I want David Berman to be a screenwriter.

"I've been working at the airport bar/it's like Christmas in a submarine/wings and brandy on a winter's night/I guess you wouldn't call it a scene."

Actually, I think that's a pretty excellent scene to me.

Berman packs a lot into a three-minute country song. Plot, setting, character development -- it's all there, accompanied by the sweet pluck of the ol' banjo.

Berman is certainly the best lyricist in country music, maybe not just country. And the new album by his band Silver Jews, Tanglewood Numbers, is perfect, save for one thing: It's only 35 minutes long.

The Silver Jews' music lets twang trip and fall into rock whenever it needs to, and the hybrid of the two that Berman and the current incarnation of the Jews come up with is probably the most interesting thing in alt-country. That, despite the fact that Berman, who writes the music, isn't especially a musician.

It helps that he's old friends with indie-rock beefcake Stephen Malkmus, who helps Berman out on guitar for Tanglewood Numbers, much as he did on the Jews' should-be classic American Water. Paz Lenchantin, late of the implosion of Billy Corgan's Zwan, and Berman's wife Cassie (whose presence on Bright Flight's "Tennessee" absolutely made the song) pop up several times on the new record.

They and the rest of the rotating cast of Tanglewood Numbers have created a strange new sound for Berman: Instead of the suburban sprawl of American Water or the Nashville neighborhoods of Bright Flight, Tanglewood is a big ol' barnyard hoe-down, but with as much spacey synthesizer as steel guitar.

As the instruments fight it out behind him, Berman inquires about the availability of indoor lodging for farm animals and details the aspects of love (bedrest seems to top the list) and in doing so, pens perhaps his strongest set of songs.

Killer opener "Punks in the Beerlight" sets the chew-stained tone, and the one-two punch of dual-centerpieces "I'm Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You" and "How Can I Love You If You Don't Lie Down?" is a knockout. And Berman takes a real risk and gets a real payoff with "The Farmer's Hotel," a seven-minute song reminiscent of Dylan's cryptic mid-'60s album closers that seems to ask more questions than it answers.

These last few years haven't been easy on Berman; he's dealt with both substance-dabblin' and depression-havin', and only recently started turning things around. So when he hits it head-on in "There is a Place," the often self-restrained Berman unleashes a demon or two and sings of somewhere "past the blues" he never wants to see again.

It's a dark valley that Berman's never traveled to before, and it's the moment that Tanglewood Numbers goes from a fine collection of songs to a superb album.

It's not a surprise that Tanglewood Numbers is good, but it's a surprise just how good.

As long as strange things keep occurring to Berman, he's going to keep writing about them, and Tanglewood gets into some of the strangest.

Berman's band continues to sit at the top of music's pile, and Tanglewood Numbers is a major contender for the album of the year.