There are no simple conversations with David Berman. The singer-songwriter, whom indie-rock historians always will remember as the guy who started the 1990s hipster favorite Pavement as a side project, has an acutely analytical mind that can find multiple layers of meaning in everything.

Chatting over bistro fare in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn during a recent visit to New York, the 41-year-old performer, who records under the moniker Silver Jews, discussed, among other things, the gentrification of matzoh ball soup, why antidepressants saved his life, how he has profited from his embrace of Judaism, and the most awful food his mother ever prepared.

“My mom would get ground beef at a grocery store, roll it up into balls, and put the raw balls in the freezer,” Mr. Berman said.

Then, once the snacks were properly frozen, they would be served. “With a big puddle of ketchup and slices of white onion. And we’d sit there and eat raw hamburger meat.”

At times, the music Mr. Berman has made since starting the Silver Jews in 1989 — six albums, plus multiple EPs and singles — has seemed just as uncooked and disconsolate. But the album he is releasing today, “Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea” (Drag City), reflects a different attitude.

“You might look at this album and say there’s no real self-pity going on,” Mr. Berman said. He was sharing a table with his wife and bass player, Cassie Berman, following a video shoot in Prospect Park, something the once-reclusive performer might never have done a few years ago. “The difference is if there’s suffering in the songs, it isn’t the narrator suffering in a context that you’re being asked to identify with. A lot of them are more persona songs, and that keeps them from being gloomy.”

Mr. Berman, who also is an established poet and academic (he released a collection of poetry, “Actual Air,” in 1999), endured a crippling period of depression that began when he was 30 and lasted until four years ago and led to a suicide attempt. However, listeners would have to dig deeper into the songs on Mr. Berman’s 2005 folk-garage song cycle “The Tanglewood Numbers” and the similarly jaunty new record to trace the tracks of the singer’s psychic dissolution.

“I’ve gotten some distance on suffering,” he said. “I’m not like a poor person who gets out of the neighborhood and doesn’t think back to what they left behind. I’m the depressed guy who got out, and I want to make sure I can leave good instructions: Here’s a way out.”

Mr. Berman said his use of antidepressants “well beyond the recommended dosage,” coupled with a lifestyle free of alcohol and illicit drugs, has saved his sanity. “People who have ethics about nothing else start having moral qualms when it comes to antidepressants,” he said. “People don’t understand. It’s not going to change them. It’s just going to give them the ability to change in a natural way. It’s like the rabbinical saying: ‘Change your opinion and you might change your life.'”

This line of thought led into the concept of “miserablism,” and Mr. Berman’s desire to distinguish his brand of songwriting from the depressive-narcissistic strain of 1990s rock. That might be easy enough to do now, as the influence of old-school country music has seeped into Mr. Berman’s loose-limbed rock songs — perhaps one of the side effects of living in Nashville, Tenn. “There was always this gestural movement in grunge music for the aggggggh,” he said, making an aggravated groaning noise. “And the word ‘down.’ In those Seattle songs, it’s always ‘down, down, down.’ There was a lot of boring, Generation X nihilism. ‘In the end, I’ll be down.’ To deliver that song so literally would be embarrassing. That’s not a pattern I need to be whining about.”

Instead, on a song such as “Strange Victory/Strange Defeat,” Mr. Berman adopted what he called “the Jewish attitude.”

“Reading the Torah gave me ideas about interpreting meaning from things as simple as word order. To really deal with sentences in the text of the Torah taught me things about poetry I should have learned a long time ago.”

One song whose meaning is rather self-evident is “Candy Jail,” which was written for Mr. Berman’s friend, the artist Jeremy Blake, during the week between the widely reported suicide of Blake’s girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, and his own fatal march into the water off of Rockaway Beach. “There aren’t any answers in the song,” Mr. Berman said. “I ended up depicting his choice. Whatever his identity was, which was composed of a handsome physical form and money and security and critical respect and all the things we supposedly want — these were things to be escaped. That’s the idea of a candy jail, which is much like a bluegrass drummer, much like a silver Jew. These are things that are in some ways oxymorons. I let them stay ambiguous, but they are by definition about ambiguity.”