visceral, that again, it hurts. Maybe share it with a friend.
Biblioklept 