“All my favorite singers couldn’t sing,” David Berman crooned. Berman—along with other indie greats also gone too young: the sublime, alcoholic Jason Molina of the Magnolia Electric Company or Mark Linkous from the band Sparklehorse—was openly troubled, openly poetic, openly marginal, openly sloppy, and openly democratic. He had what the writer Seymour Krim, in his famous 1971 essay on American failure and his own, called “the voice of scars and stars talking.”
