I had taken a news break and hadn’t been reading headlines at all, but that didn’t stop me from browsing music blogs. It was on such a site, a week after the fact, that I learned of the death of David Berman, the much respected if very low profile indie musician and poet.
Maybe because it fell into a total news vacuum, maybe because he was approaching my age, or because he lived alone in his city apartment, or that he died of depression in a hope-free age — whatever the reason, his death hit me harder than I would have expected. He was me. He was us. The thoughtful bohemian, endlessly creative, largely ignored.