Silver Jews Split? Frontman Wants To Write A Screenplay

Silver Jews frontman David Berman is ditching music and becoming a screenwriter...or a muckracker. He's calling it quits with the band he shares with his wife Cassie and started 20 years ago.

"I'm forty two and I know what to do," he told fans in the band's forum, Drag City "I'm a writer, see?"(Another sign of how bad the music industry is -- frontman gonna try and sling it in Hollywood.)

"I always said we would stop before we got bad," Berman continued. "If I continue to record I might accidentally write the answer song to [R.E.M.'s] Shiney Happy People." Dark Mean Muppets? The Silver Jews last album was 2008's Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.

So what might Berman pitch to studios in the future? In a previous forum post Berman talked some smack about his anti-whistleblower dad, Richard Berman. The senior Berman is a Washington, D.C.-based hired gun who uses front groups to defend his corporate clients against the public interest. Basically, the guy that sweeps government warnings under the carpet.

The younger Berman wrote in a post, "This winter I decided that the SJ's were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm hehas caused." I'm putting two and two together and thinking he hopes this screenplay will bring the kung-pao.