DAVID BERMAN

When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do.

I heard Springsteen was an unhappy person. I don't know, I haven't read his biography. But a lot of people in my field should be a lot more unhappy than they are.

It's a Gen X thing to be okay with going unnoticed or unrated or untouched. To be free from strangers' expectations, or anger. People got angry at me when I stopped making music because it seemed I was devaluing everything.

I hear luxury brand names, I cringe.

I was 29 or 30 when I felt sure of what I was doing, but not fully identifying as a songwriter until I was 37.

That's the way I've always been, between the albums: For two- or three-year gaps I wouldn't pick up a guitar. And when I don't pick up a guitar for a year or two, that's when the songs fall out.

I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.

I mean, I wasn't fortunate enough to have ever experienced starting out with a band and sticking with them, so that would be interesting to me. People whose bands start out like that, when they break up it's always terrible.

All musicians should write poetry or at least read it if they want to improve their game. Except for people who believe lyrics don't matter.

Some people like my singing. But it sounds like bad singing to a lot of other people.

I trust myself.

When I started the band, the name 'Silver Jews' had no literal meaning - it was just an abstraction.

I am not only neither Christian nor Jewish, but said to be in between, and I feel the same way about being from the South and being from the North. I write with my left hand but I throw a ball with my right hand.

People younger than me trust me. People my age do not. They think I'm up to something. And I've often felt this.

My only advice would be to someone right now, is if you're in a position in your life where you need to make a change, this is the best time.

There are enough really good love songs and I don't even know if I could write one if I tried.

In the beginning, it was meant to be like a faceless art piece. Then I did the first record and it received enough notice to satisfy my needs. I questioned the procedure out of fear. The Silver Jews was never meant to be recreated live.

You don't meet too many actors in Nashville.

I can't imagine putting my name on a t-shirt. For someone to wear my name? Me? It's ridiculous.

When you can't see you become very timid about space and moving. You become less aggressive and less tenacious. Lots of things that shouldn't be affected by vision really are. And you don't even know what they are until they become unstuck.

When art is about craftsmanship, then guys like me don't make it as artists.

My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.

I was much further along as a poet than as a songwriter, but the songs were getting more attention. They were doing what art is supposed to do, mixing it up with people.

I've had to stop going to the nearest grocery store that seems to play Shania Twain's 'Forever and For Always' whenever I'm there. It's hard to shop for frozen entrees through cold-air blasted tears. Feels good on a flushed face though.

Little Wooster, Ohio and gargantuan Dallas, Texas formed the municipal cocktail of my life up till age 18. That drab, weird little town and the glitzy big one shaped me for sure.