Purple Mountains • "All My Happiness is Gone" • 2019

Friends are warmer than gold when you're old

And keeping them is harder than you might suppose

Lately, I tend to make strangers wherever I go

Some of them were once people I was happy to know

Mounting mileage on the dash

Double darkness falling fast

I keep stressing, pressing on

Way deep down at some substratum

Feels like something really wrong has happened

And I confess I'm barely hanging on

All my happiness is gone

All my happiness is gone

It's all gone somewhere beyond

All my happiness is gone

“I always said we would stop before we got bad,” David Berman wrote upon disbanding Silver Jews in 2009. “If I continue to record I might accidentally write the answer song to ‘Shiny Happy People.’” “All My Happiness Is Gone,” the debut single from his new project Purple Mountains and the first new music since his hiatus, stays true to the mission. Don’t let the breezy arrangement or singalong “I Melt With You” chorus fool you: David Berman is as miserable and alone as ever.