Silver Jews

American Water is the 1998 album by New York band Silver Jews. This comes from the compound of Drag City.

After a decade in the wilderness, David Berman has returned to record-making - this time around as Purple Mountains, leaving his iconic Silver Jews brand to history. Fortunately for all the fans, he's retained his iconic songwriting style, with a new batch of tunes conveying an astonishing variety of 21st-century mid-life crises. Featuring full-on technicolor production intervention from Woods' Jarvis Taveniere and Jeremy Earle, Purple Mountains debut stands tall among Berman's classic albums, with knee-slappers and eye-wipers alike - ten new tracks ready to go into suffering jukeboxes across the land.

"If Bob Dylan was funny, if Tom Waits was relevant, Ryan might not be peerless at what he does best, which is writing large gregarious circles around his pitiful colleagues in the field. He's the best lyricist who's not a rapper going."

Book of Changes, the new album by Guy Blakeslee as ENTRANCE, is a poetic song cycle about the seasons of the heart, tracing an emotional journey through longing and emptiness to peace and redemption. The record achieves a seamless melding of the personal, political and philosophical, a vibrant document of an artist hitting a creative stride and discovering an expansive new sound. The adventurously produced collection of songs is reminiscent of Townes Van Zandt's ruminative lyricism and the gypsy flavored orchestral explorations of Arthur Lee and Love, uniquely channeled through Blakeslee's 21st Century approach to the spiritual dimensions of American songwriting in a way that gives an old form new power.

Joe Pernice has been writing for a long time—most of his life, in fact—and has crafted a remarkable catalog that boldly reinterprets and recasts classic American pop. Who Will You Believe may be his most moving and nuanced album yet; it’s certainly his timeliest. “These songs were all written during the same time period,” he says, “and they all seemed to tap into a mood I was in at the time. I go through spells where I’m a certain way for three or four months. I might be more reticent than usual, or more outgoing. With all of my records—and especially with this one—the songs all feel like they belong together, probably because they all arrived during the same stretch of time.” In a single six-month stretch he was left reeling from the deaths of three close friends, including David Berman, poet and songwriter for Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, and Gary Stewart, the Rhino Records co-founder and tireless Pernice Brothers supporter since their first album in 1998. “That was such a bad patch when David and Gary both took their own lives.