COVER IMAGE
CD released: Jul 12, 2019

Tracklisting:
1. That's Just The Way
2. That I Feel
3. All My Happiness Is Gone
4. Darkness And Cold
5. Snow Is Falling In Manhattan
6. Margaritas At The Mall
7. She's Making Friends, I'm Turning Stranger
8. I Loved Being My Mother's Son
9. Nights That Won't Happen
10. Storyline Fever
11. Maybe I'm The Only One For Me
PURPLE MOUNTAINS
PURPLE MOUNTAINS
Label: DRAG CITY
Cat No: DC680CD
Barcode: 0781484068020
Packaging: CD Jewel Case

'Well I don't really like talking to myself, but
someone's got to say it, hell...'
You know this voice. An old friend has
returned. It was some years back that you
dropped the needle on the record and heard it say, 'No, I
don't really wanna die...' Like so many lines you couldn't
possibly have guessed the finish to, it's now among the flat
natural-born good-timin' faves that you sing along with in
the jukebox inside your head. It's loaded up there along with
at least a couple dozen others from Silver Jews, whose classic
run was made somehow finite in 2009, when the voice himself,
David Berman, announced his retirement from music.
Ten years have come and gone since then. Where the time
goes, we do not know. What do they say about old songwriters?
We don't know that one either, okay? We're not good with
jokes - we're just glad that there's always more songs to be
written and sung. That's what raised up Purple Mountains
for all of us, after all.
Yes, Purple Mountains is the new nom-de-rock of David
Berman. Purple Mountains is also the name of what will be
known as one of his greatest albums - full of double-jointed
wit and wisdom, up to the neck in his special recipe of handcrafted
country-rock joys and sorrows that sing legendary in
cracked and broken hearts. The songs are produced impeccably
by Woods' Jarvis Taveniere and Jeremy Earle, buffed
up like a hardwood floor ready to be well-trod upon for an
evening of romance and dance. And then.
What is 10 years? What are 50? How is everything anything
in the eventual blink of eternity? The songs of Purple Mountains
are a potent brew, stitched together from lifetimes,
knitting the drift of the years with the tightest lyric construction
Berman's ever attempted. Honesty is archly in the air,
but lines of incredible bleakness somehow give way to playful
distraction and the hiding of surprises for close listeners.
Even still, as the songwriter once wrote, 'every single thought
is like a punch in the face.' It won't take long after slapping
the record on the platter for you to hear that this is one of
THOSE albums. There's breakup records. There's apocalypse
records. Then there's Purple Mountains.
The portrait is David Berman's most to-the-bone yet, very
frankly confessing a near-total collapse from the first moment,
then delving into the layers of nuance with twin lazers of personal
laceration and professional remove. This etches a picture
that cries to be understood in the misbegotten country that
made everything great about Purple Mountains. America's
fate is that of its treasured icons: the cowboy, the outlaw, the
card sharp and the riverboat gambler, who all face simple
resignation in the end. There are no perfect crimes. Berman's
poet-thief of so many precious moments, now stripped and
chastened, recalls his latest lowest moments in perfect detail,
hovering ghostly above the tumescent production sound as it
echoes with tragic majesty and the sound-fragments of former
glory, evoking the defeated-king era of late Elvis, soutern-fried
and sassy still on his countrypolitan way down, and somehow
still solid-gold at the bottom.
Berman's songwriter's bone's never been laid more bare,
either - if redemption doesn't come on the lyric sheet, the
act of putting these songs into singing, dancing form allows
them their finest end - to provide infotainment for others,
embodying moments of life and truth via music that elevates
with disarming warmth and a reassuring commonality, even
as David himself stands outside the communal campfires.
Where are you tonight, America? The things that used to be
have slipped away into the darkness without you knowing it,
and your children are wandering in a blasted landscape, with
only Purple Mountains left to comfort them, and David
Berman's shattered fables for company.

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