Dear Nora and Cassie Berman Play for Friends Old, New and Gone

Eight hours before their Drkmttr set, Katy Davidson of Dear Nora had a problem. While touring solo under their band’s moniker, they hadn’t been traveling with an amp, and had forgotten to line one up for their performance in Nashville.

Cassie Berman, who was opening Sunday night, pulled through. The show that almost didn’t happen did, with the help of Berman’s 31-year-old Fender Bassman — which she bought at 18 to play bass for the first band she was ever a part of and has been using ever since.

Though Davidson’s mostly been calling up old acquaintances to be openers, they’d never met Berman before; she was instead a friend of the venue. A longtime Nashville resident, Berman drew acclaim and piqued curiosity as a lyricist, vocalist and occasional bassist of the pioneering indie-rock band Silver Jews, fronted by her husband David Berman until its dissolution in 2009.

Berman has been playing solo sparingly since her husband’s death five years ago — about twice a year, she estimated. Performing with just her acoustic guitar, Berman admitted her nervousness, how she still felt new to playing by herself instead of in a group. She eased into a rendition of “Slow Education” off the 2001 Silver Jews album Bright Flight. On Silver Jews recordings, Cassie shines through as a light, lilting companion to David Berman’s distinguishable deadpan rasp. Live, her voice took on a new, deeper tenor — warm and full-bodied, though still radiant — as she recited the familiar lines, “Oh, I'm lightning / Oh, I'm rain / Oh, it's frightening / I'm not the same.”

Berman’s also still writing songs these days. Though none has been released as of yet, many are inspired by or dedicated to musicians she loves, like “Arthur” after cellist and singer Arthur Russell. She closed her set with two more Silver Jews songs from Tanglewood Numbers: “The Poor, the Fair and the Good” and a reworked version of “Animal Shapes” with the lyrics, “Are the lights on the signs that line Charlotte Avenue,” replaced with a reference to Dickerson Pike, where Drkmttr is located.

Like Berman, Davidson struck a solitary figure onstage with only a guitar as accompaniment. Davidson promised to play tunes both old and new, starting with “shadows” and the title track from Dear Nora’s most recent album human futures. For more than 25 years, Davidson’s songwriting has questioned the incongruity between nature’s magnificence and modernity’s stifling yet sinister banality, and “human futures” brings this thesis into clear-eyed focus. Lyrics like, “I remember rivers, I remember streams,” and, “The codes, they keep us shopping / and the data's always watching,” chafe against each other, but are buoyed by Davidson’s earnest, ever-playful tone and presence.

The last time Dear Nora performed in Nashville — 19 years ago — it was with a full band, in a vastly different city, in a very carpeted house. Davidson noted that songs credited to them off albums like 2000’s Dreaming Out Loud and 2004’s Mountain Rock were written by someone who’s a stranger to them now. New meanings emerged as they played old refrains. “Cause now it is said there's a change,” they sang in “The Lonesome Border, Pt. 1,” “and I sense the change in me.” When the set neared its end, Davidson asked the audience what they wanted to hear. Clamors for “Second Birthday” bounced around, but Davidson admitted they didn’t actually know how to play that one, so the crowd settled on “Second Guess.”

It’s hard to not run into the artists who grace the small stage of a venue like Drkmttr. After the show, Berman stood among a group of friends who’d come to see her play, while Davidson manned a merch table and chatted with concertgoers. Ghosts roamed the room: Davidson’s past selves, Berman’s late husband. Berman told me after the show that a lot of Silver Jews songs are difficult for her to play now that he’s gone, so she chose the ones that felt easy and fun. She said of her new songs: “Some of them belong to me, and some of them belong to David.”

In the announcement for the tour, Davidson explained that their own personal and musical future is uncertain after its run ends. Whatever new direction they — and Berman — decide to go, Nashville is fortunate to have witnessed this rare meeting of past and present, this conversation between two inimitable musical minds.