Original photography by Tuyara Mordosova. Subscribe to the playlist here.The deceased LA artist Mike Kelly did something amazing in his art. Throughout much of his work, and most notably in his Memory Work Flats, a series two-dimensional sculptures that he created from 2001 up until his suicide in 2012, he grafted modern American bric-a-brac -- buttons, bottle caps, keys, coins, and pendants -- onto larger, wall-hung surfaces. As with the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, the overall effect of these is initially overwhelming and cacophonic -- the viewer struggles to find a focus -- but a rhythm inserts itself eventually, and the collection of junk (there’s no other way to describe it) gains a more ethereal, transcendent form. Kelly has taken objects that ostensibly have little relationship to one another -- that were built to decay in trash dumps and street corner cracks -- and transformed them into a cohesive modern American, high-art sacrament.

In their patchwork, low-hi-art approach, Deerhunter provide a sonic counterpart to Kelly’s artwork. Over the past two decades, the Atlanta band has stitched together elements of ambient, Krautrock, shoegaze, lo-fi electro, post-punk, warped rockabilly, and classic pop for a sound that is, at turns, explosive, defuse, ugly, and ethereal. The songs are full of sex, noise, drugs, screeching feedback, Russian porn stars, wheezing vocals, detuned guitars, and tiny deaths. It’s ugly until it isn’t -- when the dissonance coalesces into melody, and the characters emerge from their chemical cocoons to search for forgiveness, redemption, or, at the very least, empathy. Like Kelly, they tend to build their own iconography from the minutiae of suburbia’s spiritual dissolution, and it’s both revolting and beautiful.

Deerhunter was formed in 2001 in Atlanta, Georgia. It included Bradford Cox, Moses Archuleta, and others who are no longer in the band. The band’s first album, 2005’s Turn it Up Faggot, is more or less unlistenable for those not attuned to the more noisey end of the punk rock spectrum, but the band quickly pivoted, bringing on guitarist and longtime Cox friend Lockett Pundt, who would serve as the band’s other primary songwriter and provide a more trad-rock ballast to Cox’s experimental, kitchen-sink approach. The sophomore album, Cryptograms, was recorded over two days in late 2005, but it took nearly 14 months for their new label, the venerable indie Kranky, to release it. When fans finally heard Cryptograms, many were taken aback. The album was a fairly drastic departure; the jagged, lacerated guitar work of the original was replaced with atonal ambient textures, dadistic pop tunes, and nods towards a Southern Gothic strain of shoegaze. Traces of their earlier, noisy sound remained though, and the overall effect was that of a e listener fine-tuning the dial of a old radio knob, slowly bringing clarity and a bit of pop refinement (if not exactly polish) to the band’s lurking, free-range noise sensibilities. 2008’s Microcastle/ Weird Era saw the group continue to focus their aesthetic. There were actual songs, for one thing. The jangly “Agoraphobia” remains one of their most catchy and tender tracks. There’s a wisp of Sonic Youth’s no wave guitar fuzz, but largely the album is dedicated to taut, post-punk jams like “Nothing Ever Happened” or the great “Never Stops.” As you’ve probably been able to pick up, Deerhunter’s career has a certain arc, beginning with noise bedroom and blog jams of their early years to the learner, more traditionally structured indie rock of Microcastle. It’s not that their more recent work is without value -- 2013’s Monomania traffics in Krautrock and psych to bleary and occasionally beautiful results; while 2015’s jangling, Southern-fried Fading Frontier is the hangover from Monomania’s ridiculous affectations -- but 2010’s Halcyon Digest remains the group’s high-water mark. It’s an album were the band finally boiled down their disparate, oftentimes contradictory influences into a sound and emotional palette that felt uniquely theirs.The album title is a bit of a put on; in Cox’s telling -- it’s meant as a dig at the temptations of nostalgia -- but, otherwise, the album is emotionally and sonically accessible. The gorgeous “Helicopters,” with it’s chiming, elegiac melodies and plees for prayer, is probably the closest the group ever got to pure pop, while “Revival” is a swamy, garage blues burner.But the album’s centerpiece is “He Would Have Laughed.” That song manages to shift movements and melodies without seeming overly cluttered or fussy, and while the lyrics and Cox’s vocal performance is dark and tinged with death -- the track is a tribute to the recently deceased garage punk icon Jay Reatard -- the track is vulnerable and mournful; at one point, Cox muses that with “sweetness comes suffering.” There’s still a whiff of the anger, neurosis, repression, and self-destruction that swirling beneath the surface, but Cox is able to synthesize this into a voice that is tender, honest and revealing. The pain is still present, but it has transformed and taken the shape of art.

Chance the Rapper owned hip-hop in 2016. He provided the musical backbone of Kanye’s Life of Pablo, partied with Beyonce at the VMAs, hung out with Obama at the White House, headlined his own festival, and released the groundbreaking mixtape/album Coloring Book. In terms of larger cultural impact, there’s very few rappers this decade who’ve matched Chance’s 2016 run. To an extent, it seems destined that Chance the Rapper would reach this stature -- he’s been buzzed about in underground circles since his 2012 mixtape 10 Day, and he comes from the upper echelons of Chicago’s political elites: his father is currently serving as the chief of staff for Mayor Rahm Emanuel -- but his moment in the limelight is a weird by-product of a dark political and cultural moment. The joy and euphoria of his rhymes, and the mindfulness and positivity of his persona, provide an anecdote to 2016’s riots, terrorism, police shootings, and political demagogues. He embodies the way we want to see ourselves, our future and our culture. For hip-hop fans, particularly those who fashion ourselves purists of a certain variety, he also reflects how we’d like to think of the genre. And part of the joy of listening to Coloring Book is picking apart his influences and how he reflects hip-hop. The smartly euphoric uplift of “No Problems” recalls Kanye during his pop maximalism peak, while the “Blessings” channels the strands of gospel that pops up in everyone from Tupac to Anderson.Paak. Though he reps his hometown of Chicago -- and his music contains echoes of everyone from Juke legend DJ Rhashad to classic boom bap icon Common -- he’s also has omnivorous tastes, channeling LA underground absurdists Freestyle Fellowship and the sludgy H-Town hip-hop of Mike Jones. For this playlist, we trace some of those influences and try to unpack Chance’s deceptively dense masterpiece, Coloring Book. You can subscribe to the playlist here. We’ve also curated a playlist of some of our favorite interviews of the rapper. Check it out below. -- Sam Chennault

Calling Anderson .Paak an R&B singer shortchanges him. Under the moniker, NxWorries, his 2016 collaboration with producer Knxwledge, Yes Lawd!, the LA musicians pleading, lurching voice carries the weight of that genre’s history -- most distinctly recalling the bluesy soul of O.V. Wright -- but you can also hear the heft and bravado of hip-hop, a byproduct of both .Paak’s early years at the seminal underground label Stones Throw and his association with Dr. Dre and Aftermath Records. He’s of a generation of singers who came of age in rap’s shadows, and this makes for a strange nostalgia; a hall of mirrors where soul refracts hip-hop refracting soul, creating a sound that is uncanny.And while Yes Lawd! feels singular and very much of this moment, the sound that Knxwledge and .Paak crafted is the culmination of a strain of soul that has been bubbling in the LA underground scene (and beyond) for at least a decade. The twin pillars of the sound are J. Dilla and Madlib. The former worked with D’Angelo and Erykah Badu to craft neo soul in the 90s, while the latter opened the door of hip-hop towards psychedelia and outre world music. Their syncopated drums, hazy samples and penchant for compensational pastiche can be heard in the everyone from Flying Lotus to OmMas Keith, the latter of whom helped craft Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde.Yes Lawd! feels like a distillation of that sound -- Madlib’s presence is most clear in the compositions sketch-like quality, but there’s also a pop sensibility grounded in 90s R&B and the generation of forgotten alt. soul groups of the ‘00s, most notably Foreign Exchange (a group comprised of Little Brother vocalist Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolary) and the underrated LA group J*DaVeY, a trashy, funky duo who proclaimed themselves the “Black Eurythmics.”For this playlist, we peel back onion on this universe, tracing the influences of NxWorries; .Paak and Knxwledge’s solo work; as well as samples and the work of guest and collaborators. If you love the new album, as many do, this should provide great complimentary listening. Subscribe to the playlist here.

Nas may be known primarily for classics albums such as Illmatic and It Was Written, but his work on other people’s tracks reveals new dimensions of his work. On earlier classics such “Verbal Intercourse” or the vastly underrated AZ collaboration “Mo Money, Mo Murder (Homoside),” Nas seems primarily concerned with sensory detail and pure sound -- the clanging consonants and sly insertions of internal rhymes that melt the rusted metal of his harrowing imagery into pure liquid poetry. As his career would progress, he became more interested in carving out meaning, and tracks such as “Road to Zion” -- his collaboration with Damian Marley -- and “Music for Live” are thoughtful post-colonialists critiques set to boom bap. His recent verse of DJ Khaled’s “Nas Album Done” verifies that, 20+ years into an already legendary career, the rapper is still near the top of the game. The power of his voice is matched by the subtlety of his language as he pushes for equality through economic re-investment in black communities. Yeah, it’s admittedly strange this is taking place on a DJ Khaled track, but the track has to be encouraging for all Nas fans.

Kendrick Lamar isn’t just the most talented hip-hop lyricist of his generation; he’s also a transformational cultural figure. He meets with gang bangers and world leaders. Protesters chant his lyrics at rallies to voice their opposition to police brutality and Donald Trump. And millions of fans from across the globe absorb and internalize his knotty, progressive lyrics. As a pop-culture figure, his power is unrivaled. It’s not innappropriate to speak of him in the same breath as Bob Marley, Dylan, or Fela Kuti.In many ways, he gets this—and so does the music press. Few stars have had their lives as extensively chronicled as Kendrick. There are literally hundreds of interviews, thousands of think pieces, and tens of thousands of blog and message-board posts trying to piece together his story. With this series, we’ve consolidated all those different sources to provide you with a comprehensive look at the rapper. We’ll start off with this playlist of his essential tracks, and then, over the course of the next 10 posts and playlists, we’ll tell the story of his childhood, and the story of Compton. We’ll track his early years in the rap game, and provide you with a deep dive into his collaborators and inspirations. If you’re a casual admirer, you’ll come away feeling that you know Kendrick so much better. And if you’re already an obsessive fan, you’ll still learn a few new things. And, regardless of your level of engagement, you’ll have 11 awesome new playlists. Enjoy.

Saying Wu-Tang owned ‘90s hip-hop is a slight overstatement—Dre, B.I.G., Pete Rock, Mannie Fresh, and dozens of other legendary figures also chipped in—but it’s also inaccurate to say that they completely fell off thereafter. Yes, they never reached the heights of their initial 1993-97 run, but they remained one of the most talented and idiosyncratic groups in rap. In the aughts, there was at least one classic album (Supreme Clientele), a couple near-classics (Fishscale, Only Built for Cuban Linx II), and several underrated jewels (8 Diagrams, No Said Date,Legend of the Liquid Sword) tucked into their catalog, and even their lesser, disappointing releases (Birth of a Prince, Wu Massacre, Tical 0) usually contained a banger or two. We’ve highlighted our 36 favorite of these, using Spotify, into one playlist. But, before we get into the the list, a few disclaimers:* GZA’s Grandmasters, RZA’s Digi Snacks, and the Wu-Tang’s 8 Diagrams are not available on streaming, so we have not included any of those tracks here.* We are not including tracks that the Wu-Tang guested on (hence no Kanye tracks).* In the interest of including as broad a selection of tracks from the Wu-Tang Clan, while still remaining honest to the concept, we didnt include eight tracks from Supreme Clientele. With those qualifiers, enjoy the list and subscribe to the playlist right here.36. “Meth Vs. Chef 2”, Meth + Ghost + Rae, Wu Massacre, 201035. “Silent”, GZA, Legend of the Liquid Sword, 200234. “Wu Tang,” U-God ft. Method Man, Dopium, 200933. “Ill Figures,” Wu-Tang Clan, Chamber Music, 200932. “All Natural,” Masta Killa, Selling My Soul, 201231. “Pioneer The Frontier,” Wu-Tang Clan, A Better Tomorrow, 201430. “Biochemical Equation,” RZA ft. Wu-Tang Clan and MF DOOM, Wu-Tang Meets Indie Culture, 200529. “Sound the Horns,” Wu-Tang Clan, Chamber Music, 200928. “9 Milli Bros,” Ghostface Killah ft. Wu-Tang Clan, Fishscale, 200627. “Keep Watch,” Wu-Tang Clan, A Better Tomorrow, 201426. “City High,” Inspectah Deck, The Movement, 200325. “When I’m Writing,” Killah Priest, Black August, 200324. “If Time is Money,” Wu-Tang Clan, The Saga Continues, 201723. “The Glide”, Method Man, 4:21...The Day After, 200622. “Ghost Showers,” Ghostface Killah, Bulletproof Wallets, 200121. “Grab the Microphone,” Masta Killa, No Said Date, 200420. “Uzi (Pinky Ring),” Wu-Tang Clan, Iron Flag, 200119. “Must Be Bobby,” RZA, Digital Bullet, 200118. “Colombian Ties,” GZA, Pro Tools, 200817. “Got to Have It,” Method Man, 4:21...The Day After, 200616. “Shakey Dog,” Ghostface Killah, Fishscale, 200615. “Pop Shots,” Ol Dirty Bastard, Osirus, 200514. “The Sun,” Ghostface, Bulletproof Wallet outtake, 200113. “Grits,” RZA, Birth of a Prince, 200312. “Pyrex Vision”, Raekwon, Only Built for Cuban Linx 2, 2009.11. “Run,” Ghostface, The Pretty Toney Album, 200410. “We Pop”, RZABirth of a Prince, 2003In the end, the Wu-Tang sound—stringy hip-hop minimalism with Memphis soul samples and crusty, boom bap beats—had little lasting impact on hip-hop. By 1996, rap had moved on to the jiggy beats of Diddy and the Trackmasters, and, shortly thereafter, the pumped-up Orleans bounce of Mannie Fresh; and by 1997, so had the Wu, unleashing their own variants on their signature template. On this track from 2003s Birth of a Prince, RZA tries to catch up to the rap mainstream by taking a page from G-Unit, unleashing bronzed-out F-funk over a paean to popped champagne bottles, “hoes in different areas,” and “the bass shake in the club.” It really shouldn’t work, which makes this earworm semi-hit all the more remarkable.9. “Holla”, Ghostface KillahThe Pretty Toney Album, 2004“I’m from a place where fish was made,” Ghostface rasps on this track’s opening line, and, like many of Ghost’s best lyrics, it means absolutely nothing and everything. The song is alternately tough-as-nails and unimaginably fragile, from the quivering strings of the The Delfonics “La-La (Means I Love You)” to Ghostface’s taunt brag, “Like, an angry, cripple, man, dont push me!” Ghost isn’t constructing meaning here as much as he’s conjuring mood, and, as such, there’s no real production on here to speak of; the Delfonics track is left as-is—no loop, chop or cut—as Ghost raps over the broken boombox beat, channeling a time and place that is bitterly, sweetly nostalgic. 8. “Pass the Bone (Remix)”, Masta KillaMade in Brooklyn, 2006In the aftermath of World War II, there were stories that pockets of Japanese soldiers remained stranded on deserted islands. Isolated, and without any news of Shigemitsu’s surrender, they fought on for many years after that war had ended.* Masta Killa is the Wu’s version of that. He was a disciple of GZA who was only sparingly featured on Wu tracks during the group’s glory years, and, as other members were trying to update their sound (see RZA’s “We Pop”) or disappearing into their own aesthetic (pretty much any Ghostface record), Masta Killa made two classic albums (2004’s No Said Date and 2006’s Made in Brooklyn) anchored by his dense lyricism and crusty breakbeats. These late-period jewels sounded like they had been delivered to the 2000s from Wu headquarters circa ‘96 in a hazy time machine. “Pass The Bone,” a highlight from Made in Brooklyn, is rap as cinema verité, conjuring loose Saturday nights, coughed-up blunts, random hook-ups, and stoop conversations over a straightforward soul loop.* If you don’t believe me, there’s a Gilligan’s Island’s episode dedicated to this.7. “Animal Planet”, GZALegend of the Liquid Sword, 2002GZA was always Wu-Tang’s most accomplished technician. Where Method Man or ODB’s lines contained a visceral velocity, crushing coal to near-perfect lyrical diamonds in split seconds, GZA’s rhymes seemed as if they were written in tomes over the course of decades, revealing calculated phonetic associations and delicately crafted allusions. “Animal Planet” abstracts the violence and politics of the streets into a jungle metaphor; the tarantula is the “hype man” and chimps “sling in trees” with “elephants for security,” while everglades were “controlled by the gators” before they were “crashed by the crocs who came years later.” The conceit is anchored by a lush beat and the simple, half-whispered chorus—“it’s a jungle sometimes”—that appropriates Grandmaster Flash’s classic line from “The Message.”6. “Nutmeg”, Ghostface KillahSupreme Clientele, 2000The best art teaches you how to see it, writing its own rules and daring viewers to decipher the lines, hues, and figures on its own terms, and not according to your preconceived notions of how it should be. Metaphorically speaking, that’s exactly what Ghostface did on 2000’s Supreme Clientele, bending nouns to verbs (“watch me Dolly Dick it”), building up a thick lattice of NYC esoterica (Scotty Woody, Clarks, Optimo), and tilting towards the undecipherable (sample lyric: “Dancing with Blanche and them bitches, flicking deuce pictures/ Kick down the ace of spades, snatch Jack riches”). “Nutmeg” was produced by Ghostface’s barber, Black Moes-Art—which is as perfect and makes as much sense as anything else on Ghostface’s wacky masterpiece.5. “Black Widow, Pt. 2,” Bobby DigitalDigital Bullet, 2001It only lasts a little over two minutes—not including the ponderous outro—but this song is terrifying, sonically and morally. For the second time in his career, RZA samples Wendy Rene’s “After Laughter (Comes Tears),” but where his previous flip on “Tearz” emphasized the track’s hardwon soul—contrasting the source track’s anachronistic strings and vocal harmonies against some of the toughest drums RZA ever produced—“Black Widow, Pt. 2” strips the sample to the bone, focusing on Rene’s scream—a primal, sensual, terrifying plea that loops over and over, building a screeching house-of-trap horrors, backlighting the moment where ODB’s sputtering, disconnected misogyny (“bitch, you belong to me”) turns to violence and the song’s female subject screams, “Dirt, I don’t want to die.” None of this is defensible—it’s morally repellent—but the best Wu was frequently ugly.4. “I Can’t Go to Sleep,” The Wu Tang ClanThe W, 2000Middle-period Ghostface—starting with 2004’s ThePretty Toney Album and lasting through 2009’s Ghostdini—found the MC trying to formulate himself as a post-crack-era Al Green, appropriating classic soul tracks verbatim (e.g., “Big Girl,” “Holla”) and rapping in a pleading, quivering voice that imbued 36 lifetimes of desire, confusion, loathing and transcendence. This track from 2000’s The W laid the groundwork for all that, building off the symphonic, proto-prog soul of Isaac Hayes “Walk on By” and chronicling the “havoc of the streets of Satan,” the murdered babies, raped women, and “crack and guns” of the “early 80s.” Even if his lyrics amount to little more than clever phonetic interlacing (sample: “Whippy got hit up with the big shit, bong bong”), Ghostface’s voice—cracked, pleading, piercing—seems to have absorbed all that. When RZA comes on the track’s second verse, translating Ghostface’s grief by making the personal political and the political historical—referencing Malcolm getting “shot in the chest” and Marcus Garvey getting deported because “he tried to spark us”—the track enters the upper pantheon of Wu Tang, regardless of the era.3. “House of the Flying Daggers,” RaekwonOnly Built 4 Cuban Linx 2, 2009By the late-aughts, Wu Tang were more or less playing hip-hop’s oldie circuit, and the prospect of them revisiting a deeply cherished album from their golden period seemed fraught, to say the least. And while Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 doesn’t quite match the considerable heights of the original, the uneasy, propulsive “House of the Flying Daggers” is monumental. Ghost, painting in his usual loopy word spasms, threatens to “humiliate, brutalize, Ruger pop, pulverize,” as Rae requests that they “bury me in Africa with whips and spears and rough diamonds from Syria.” The production, provided by J Dilla, cyphering the dirty adrenaline of classic RZA, simply bulldozes you.2. “Cherchez LaGhost”, Ghostface KillahSupreme Clientele, 2000It’s easy to forget that the Wu-Tang didn’t have much of a imperial, decadent period. They began as an underground unit from a (very) outer-borough, cataloging the litter of broken crack vials and busted 40 ounces, and, after shortly flirting with pop success, they and their quirky, never-quite-mainstream sound quickly slid back into obscurity, foregoing the usual accoutrements of hip-hop royalty (velvet roaches, Superhead, and French vanilla Ciroc). Still, this song, couched in the cooing cocaine big-band disco of Dr. Buzzards Original Savannah Band’s “Cherchez La Femme,” feels like the party after the afterparty, the slice of euphoria before the comedown. Rarely have the Wu-Tang sounded as if they were having this much fun. It didn’t last long, but it was a good minute (or three).1. “Careful (Click, Click)”, Wu-Tang ClanThe W, 2000The unvarnished soul sample that bleeds out of the track’s opening hints at classic Wu, but this banger from The W feels utterly unlike anything that came before it, or after. As a forlorn flute slinks between the track’s hovering bassline and tight boom bap beat, “Careful (Click, Click)" doesn’t so much describe the grit and toxicity of urban life as it revels in in, recoiling in the tight spaces where brown paper bags, dirty syringes, and cocked hammers mark the dark spaces of Wu’s boarding houses/imaginary slums, bobbing with a millennial sleekness that underlines the track’s post-industrial menace, eerily evoking future trauma through Ghost’s insistence, nearly a year before 9/11, that the “boxcutter went click click.” Quite simply, this is the Wu at the height of their powers.

An homage from Dowsers founder Sam Chennault: I’ve never written an obituary, and I’m not entirely sure where to begin, but I’ll start with what I know is true: David Berman is dead. Berman was a poet and the leader of the band the Silver Jews and, more recently, Purple Mountains. I’ve spent thousands of hours over the past 25 years listening to his songs and reading his poems. To say that his words and voice were beautiful, poignant, clever, funny, or any of the usual adjectives that I’ve used over the years to describe music feels wholly inadequate. More than anything, they were unflinchingly human and startling honest. They provided a window into a journey and a life that was difficult, and oftentimes incomprehensible and cruel.

Maybe he described it best: “Songs build little rooms in time/ housed within the songs design/ is the ghost the host has left behind/ to greet and sweep the guest inside.”

Berman was born in Virginia, not far from where I lived for a period of my life when I was younger. He was the son of an infamous Republican lobbyist, and he began making music in the early ‘90s. His first songs felt like a lark — the music equally appropriated noise rock and country, and they were ramshackle, disheveled, and sometimes formless. They oftentimes sputtered out without warning. But it was clear that he had a gift for conjuring images of liminal, ancient spaces. An early jewel: “Sin and gravity/ drag me down to sleep/ to dream of trains across the sea.”

‍Over the years, his songs took on more concrete forms. The track “Pretty Eyes” from the 1996 Natural Bridge was a turning point where he first understood the power he wielded. The song is a surrealistic, trickster slice of Americana that tells of  “little forest scenes and high school Halloweens.” In it, Berman declares “one of these days these days will end,” and relays a story of hosing down elephants in his backyard. These elephants are “ashamed of their size,” so he comforts them by telling them that they have “pretty eyes.” It’s a silly image on some levels, but there’s also an underlying tenderness to it, as there is with so much of his work. The last verse begins: “I believe the stars are the headlights of angels/ Driving from heaven to save us/ to save us/ Look in the sky/ Theyre driving from heaven into our eyes.”

Berman was also a deeply troubled person. He spent many years addicted to crack cocaine, and, in 2003, he tried to kill himself in the same hotel room in Tennessee where Al Gore was holed up on election night 2000. He declared he wanted to die where the presidency died. In 2009, he temporarily quit music, saying that his father (the Republican lobbyist) was "a despicable man ... a human molester ... an exploiter...I thought that through songs and poems and drawings I could find and build a refuge away from his world...There needs to be something more.”

He would return from his self-imposed exile in 2019, recording under the moniker Purple Mountains. His work had become progressively darker — his voice grew warbly and broken, and he conceded that he’d been “humbled by the void.” Even more alarmingly, was his line that “the dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind.”

It’s all very bleak, but there was always a hardwon hope. One of my personal favorite songs of his is “The Wild Kindness.” To an extent, the song is about entropy and decay. He relays that “Grass grows in the icebox/ and the year ends in the next room/ It is autumn and my camouflage is dying.” But the song ends with this image: “Four dogs in the distance/ Each stands for a silence/ Bluebirds lodged in an evergreen altar/ Im gonna shine out in the wild kindness.../And hold the world to its word.”

He was always fighting, trying to find an escape route from his family’s history, from his own addictions and mental issues, and from a world that was, at turns, absurd and cruel. I identified with this, as did many of the people whom I love and care deeply about. I thought that if Berman could negotiate these dark alleyways, and still produce works of such startling beauty, maybe there was hope for the rest of us. When I met him, I told him as much. I hope that meant something to him.

On August 7th, 2019, we found out that the worst had happened. Berman, in his own words, had been “playing chicken with oblivion,” and, this time, no one flinched. His last video was for a song called “All My Happiness is Gone.” It’s lonely and ecstatic, and begins with Berman and his friends entering a cave. The last verse of the track will always be devastating:

Its not the purple hillsIts not the silver lakesIts not the snowcloud shadowed interstatesIts not the icy bike chain rain of Portland, OregonWhere nothings wrong and no ones askingBut the fear is so strong, it leaves you gaspingNo way to last out here like this for long

My friend texted me to let me know the news at 7:52 EST. Four minutes later, another person, someone who is one of the most important people in my life, also texted me, “I’m having such a hard time. Life is painful.” She’d never heard of Berman or the Silver Jews; life doesn’t always require a specific tragedy or death to be crushing.

I called her partner and found out that she was curled up, crying, mumbling that she wanted to “meet Jesus.” I asked to speak to her, and told her that she should get professional help, that a therapist would help her unpack and understand her past. She replied that her past — consumed with a dead child and lost dreams — was too heavy, and that she had no desire to revisit it. I asked to speak to her partner, and told him to hide the sleeping pills. Sometimes, this is the best advice you can give.

As I mentioned when I first began writing this, I’ve never written an obituary. You tell me, but maybe they should have a happy ending, or at least some nod toward redemption or celebration. I’ll try to provide that here. About a month ago, I lost someone whom I cared deeply about. They didn’t pass away, or disappear into drugs or alcohol; they simply stopped caring about our relationship and exited my life. I consoled myself with the knowledge that there was a new David Berman album, and this album contained more than just new songs from a master. It held 10 new friends, friends who would help carry the weight of mass shootings, dead children, failed relationships, and lonely bars, and they would go on and on and on. They will live forever.