David Berman is a classic cult figure: revered by a circle of serious fans while remaining largely unknown in the world of popular culture. To the initiated, he is recognized as a major influence on modern independent music, an excellent poet and a remarkably inventive and idiosyncratic songwriter. Berman’s relative obscurity outside the cognoscenti, even when compared to the two guys he started his band Silver Jews with in New Jersey back in 1989 — Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich — is interesting. More interesting is how he has managed to stand just to the side of mainstream success while spending years at a deliberate remove from his audience.

While toying with the singer/songwriter role, Berman made several counterintuitive moves that make perfect sense for his particular needs. First, there’s the matter of choosing a moniker that is at once ambiguous and provocative. (Forget the word “fuck”; I’ve never faced more pointed questions from strangers than when I’ve worn my Silver Jews T-shirt in public. “What does that mean?” they invariably ask, alternately curious and suspicious.) And like Drag City labelmates Smog (Bill Callahan) and Palace Brothers/Bonnie “Prince” Billy (Will Oldham), Berman used a band name for what was essentially a solo project while he worked with a revolving cast of friends and colleagues. Then there’s the fact that he refused to tour, the most immediate and practical way to develop a fan base. From his first EPs in the early ’90s to this summer’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, it has been the strength, originality and electricity of his work that has won Silver Jews devoted — almost devotional — followers.

Lookout comes on the heels of several major life changes Berman, 41, has experienced in the last five years. Following a breakdown in 2003, he went to rehab and discovered a new spiritual path in Judaism. (Raised in a secular Jewish family, Berman’s band name was inspired by a partially obscured sign for silver jewellery.) Returning in 2005 with the dark, slightly discordant Tanglewood Numbers, Berman surprised fans by talking openly about his new religious conviction and, even more shockingly, by embarking on a series of tours through North America, Europe and Israel in 2006, after more than 15 years of avoiding the road.
“I don’t know how I said ‘no’ for so long,” says Berman, who now lives in Nashville. “I stopped saying ‘no’ for about six months. I was saying ‘maybe.’ I was looking the other way when Drag City wheeled in the giant ‘yes.’”

The positive effects of touring are immediately evident on the new record, which is not only carefully constructed and as densely written as a Great American Novel, but sounds as rich, accessible and infectious as the best brand of pop music; a turning point in a career of turning points.

“The songs are much more social than ever before,” he says. “They are outward-directed songs. The better for the band to get inside of.”

This shift reflects not only the technical benefits of performing live for a couple of years with the same musicians — including his wife, Cassie, who plays bass and sings on most of the songs — but also a change in perspective. Berman’s signature story songs upending country-music conventions about violence, honky-tonks and heartbreak are still here, but they’re treated with genuine affection, compassion and even hope.

In “What Is Not But Could Be If,” Berman plainly states a new focus away from the limitations of the past and toward the unlimited possibilities that lie ahead. Equal parts sardonic and beatific, in “San Francisco, BC” he drops the lines “Romance is the douche of the bourgeoisie / was the very first thing she imparted to me” in a six-minute-plus song with no chorus that makes Johnny Cash and Shel Silverstein’s “Boy Named Sue” feel lazy. Then, in “Suffering Jukebox,” he sings a tender lament for a burdened machine forced to play schmaltz all night so that locals might achieve banal catharsis.

Berman agrees that touring has been positive, though he hates the actual travelling. (“I don’t like a single van hour or air hour.”) For one, the response from audiences has been incredibly supportive and he was stunned by his warm reception in Europe and Israel.

“It’s so weird to be in Paris playing the part of a likeable or even lovable entity after so many years of being completely locked out of the French mind,” he says. “There are always older people at these shows — people in their sixties and seventies. An old man in Germany who stood near the front looked 80. His mouth was singing the words the two or three times I could bring my eyes up to glance at him. I was calculating his probable birthdate in my head, and comparing it to the Nazi timeline.”

As for his first appearance in Ontario, Berman is looking forward to it.“I just heard the ticket sales are doing best in Toronto,” he wrote. “Now I’m pro-Toronto!”