Bridges had a special place in the poetics of David Berman's songwriting. They recur in Silver Jews' artwork and album titles, but I mean this too in both the formal and thematic senses that bridges connote. Berman clung to them as the apotheosis of an urban, quotidian, no-place, architectonics whose aesthetic and philosophical potential he evoked in The Natural Bridge cover art, with its distant buildings and shooting star suspended at the turn of a downward trajectory; the precarious wooden bridge at sunset on the cover of Starlite Walker; in the half-lit, transitory, spaces of the dying American West in "Smith & Jones Forever"; in the odd William Eggleston-like Instamatic flatness of the Bright Flight cover art; and in the band's music video for "Random Rules" (where Berman is seen helping an elderly man clear a blocked pathway of snow as an everyday gesture of care in a transitory space). But the bridge was also, perhaps, his signature musical form — the sonically, lyrically, or rhythmically differentiated bars inserted between a verse and a chorus — that have a special relationship to time in either holding us in suspension or propelling us along.
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