I Only Want To Die In Your Eyes

Do you remember the way the girls
would call out “love you!”
conveniently leaving out the “I”
as if they didn’t want to commit
to their own declarations
I agree that the “I” is a pretty heavy concept.

—David Berman, “Self Portrait at 28,” actual air

Driving from Nashville to New York on the last day of our honeymoon, my husband and I passed the turn-off for the Natural Bridge on the I-81. Our trip across America that summer had been something of a musical pilgrimage. We had seen the motel in Joshua Tree where Gram Parsons died; left dried roses on one of the three possible graves of Robert Johnson in Mississippi; and shuffled silently through the carpeted hallways of Graceland with a stream of other tourists who arrived on shuttle buses, clutching iPads and headsets, to visit the home of the King. But the Natural Bridge, a geological monument in Rockbridge County, Virginia, would only register as a musical landmark to those familiar with the 1996 album of the same name by American underground rock band, Silver Jews.

David Berman, the band’s singer and songwriter, was born in Williamsburg, on the other side of Virginia, and now lives in Tennessee. A friend of mine has a tall tale about visiting Nashville and meeting Berman and his wife Cassie after looking up their address in the phone book and walking for miles across the hilly suburban streets to their home—the indie rock equivalent of knocking on the door of J.D. Salinger’s hideout in the woods and being invited in. To me, it seems like just another one of the myths that have stuck to Berman like burrs since he dissolved Silver Jews in 2009 and disappeared from public view.

In Nashville, I sang “Superstar” by the Carpenters in a smoky karaoke bar that only sold cigarettes and PBR; I two-stepped to a honky-tonk band with an old cowboy gentleman who turned me briefly into someone resembling a good dancer; and I watched the sky turn silver and the streetlights flicker on in the middle of the day during the total eclipse of the sun, but I did not meet David Berman and I did not stop at the Natural Bridge. I saw the sign for the turn-off out the window of the passenger side and by the time I’d pointed to it, we’d missed the exit, it was already gone. All I have is a blurry photo of the moment after—a four-lane rush of highway, safety rail, trees and sky.

But it’s this sense of missed connection—the “what is not but could be if” that Berman sings about...