Dean & Britta’s collaborative holiday album with Sonic Boom, A Peace of Us, is out November 17, and among the songs covered on it is “Snow is Falling in Manhattan,” one of the best songs on the late David Berman’s Purple Mountains album. Dean recorded this for the 2019 David Berman tribute album, but it has now been reworked with Britta Phillips and Sonic Boom’s pixie dust.
“David Berman’s Purple Mountains is one of the great albums of this century,” Dean writes (and we agree). “We were all shocked when he took his life soon after its release, and I recorded a demo of ’Snow is Falling in Manhattan’ for a tribute to him. The song is now updated with a new mix and added vocals by Britta and Sonic Boom. It’s such an evocative song about a snowstorm in New York City and contains one of my favorite Berman stanzas ‘songs build little rooms in time / and housed within the song’s design / is the ghost the host has left behind’ — where it feels like Berman is talking to us from the beyond, he is both ghost and host, and I am the guest who sings his lines.”
You can watch the video for “Snow is Falling in Manhattan” below.
A Peace of Us is out November 22 via Carpark. There’s a Bandcamp listening party on November 17 featuring a live chat with Dean, Britta and Sonic Boom. More info on that is here.