David Berman (musician)  David Cloud Berman (born David Craig Berman; January 4, 1967 – August 7, 2019) was an American musician, singer, poet and cartoonist best known for his work founding and fronting the indie-rock band the Silver Jews. Although the band primarily existed as a recording project for most of its existence, the Silver Jews toured regularly from 2005 until 2009. In January 2009, Berman announced his retirement from music in hopes of finding a meaningful way of undoing the damage that his estranged father Richard Berman, a lobbyist and public relations executive for the alcohol and tobacco industries among others, had brought upon society. In addition to the six full-length albums that Berman wrote and recorded with the Silver Jews, he released two books: "Actual Air" (1999) and "The Portable February" (2009). In early 2019, Berman returned to music under the new band name Purple Mountains, releasing a self-titled debut album in July 2019. He died of suicide on August 7, 2019. Berman was born January 4, 1967, in Williamsburg, Virginia. His father was Richard Berman, a lobbyist who represents firearm, alcohol and other controversial industries. He attended high school at Greenhill School in Addison, Texas, before matriculating at the University of Virginia. While in Charlottesville, Virginia, Berman began writing and performing songs (often left on friends' voice message machines) with his loose band, Ectoslavia, primarily composed of UVA classmates Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. Upon graduation from the University of Virginia, the trio moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, where they shared an apartment and adopted the moniker Silver Jews recording discordant tapes in their living room. At this time Berman was a security guard at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. Working in this environment influenced him artistically; Berman spoke about this time saying "We were working at the Whitney with all this conceptual art, and we were learning about it … and so I thought, 'Well let's just make this record that looks like a record, and has song titles and everything, but the songs would be the ones we make at home that sound terrible.'" Before moving to Hoboken, Malkmus had also founded another band, Pavement, with his childhood friend Scott Kannberg. As Pavement's acclaim and visibility grew, the notion arose that the Silver Jews were a "Pavement side-project," despite the fact that the Silver Jews preceded Pavement, and Berman's writing, singing, and guitar playing led the Silver Jews' music.