Johnny Cash may have taught the weeping willow how to cry, but Berman chopped it down to build his party barge. Up there with the best of them in writing a hook filled and seemingly throwaway song, “Party Barge” (from the 2008 Silver Jews album Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea) ranks with his finest. “Honk If You’re Lonely” and this same album’s “Candy Jail,” are other solid picks, but the rolling rhythm and Cassie Berman’s rescue squad lead make this one a winner. It also contains one of Berman’s most ingenious and ponderable lines: “things get kind of squirrelly when you’re sleeping in the park.” If DJ’s reached for “Party Barge” instead of Little Big Town’s “Pontoon,” the world would be a better place.

City songs that more than scratch the surface of a place are ones to cherish. Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s same named country song initially views “Big D” from the window of an airplane, but Berman gets to the nitty gritty of “cruising down Commerce,” into the underbelly of the city. “How did a billion steers, turn into buildings made of mirrors?” is an on point observation that more than evokes an image.

Coming from the Silver Jews’ debut album, Starlite Walker, “Advice to the Graduate” showcases Berman and Malkmus working together as well as anything in the Jews’ catalog. There are other songs that are more Malkmus/Pavement-centric, but here we get a balanced mix. Never one to shy from the dark side of things, we also get the most pithy of lines in the Berman catalog early on in his career: “On the last day of your life, don’t forget to die.”

Good luck finding a Berman song that plays it straight from start to finish, but we get a beautiful one here. Appearing on the sole Purple Mountains album, Berman takes the listener into a cozy Brooklyn brownstone as the drifts pile up outside. With horns and vibraphone and Anna St. Louis’ backing vocals, the song sounds an outtake from Lambchop’s Is a Woman album and is fully realized as a result. We also get one of Berman’s slyest and deeply deferred rhymes here: “Snow is falling in Manhattan…. Salt the stoop and scoop the cat in.”

One of the brighter moments off of the low key Bright Flight, “Let’s Not and Say We Did,” takes us from the prior song’s urban environment to the appeal of chucking it all away to escape to the pastoral. The song’s barrelhouse piano, courtesy of Tony Crow (Lambchop, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), makes disappearing to the country seem like the most reasonable thing in the world.

Never one to bury the lede, seven of the remaining songs here are either the first or second song on their respective albums. “How to Rent a Room” leads off 1996’s Natural Bridge and rumor has it the lyrics are likely directed at Berman’s estranged father for which he held a lifelong disdain. Regardless, it’s just a wonderfully composed loper of a song and sets its mood perfectly, tell off or not.

One of Berman’s darkest and most psychedelically tinged songs, “K-Hole” takes us to the depths of despair. It’s an honest and open look into depression and the efforts to battle it. And the occasional shift of phase mimics the out of body experience of too heavy a dose of the drug that inspired the song. The closing line, “Better get inside the kingdom and close the door,” is one Berman’s most abjectly lonely ones.

Not surprisingly, Berman is a master of the story song. Others include “Farmer’s Hotel,” “I Remember Me,” and maybe to a lesser extent “Smith & Jones Forever,” but here we get Berman at his narrative and zany best. Even a mid-song series of yelps feels pulled from a Three Stooges’ bit. The over six-minute caper song comes complete with arms smugglers and plenty of bad haircuts. The narrative tangle of the action scene towards the end of song is one of Berman’s finest lyrical moments: “He came at me with some fist cuisine/I had to duck aside and that was bad for Gene/‘Cause when he went by me he tripped and fell/Through the glass coffee table at the Wong Hotel.”

A two-and-a-half-minute blast of Berman’s most engaged moment on tape. He’s downright aggressive in tearing off the end lines of the choruses and puts forth all manner of observation for us earthbound humans and horses. He contrasts this with: “Happiness won’t leave me alone, says the bird in his nest/Get a load of this fuckin’ view, it’s the best in the West.” A ripper of minute proportions. Considering the couplet “Bandits in the capital/Limited civilian unrest,” there is always a time relevant Berman quote for any moment.

In putting together any list like this, you are bound to come across a new found favorite and “Slow Education” easily takes that cake. It has the loveliest of harmonies with Cassie of any of the Jews’ catalog and is wrapped up in an even prettier country melody. The opening lines set the deepest of hooks: “When God was young/He made the wind and the sun/And since then, it’s been a slow education.” The line rings true today as ever and the simple chorus of “oh, oh, oh I’m lightning, oh, oh, oh, I’m rain,” is classically timeless itself.

Two misfit characters, their “mustaches caked with airplane glue,” that are nonetheless inseparable. The song feels a piece of the earliest songs from Starlite Walker, but more fully developed and with an incessant pulse of purpose. If Silver Jews have a fists in the air, sing-a-long song, “Smith & Jones” would be the one and it was the last song the group ever played live.

The leadoff track from Berman’s Purple Mountains’ return is a devastating one, filled with heaps of humor and plenty of pathos. It’s the first of Berman’s voice we’d heard in a decade and it starts with no accompaniment. When the backing from New York’s Woods kicks in, you know that Berman is in good and sympathetic hands. A percolating romp that keeps feeding you snippets of Berman’s “decade flirting with oblivion” and filled with one classic line after another: “I tried to drown my thoughts in gin/I found my worst ideas know how to swim,” being one of the most pointed.

Setting aside Starlite Walker’s brief intro track, “Trains Across the Sea,” was our first introduction to the wonders that were yet to come from Berman. “In 27 years, I’ve drank 50,000 beers, and they just wash against me like the sea into a pier,” encapsulates the promise of what Berman would continue to offer up as time rolled on. The song also has the “first thing I heard from them” edge of a warm nostalgia every time those opening notes hit and as it rambles on from there.

Perhaps not a surprise that the opening track off of the loaded American Water is the top pick here. From a technical perspective, it’s the most composed of Berman’s works with the Jews, with a bridge and a horn arrangement. It contains, likely his most well known line as well: “In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection,” and goes on to make for a perfectly circled song of cheating and heartbreak. And contrasting the seemingly orderly process of a line dance to the chaos of the world is a neat trick in and of itself. Berman’s best-loved song and rightfully so.