David Berman Covers EP — and Well-Tempered Zealot

wherein we welcome 2025, share an EP of david berman covers and introduce well-tempered zealot

hello friends

welcome to the first dirty projectors newsletter of 2025! there’s going to be a lot happening this year — including a big announcement tomorrrow :) today i just want to share two things:

first is — i’m moving the newsletter over to substack! i’ve become a big fan of the platform and am excited to be a part of it. if you’ve been subscribed to the newsletter, there will be no change. the substack is called well-tempered zealot, and it’ll just be a cozy, maybe slightly messy, little corner of the internet where i can share stuff. melodic amoebae, chord petri dishes, lowercase rants, notes to self, crayon drawings, poems photographed in the mirror so you can only read them backwards. that kind of thing. i won’t post too often; once every week-or-two-ish? from time to time i’ll update — or my handsome & equanimous managers david newgarden and jake abrams will update — with pertinent information like show and album announcements.

we’ll see what kind of a flow we get into. i want to keep the stakes low but i’m secretly very excited.

a few years ago, i taught a course through the school of song. it was a life-changing experience. the community we built that month — this fabric woven from a shared zeal for music, stretched only slightly asynchronously around the whole world — was like a beautiful and unexpected flower. we probably all mostly agree that social media is a noxious pox on clear thinking. but that experience of digital community gave me hope. i’d like to keep this space informal and open, kind and considerate, perhaps try to get some dialogues going along the way. an experiment …

here in my first post i also want to say that i’m offering a paid tier. like if you have too much money and you actively want to throw $7 at me, this would be a more direct way to do it than via 2,334 spotify streams at $0.003 each. i’ll be sharing certain super-rare, secret mega-special stuff behind the paywall. demos, works-in-progress, lost songs from the vault, score excerpts, arrangement breakdowns, guitar lessons. some longer writing — dirty projections, well-tempered zealotry, renderings unto caesar — will be behind the wall as well.

along these lines! the second thing for today:

over the weekend i had the pleasure of participating in a show in los angeles celebrating the life and work of david berman, the poet and songwriter behind the bands silver jews and purple mountains. it was organized, on the occasion of what would’ve been berman’s 58th birthday (1/4/2025), by the folks behind jokermen, the best podcast on the internet for deep dives into the oeuvres of the deep divers (by which i mean great songwriters). ana nersessian, who i went to school with twenty years ago and hadn’t seen in forever, read harmony korine’s 2019 eulogy for david. it was beautiful and wrenching and mind-blowing, and if it exists anywhere on the internet i encourage you to seek it out.

i played a short set of three favorite DCB numbers — pet politics, black and brown blues, and (need to) random rules. next morning i tumbled out of bed straight into a couple microphones so i could record ‘em.. so please enjoy this, my belated DCB birthday covers EP, for streaming or free download:

thanks to the jokermen

there’s a ton more to come this year — including a big exciting announcement tomorrow, wednesday january 8th!!! so watch this space. i’m excited for a new way to connect and share. i wonder what we can do here! if you have something specific you’d like me to write about or share sometime in the future, drop it in the comments. or just say hello.

in the meantime, let’s be kind and take care of one another.

hope you enjoy the EP! thanks for reading & listening. xo

david longstreth

los angeles

january 7, 2025

performing at Songs Build Little Rooms In Time event. courtesty arts + archives 2220