The Silver Jews is poet/songwriter David Berman's artistic outlet. Including this year's Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea they have released six albums since 1994. The band was initially formed with Berman's college buddies Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastonovich. Although Malkmus and Nastonovich had a formidable pedigree with their success from their seminal band Pavement, the Jews were always a result of Berman's ultimate vision as a songwriter. The Silver Jews' history is littered with a revolving door of contributing musicians. Some albums include Malkmus and Nastonovich but the majority do not. As a lyricist Berman has written some of the most poignant, witty and just downright brilliant lyrics in the last two decades. Musically, the band always relied on a blend of country and indie rock that has changed and evolved depending on Berman's whim. They've notoriously neglected to tour a lot over the years but their albums have been consistently excellent.

Junk Media recently spoke with Berman about the human eye, country music, politics, the importance of the year 1913, and of course the new Silver Jews album. Mr. Berman is busy these days. The Silver Jews just returned from a whirlwind European tour, the new album was released on June 17th and a U.S. tour is currently in the works.

Junk Media: Hi David, how've you been?

David Berman: Fine, we just got back from a trip.

Right, how was Europe?

It was good. The only bad thing that happened was I sprained my thumb so we're trying to get it X-Rayed or something.

How did that happen?

I tripped over a curb in the dark in Ireland. It turns out that Ireland isn't very well lit. Sorta dark and there are meaningless curbs everywhere, so it was very treacherous and I fell down and just landed on my arm.

Did you try to go to the hospital there?

No, there was no time.

Yeah, your tour was really hectic.

There was literally no time. We had a day off one day in the country but mostly the other days off you are driving. Just the idea of sitting in an emergency room. When we were in Wales, Brian, our drummer got some terrible food poisoning and we had to take him to the Welsh hospital. They were really great and it was amazing and you saw a national health care system working really great. He was in there with some terrible cramps and pain. I also had an experience in a Spanish emergency room in Madrid in 1998. I got my head kicked in and my eardrum busted and it was pretty much a nightmare. They couldn't do anything but tell me to go back home and get my eardrum repaired.

How did that happen? Did you get into a fight?

Yeah, it came from a fight with unfortunately, one guy and his four friends. It was totally, or maybe it's just the way I remember it now, so much like a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. It was on a cobblestone street with these four guys on mopeds. One of the guys actually started kickboxing. It was just bizarre. I was trying to catch his leg and pull him down and I did but after that I just blacked out. His friends just kicked me in the head so many times that I, you know, there is a "Hot as Hell" live Silver Jews 7" that is on Sea Note, a Drag City subsidiary, and on the cover you can see this picture of me from that night. There is a boot print in purple, the treads of the boot print, right on my forehead. When I went back to New York it was funny because people look at somebody with a boot print on their forehead and they think that they might be chaotic or something. They make you feel nervous. This was in '98 and the funny thing about it was that there was a hole in my eardrum. When I got back to New York I of course didn't have health insurance. A friend of mine, Rob Bingham, was a wealthy guy, he sent me to his doctor on the Upper East Side and he sort of burned this paper over the hole. That lures the skin to cross the paper and meet it on the other side so the hole gets covered up. The skin would never grow out into the air to repair the hole. So that got pretty much repaired, but I bet my hearing is a lot worse. But sometimes I wonder if that is just from years of standing to the right of the stage when I go see live shows.

Was that after you had finished recording American Water?

Yeah, that was right after American Water.

At least you had that under your belt at that point. At least it didn't screw that up.

Exactly. I was in Spain doing press for that record. Years later, around early 2004, I realized that the vision in my right eye had been getting really really bad; it got so bad it was like a soapy window with light and color coming in, but with no distinct shapes. My eyes had always been bad since I was a kid. They would slowly get worse and worse and the prescription would get stronger and stronger, but this one went way off the map. We went and got it looked at and it was this condition called keratoconus. Like your eyeball, the cornea, the clear part that looks like a clear disc, above the color, the dome above the color, was instead of being smooth like a dome it was more like a mountaintop. It had become craggy, and tall and pointy. It sorta grows up like that. Instead of being this perfect prism, that your cornea is supposed to be where the light comes in from all these directions and gets assembled. Now it came in and hit that thing and the light comes in at all these crazy directions like a salt cluster or something. That's why it looks like a soapy window. So they see this and for a while they make you wear hard contacts, soft contacts fall over the mountain. The hard ones create a dome again and amazingly your tears fill up the rest of the dome and you can see again. It's really weird until it gets so pointy that the contact just falls off constantly. When it finally gets to that point you have to get a cornea transplant. They don't know why people get them but they associate it with people who get really strong blows to the head. Like kicks.

That is definitely a direct correlation.

That was the correlation. That got it done.

What happened since then?

One of the good things about going on tour is that I was able to come back and pay off my debts and we were able to afford the cornea transplant. So I went to this doctor here at Vanderbilt, Dr. Tren, she was this amazing Vietnamese woman. Amazingly delicate hands and she took this, I guess they don't tell you whose it is…

Anonymous cornea.

It's kind of like the Lions club. I never really thought about what they did. So, from the eye bank they collect the corneas. They shave out the old one and put a new one in. There are a lot of stitches, like forty or eighty microscopic stitches and you take eye drops for a year. It takes a long time for the body to meld with it because there are no blood vessels but the good part about it is that once it does then it's not like having an organ or something where your body might reject it. Once it's been in there for a year and you've been taking eye drops and the body still holds it, it becomes like you.

That sounds really cool and gross at the same time.

Yeah, and it's really amazing to me. All last year, I would go in every month and she would take out some more stitches. Every time the stitches would come out the thing would relax a little bit more and my sight would come back more. Finally when she really took it out, with glasses on, I was able to have that feeling of bilateral vision.

How did this experience, including that blow to the head, affect your writing?

Well, I think I can say more how it affected my life. As you lose your vision you become really passive. It starts with you becoming more passive in space because you don't feel that comfortable moving around. It actually sort of inhibits you, draws you in further and you might even take on the consciousness of a handicapped person. I think that I would just let myself off the hook for just moving around. My movements became more centralized. I think getting it back is obviously really metaphorical. It's kind of strange that I have such obvious metaphors working in my life. Being able to see coincident with being more appreciative as I'm growing older, things like that.

Is there anything in your music, lyrically, that you consciously wrote as a direct result of what happened?

Yeah, I think that's what the album title is. That's where the album starts or ends. Looking outward at the world, from the cover painting to the title and the play on words with "Sea" and also the mountain on my eye.

So the metaphors are all there.

Sure and the lyrics "we could be looking," 'looking' and 'seeing' is going on all over the place. There is a certain issue with clarity and I think in a way the album, since it is in a communicative mode as opposed to other albums which are more demonstrative, it states clarity as being important.

This album seems much more concise than the last few.

Right. Yes. It is very concise and it's obviously a choice when you want every piece to represent an idea or a concept. It's the opposite of what you read thousands and thousands of times in interviews when you hear, 'I want the listener to make it what they want.' It's more of a cooperative effort than that. I'm actually depending on the listener to meet me half way, but what I'm offering isn't total freedom of impression. In the song "Suffering Jukebox," I'm anthropomorphizing this jukebox and you can think about it as a country covers guy down on Broadway, you can think of it as me, or as Cassie speaking to me.

My impression of it was literally a jukebox in a bar that is forced to play these sad songs which it is always fed and it's suffering because it has no other choice.

Yeah, and that's kind of the joke also because famously country music is about misery. Its like of all the songs about jukeboxes, here is a twist that I haven't seen, and it's obvious; it's not a weird one. It seems like somebody should have thought of it. You know, that jukeboxes are filled with sad songs. If you anthropomorphize it, it becomes like an Eeyore, or a suffering character.

You have sad country theme running through a lot of your music. "Buckingham Rabbit" from American Water, the lyrics "Honky-tonk psychiatrist."

There's always me trying to engage with twisting these country music motifs that are really kind of obvious. To me though there isn't really a dialogue between what I do and country music. I try to be that in my music because I am interested in country music. I find that a lot of people that maybe wind up listening to Silver Jews records don't look very far into it. I can pretty much be assured of that.

You know, I bet you that a lot of people who are into your music are probably into people like Bob Dylan. When you get into him and you read about him you know that he was into people like Hank Williams. People might go out and see what that's all about. So maybe some of your fans might be familiar with country music.

What I think is that people appreciate a limited palate. People like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and maybe Dolly Parton. It gets very constricted to a group of people. At any rate that's one of the reasons why I probably live in Nashville. The cliché country environments are still visually around. I'm still within the lifetime of classic country music and where it was made. Even though, of course it's not made anymore, there's still the people who are actually always dying, but you can always go to their funerals.

Country music is the heritage of Nashville. It will always be there.

Right, right, you know and the studios, even where the rock albums were made, this place I go and have lunch at everyday is across the parking lot from where Harvest was made and when I eat lunch there I think about the album. Right near where I live there's this street where that annoying country song "Elvira" was named after. Dallas Frasier, I think he lives on this street. Obviously those ciphers, signs and signals are fun for me to play with. There are certain things I come back to. I always have allowed that. Even in my poems. I think that country music has parables, jokes, epigrams, short fits of things you can put in your pocket. Maybe it's because I have such a bad memory.

Did you always have a bad memory? Before the kicks to the head?

Yes! I've always had a bad memory. I can never imagine working on a project that would be in a long form. An album is sort of like that but there's the changing. The songs are all different. I've always been attracted to getting in and out as best as I possibly can. It actually turns out that I can take a long, long time to make just one thing. As a younger person I was always interested in writing poems. People always said to me, so, "when are you going to write a novel?" As if it was inevitable. As if you sort of see what I'm doing through one traditional way. Where as I view what I do more as coming not through writing but through this plain sense of art. Whether I'm drawing cartoons or making a song.

Your longest narrative song, "San Francisco, B.C." is like a short story, but you're not going to go much further than that?

No, and to me, it's almost like there isn't a character that could hold my attention that long unless I was writing an autobiography or something. That song I wanted to be a story, but to be a story it had to be long. I wanted something to happen, and I wanted it to circle back on itself. I also didn't want to have anything arbitrary; I wanted everything to contribute to the whole of it. I almost felt apologetic when we were playing live about playing the song for so long, like, oh, this is six and a half minutes.

Oh, six and a half minutes. That's nothing. No big deal.

I was like, oh, if you wanna go to the bathroom or whatever.

Getting back to Nashville, you have a line in "Suffering Jukebox" where you say "Tennessee tendencies." What did you have in mind when you wrote that line?

I guess I was taking a liberty there with just the idea. I guess there isn't a Tennessee way to be. The distance between Knoxville and East Tennessee to Memphis is as far as you can go.

Was it a Nashville thing?

I was sort of just saying 'redneck.' I was thinking low class self-destruction. Which all self-destruction eventually gets to. I was probably sort of thinking there are certain tendencies, very strong tendencies actually in country music. Along with Texas, Tennessee, has just a little bit more contributed the most to country music.

You grew up in Texas, right?

I lived there when I was young and graduated from High School there. To me, it would be a pretty good distinction between Dallas and the country music of East Tennessee. Obviously Tennesseans do not believe in paying state taxes. Consequentially the libraries aren't open on Fridays, which is ridiculous to me, completely ridiculous.

Why aren't the libraries open on Fridays?

Because Tennesseans are predominately conservative and conservatives have brain washed them into thinking that the government is their enemy. Going to Europe, especially in just these last three weeks you really see how (for someone traveling through there for the first time in twenty years), how Europe was still something that was a poorer entity than the United States and you could really tell that. In London, and especially in somewhere like Ireland that was third world country in the 80's.

What is the currency in Ireland?

The Euro.

So now in a place like Ireland, their money is worth more than the dollar.

Their money worth a hell of a lot more, to point where you can't afford to buy candy bars. Candy bars are like, four bucks.

Then you come home and you're like, "damn, I can't afford anything here either."

The thing is, over there, society is exceeding the United States. Because of the public works, because the society is so much more efficient, because the trains are so much better, because the laws and the way things are done make so much more sense. The idiocy in the United States that lets the infrastructure rot. It's like the people in the United States are in a country club and they don't want to pay their dues or something. They think the money they make comes from somewhere outside the universe and it's being taken from them instead of seeing that the money that they make is actually only makeable because of the entity called the United States government.

Since we are getting political, how do you feel about Obama securing the democratic nomination?

I'm not a prognosticator but I feel bad for Barack because in a way I can see him becoming history's dupe. In the last eight years I have seen unbelievable behavior on the part of the right wing in the United States. Things on the level of lying and just among common people complete denials of reality that I've never seen before. I just can't see people capable of letting the Democratic Party do the business of repairing all the damage that has been done. It seems to me that there is no way that the congress and the political media will let anything happen. All the destructive policies. The Bush administration has been so thorough in destroying so much regulation in every single aspect of the government, from corporate misbehavior to the FDA to mining regulations to labor law. To what measure would Barack be successful? I don't understand.

There would have to be a complete 180.

Yeah and to me there is no way that the people that I've seen over the last eight years, my fellow countrymen who happen to be conservative, are so ignorant and so dead set at staying ignorant and not learning, that I don't have a positive view of the future.

That's exactly Obama's platform, "Change."

It has to get really bad for the society to completely dispose of the Rush Limbaugh selfishness. The evil has to be totally exposed and hasn't been. What that means is that something a lot more catastrophic has to happen. So, to bring it back to the album, there's a lot on the record that has to do with me going out on tour in 2006. Seeing who the fans were really changed my writing and made me more communicative, like I said, because I understood that the people were younger, number one, and that younger people are actually different. There is actually a generational divide for people born after 1980. They are really bright and really sweet and capable of working in teams in ways people my age are totally not. In that way it's fortunate since those are going to be the adults who are going to have to deal with the mess.

So you see hope?

It's not going to be Barack Obama's age group. I'm confident because a generation like mine could never do that. We are too cynical, growing up in a society that was a lot more negative than the kids born after 1980 and not as protective. The piece of speech before the fifth song is Teddy Roosevelt speaking in 1913 to these kids. The Boys Progressive League Party in New York City in 1913. It was this republican offshoot party and he was saying "boys go out and fight for the progressive party, da, da, da." Then he uses the line "I want you to go out like a game of football and don't flinch, don't foul and hit the line hard." The reason I put that in there is A, to make a comparison of me as Teddy Roosevelt speaking to young people. The self criticism in that is, well maybe not necessarily me, but whoever speaks to younger people and whoever they listen to, don't understand what lies ahead. In 1913 Teddy Roosevelt could not see how the world would change forever the next year and it would never be the same. After which people would no longer have any faith in the perfectibility of mankind and all these ideals of the 19th century were totally blown away by WWI.

In 1913, speaking to these boys, he was probably speaking to boys who would be gassed in trenches in WWI. It almost burns with arrogance to me that Teddy Roosevelt and the people who ruled that Edwardian world, who set up this combustion, who presided over that most terrible thing that ever happened, didn't see it coming. There is a certain amount of anger I have right now because I feel it is a 1913 kind of moment. Young people don't realize it. They are not angry at the baby boomers who totally fucked the country by forgoing long term planning and going for it greed-wise in a way that no one has ever before - deregulating everything, getting us involved in super massive technology that we don't understand and not even questioning it. The adults of today are more irresponsible than any adults in history because they have more to take care of. Today, the ones who run our society are the most irresponsible people that I have ever had the nauseating pleasure to know about.

So, in your estimation, something as catastrophic as WWI is right on the brink?

Yes, something as catastrophic as a world war or a depression or those things that happen that makes societies evolve. Our society is stuck in this one place. It has to do with consumption. That's why on the album there is a lot of gluttony.

Like on "Aloyisius, Bluegrass Drummer" the imagery of eating all this hydrogenated fat.

Right, or like the candy in "Candy Jail." It's probably more normal in rock songs for people to use sin in the sense of lust or robbery or theft or something. Gluttony was the best thing for me. I'm trying to make a record and a lot of records have been written with backgrounds of misery in drugs and alcohol or even a celebration of such. The only mention on the whole record of mind altering substances is the word 'doubles' in "suffering jukebox."

Consumption in the way you describe it, as a theme in a rock album, sounds like new territory.

It comes back to the title again, writing about 1913, that time before the world changed, which was the last time you could travel the whole world without a passport. After that everything changed in ways that nobody could imagine.

That's when the U.S. was really on the verge of becoming either an agrarian or industrial society.

There was no way in 1913 you could even imagine the options, much less the choices, so part of the weird thing is that I can talk about this, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

Have you ever read "East of Eden" by Steinbeck? It really captures that moment in history.

No, but there is a Virginia Woolf quote where she says "on or around about October 13, 1910 the world ended forever" for the people who were there maybe they saw the modern world coming a little bit early but for someone who wasn't there I just know WWI was the beginning of the end. 1913 is symbolic and even the CD face has a woman's face, it looks like the continents of Asia and Europe but if you look twice it is actually a woman in profile. That drawing was drawn by the guy who drew "Uncle Sam Wants You." Both were drawn in 1913. It's this picture of the other side of the world. I guess all of this comes around. I'm making some kind of claim in the album. I'm taking pains to say this album is looking out, this album is paying attention, but the hard thing about talking about it is that I don't understand what's to come, but I feel harping, or maybe I want to make a harping of the future.

You also don't want this point to be too explicit on your record without sounding too political. People don't necessarily want to hear that.

Exactly. You don't ever want to discredit yourself for being a quack or something like that. As an artist I considered a lot of ways of making music that reflected all the political feelings that I have. Hopefully I considered writing different kinds of songs, and when I thought about writing political songs and actually tried to, I didn't have a knack for it and there are so few good precedents.

On some of your earlier albums, especially the ones where you collaborated with Stephen Malkmus, it was a little more musical, probably due to his influence. Even though Stephen is not on this album you have shied away from that style on this album specifically.

I think that recording a record and being in a band is a social situation. There's a certain way you are with yourself and you are different with someone else or with two different friends. In the albums where Steve played, I knew beforehand that he was going to play, its not like we decided about it last minute, so I'd be in that mode when I was writing those songs, which would be less inward. I would leave places for Steve and the band etc. When it's just me…

You're filling all the spaces.

Right, and so that's natural.

Is working with Stephen something you'd be interested in doing in the future? Have you guys spoken?

Oh, yeah, we speak. I just saw him in Barcelona. It would actually be the pattern. Which has been every odd number album.

Have you heard his album?

I listened to it. I always listen to the guitar work. I always like it.

Getting back to the cover of your album, that is Babar on the cover isn't it?

Yeah, I saw the painting and loved it. If it hadn't been for Babar, if it was just a generic stuffed animal I would have still loved it. [laughs].

[Laughs.] That's really funny because the imagery of the painting makes perfect sense to the way you were describing the album. But then you say, 'it could have been any stuffed animal.' Did there really have to be something in there like a stuffed animal to make you decide to use it?

It's the idea of the stuffed animal in the place of the hero or whatever. The stuffed animal in a state of nature that's somewhat treacherous, it's faux epic. For the painter it has more meaning, because since it's Babar and its called "The Lure of Paris" he's thinking of Babar going from Africa to Paris. He gets civilized and then he goes back to Africa, I think, and civilizes the elephants and so now he's looking back at Paris, looking back at civilization. For me it just clicked in ways that work for me. Whether I imagine myself as Babar and ones behind me as the band or something. If that were the case then imagine Photoshopping my own self into there. It would be ridiculous on a whole new level. But if I were trying to do it un-ironically like you would have done in the 19th century, in 1913 or before, you could have had a man sort of shaking his fist at nature saying, "Look out Mountain! Look out Sea! Here I come!" That was man's consciousness of the world – that he was a divine, perfectible creature in nature and that people believed that nature revolved around an odyssey like that. Now we much more see ourselves as scientifically insignificant. I'm always trying to have it both ways. I want to point to epic or serious issues, but I'm also communicating a distrust of people who try to take on big serious issues.

I guess you found a cover that really worked for this album.

It really seemed to me to be the visual analogue and I was really worried that I wouldn't get permission from the guy. He allowed me to use it and it was great.

What is the artist's name?

His name is Steven Bush and one of the interesting things about it is that he paints it every year, it's an ongoing project. I think he found a Babar toy in the early 90's and he paints it once a year using one tube of black paint and one tube of white paint. He doesn't look at any other previous version when he does it. He always does it from memory. They are all a little bit different.

Wow, cool.

I was looking for album art and I bought an Art Forum and I saw a gallery ad for one of his shows. His paintings were these really amazing Day Glo, really super bright paintings. I thought they were cool and I thought I was on a lead to something. I ordered his book and in his book was one black and white painting to represent the whole series. Funny enough, I was like, "oh that's the one."

The thing that sucked you in was the exact opposite of what you wound up picking. You know the album leaked about three months ago. How do you feel about that?

My attitude then was, I hadn't heard of a case study or an example where someone showed a leak then leading to flat sales. I challenged the worrywarts to show me one and no one really did. So I don't worry about it.

Have you heard the leaked version?

I would never listen to it like that. It would destroy me. I wouldn't want to know what people were hearing.

I can tell you honestly that I downloaded the leaked copy. It sounds pretty good. Don't worry though; I'm going to buy the LP.

Ah, no problem. So you know, people tell me that all the time.

Just for your peace of mind, it sounds pretty damn good.

Ok good! That's good news. I'm not an audiophile so I don't worry about it too much.

The concern is that you don't want people thinking that it sounds like shit and that's the way you intended to put it out.

Right, right, yeah. My attitude was like, if you're a big band and you have a shitty album that you are trying to trick your fans into buying who otherwise if they knew about it would save their money, then it could hurt you. I haven't seen that. It should happen somewhere. I don't know why people don't write about it.

You've been known to be a reluctant live performer. You just did this European tour – are you becoming more comfortable performing live?

Yeah, I am more comfortable performing live. You know I did it for forty five shows in 2006 and I did these last fifteen shows, and in the fall I'll do five weeks in the U.S. That's all I have planned. I like it, but I think the albums are just better. When I'm doing it, onstage, I enjoy it; I don't like waiting all day and the driving I hate.

Did you play guitar on this tour?

I started out.

Then you broke your hand.

Then I did the hand and I had to put the guitar down. That helped me though. I was like 'oh my god'. At first it was very uncomfortable. The guitar is something to hide behind. I kind of think of it as a fig leaf or something and you're completely naked without it. It may feel naked to go out on stage in general but if you have a guitar and your strumming people don't care if you just stand in one place and sing. But when you don't have one you kind of have to move around.

Yeah, you don't want to be expected to be Mick Jagger up there.

Exactly. I just wind up pacing around. It was good. It allowed me to get even more comfortable.

Was your touring band the same as on the album?

Yes.

Did you have a good experience with them on tour?

Yes, yes. Pretty much every show we'd do every other song a song off the new album and then one of the old songs. It pretty much melded altogether.

How long have these guys been with you?

The drummer and keyboard player were on the last album. William was the main guitarist on Bright Flight and the other guitarist, Peyton was the main guitarist on Natural Bridge and my wife is on bass so everybody has been in the band on a record before and we all get along.

How is having your wife on tour with you? Must be nice but there is also an interesting dynamic there.

[Laughs.] It's good. Sometimes I wonder if it's not unhealthy. Sometimes you might treat your wife like a bass player [laughs].

Any fights come up? Like, Cassie, "I don't like the way you're playing that."

Um, so far no, just because she pretty much listens to my advice as far as delivery and her playing is really good so I don't have anything bad to say about that.

She adds a lot to the album.

The art opens up when it has a male and a female side. It just gives it more range and more perspective. It helps me stretch out.

Did you specifically have her in mind for the part on "Party Barge" where the line "Send us your coordinates, we'll send a St. Bernard" is repeated?

Oh yeah, yeah that was definitiely for her.

Is that in reference, to like those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where the rescue dog would come in with a flask of whiskey around its neck?

[Laughs] Exactly. Right, in reality, I don't know what it is, but in Switzerland they have these dogs and they had some alcoholic medicine. In the Bugs Bunny cartoons it became a Martini. [Laughs.]

How were the fans in Europe?

They're different from wherever you go. In Ireland they were great. I was really surprised by how loud they were in London. In Germany people were excellent. We really, I don't know, I think the show in Hamburg had like ninety eight people, I think that was the smallest one, and we were saying 'oh gosh, why aren't there any people here?'.

Those Germans didn't want to see a band called the Silver Jews huh?

[Laughs.] Yeah, uh, Berlin and Frankfurt were really great though.

From looking at your MySpace and message boards it seems like the turnouts in general were pretty good.

Yeah, definitely.

Medium sized venues?

In Paris it would be like five hundred and London, a thousand, Frankfurt, two hundred or something. Switzerland was in this really beautiful old theatre. The theater in Leeds was this Vaudeville theatre, over a hundred years old; Harry Houdini had played there. Belfast, that crowd was amazing. The small town where I broke my thumb, there was a pier, dead boats on this dead lake, it was at this place called the Spirit Store, it was the tiniest room but it was really amazing.

Did you encounter any anti Semitism while you were there?

Um, no, the only thing that was kind of like that was with [opening band]Monotonix, they're from Tel Aviv and it was in Switzerland. See, in Switzerland, I know this, in the bathrooms they have these stickers that say 'no pornography,' no 'Nazi graffiti.' I think in Switzerland people are a little more insensitive to it because they are neutral and maybe because they don't have the tremendous guilt like they do in Germany. Anyway, some kid came up to them and asked where they were from, and they said "Israel" and the kid just went off on them. The people at the theatre felt really bad and shooed him away. Monotonix have been all around the U.S. and haven't experienced anything like that.

In Europe you see a lot more anti Semitism.

Definitely. I was conscious and proud of the fact that fifty years later you can tour Germany and be called the Silver Jews.

And have that on the marquee!

Yeah, have that on the marquee and also have the schedule of where you'll be tomorrow and the next day [laughs]. I actually said to Cassie, "you know you should convert to Judaism because if we get blown up then you won't get to be a martyr, it would be a wasted death." She wouldn't go for it.

Brandon Ginsburg
June 24, 2008