In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.

Slowly screwing my way across Europe. They had to make a correction.

Welcome to the New York Times Popcast.

New York. Snow is falling in Manhattan of music, news, and criticism.

I'm your host, John Garamonica. you can't make it see can't shake hands when they make your hand shake.

I know you like to line dance.

Everything. to line dance.

dance. But everything's so democratic and cool.

But baby, there's no guidance when random

move. This week on pop cast we are going to celebrate David Berman.

David Berman of Silver Jews and Purple Mountains. Berman took his own life earlier this month.

This has been a tremendous outpouring in the wake of his death from his fans.

At the beginning of the episode, what we were listening to is random rules and that's from the third

silver-ju's album American Water. Berman was kind of an uncharacteristically

intimate and raw and direct songwriter he's been putting out records since the

mid 90s and also especially from the mid-2000s forward kind of had this publicly troubled

character or role he was very front and center with the things that that he was

struggling with and so what I wanted to do is really try to understand Berman

from a few different perspectives on this episode of Popcast.

So we're going to have three conversations this week.

First, we're going to talk to Nick Widenfeld. Nick in 2005 wrote

the first kind of real David Berman profile and got to spend a lot of time with him

...