An old band's new life

If David Berman tells the audience members at First Unitarian Church on Tuesday that he loves them, he won't just be mouthing hollow stage patter.

"I get really happy when I see people who like the Silver Jews' music," says Berman, the songwriter, guitarist and author of the acclaimed 1999 poetry collection

Actual Air,

talking on the phone from a van driving across Ohio. "I feel a great affection for the audience."

Berman formed the band in 1989 with Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich (both members of Pavement), when the three friends were all working as security guards at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. ("We used to go to Central Park and get high at lunchtime," he recalls, "and then come back and stare at masterpieces all afternoon.")

But until 2005's dark, droll, country-tinged

Tanglewood Numbers,

the fifth album by the band whose only constant member has been himself, Berman never took the Silver Jews out on the road.

"People would say, 'Why don't you play live? You'd sell so many more records,'" says the baritone talk-singer, who's newest Jews release is the excellent

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea,

which contains such imaginatively conceived story songs as "Suffering Jukebox" and "Candy Jail."

"But when I was younger, after a small amount of stress, I would quit doing something," says Berman, 41. "I couldn't handle the kind of stress that I can now."

Plus, "part of being an artist is you make irrational decisions."

When it came time to make

Tanglewood Numbers,

however, Berman, who lives in Nashville, could no longer afford to be irrational. He had survived a 2003 suicide attempt that he calls "cruel" and "pathetic" in which he would have died of a Xanax overdose if he had not been awoken by his wife, Cassie, with whom he sings the tender love song "We Could Be Looking for the Same Thing" on

Lookout Mountain.

Making

Tanglewood,

he said, "had the feeling of a battle - it was about saving myself." And, Berman realized, music also offered him an economic lifeline to help him pay his post-suicide-attempt medical bills. "I had this epiphany," he says, of when he realized he could head out on tour. "I had all this money in the bank that I had never thought about. Hiding in plain sight was a way to pay my bills without going into academia or getting an office job."

So though the Silver Jews have existed for almost 20 years, the experience of playing music for people in person is new.

"Most musicians start playing live when they're younger," he says. "When you go see them, they've seen you before. But when I tell you that I love you, I mean it. You're one of my first audiences. I haven't slept with a million other audiences before. It's like a second act in my life."