The National (2010)
Interview Background
They’d been performing for years by then, but when The National’s Boxer album dropped in 2007, they emerged as New York’s best-kept secret. Reviewing the Mistaken For Strangers single at the time, I suggested, “The Brooklyn band sure aren’t the pretty boys that New York sporadically turns up, but if you’re more into vintage Cohen than vintage Converse, then this brooding and bass-filled punch will flaw you”. A hand-signed Boxer poster featuring personal messages of thanks from the band arrived in my mailbox not long after, which indicated they were nice guys as well as great musicians. Since 2007 The National’s popularity has increased dramatically, with 2010’s High Violet release confirming their international status as esteemed rock poets. I spoke to The National’s brainbox (and future Taylor Swift collaborator) Aaron Dessner just before the release of High Violet, with the guitarist giving an interesting insight into the band’s musical evolution, their humility and their love of a good in-joke.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up in May 2010.
The National - What's The Frequency?
by Scott McLennan
Ever since his 1985 debut Less Than Zero shocked and excited readers, New York novelist Bret Easton Ellis has subversively revelled in text that pairs gruesome violence with incongruous pop culture soundtracks. A famous passage in his 1991 novel American Psycho found his twisted anti-hero Patrick Bateman hacking up a victim while waxing lyrical about Huey Lewis & The News, while a murder in his 1994 short story collection The Informers takes place during a Duran Duran look-alike contest.
In the forthcoming sequel to Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms, Easton Ellis has bestowed his bloody blessing on Brooklyn’s The National, with the novel’s protagonist speaking of their “muted fury”.
“We were pleasantly surprised about that, so I’m curious to read the book when it comes out,” multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner suggests while promoting new album High Violet. “Because we always make fun of ourselves and are very self-deprecating, it’s always surprising when a great artist or someone writing literature is obsessing over our songs. It’s a big surprise, but it’s a nice feeling too.”
Easton Ellis joins iconic US artists such as R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen in praising the magic melancholia of the critically acclaimed group. In the wake of their dark 2007 masterpiece Boxer, The National even joined R.E.M. on a North American tour. Dessner shakes his head that his teen heroes are now in awe of his own band’s output.
“To learn that R.E.M. – Michael Stipe and Mike Mills – were big fans was an amazing feeling. They kind of invented underground and indie rock. They became a massive band, but in the ‘80s they created this genre that we’re part of – if you can call it a genre with so much diverse music being made. I have so much respect for them and I was incredibly honoured. We’ve also gotten to know David Byrne and he’s really incredible, a gifted musician and songwriter. To be able to work with him and have his feedback and know he appreciates our work is just surreal.”
Growing up in Ohio in the 1980s, Dessner and his brother Bryce’s exposure to forward-thinking acts such as Talking Heads and R.E.M. often relied on their big sister’s LP collection.
“To be honest, most radio in Cincinnati when we were growing up was either very mainstream or country. There was the pop station playing Madonna and Michael Jackson, the station playing Led Zeppelin or The Who and then there was the country station. There was one station in Ohio called 97X that played all the cool underground rock that was going on back then, but we didn’t live close enough to get it at home. Our sister was a few years older and she had all the records and was off listening to Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smiths and the Pixies. Now she takes the credit for everything. She thinks that if it wasn’t for her we’d be married to our high school girlfriends and working for banks in Cincinnati.”
Former Adelaide University student Padma Newsome is a long-time cohort of The National, with the Alice Springs-born composer’s work with various members of the band pre-dating the inauguration of The National in 1999. Now based in Victoria, his orchestration is again on show on High Violet.
“He works in a place called Mallacoota, which is apparently a 10-hour drive from Melbourne or something like that. He does come to the States to work with us and he worked quite a bit on this album, but a lot of the songs and music he worked on are songs that didn’t end up on the record because Matt [Berninger, vocalist] didn’t finish the lyrics, but he’s on three or four of the songs.
“Padma’s not a nationalist but he’s very proud of Australia. He spends his spare time checking cricket scores and he’s so proud – he’s told us so much about your animals and the country and the landscape. I find it all very interesting, so we talk about Australia all the time actually.”
With Boxer exposing The National to a new level of worldwide interest and expectation, it was with a sense of relief that the band members took time out from the band following Boxer’s tour cycle. The Dessner brothers used this time to finalise their Dark Was The Night double-CD compilation, a charity release that featured contributions from esteemed acts such as Arcade Fire, Feist and My Morning Jacket.
“I think it did help my brother and I get our minds off The National, so it allowed us to get inside other artists’ heads and make music with other people. I think it was helpful and it was also just a good experience to do something charitable.
“There were times when we wondered what we’d got ourselves into and if we could finish it at a higher level – we didn’t want to put something out that wasn’t special. It just kept snowballing because initially it was only supposed to be one record but so many great artists were interested and we just kept collecting tracks; of course we’re going to wait for Arcade Fire, of course we’re going to wait for Sufjan Stevens. We just kept going because we wanted to make a great record, but we also wanted to sell records to raise money to fight AIDS.”
High Violet finds The National reinvigorated and willing to experiment with their sonic textures more than ever before, with the normally bleak Berninger also injecting bemusing black humour into his lyrics. Mark Fox’s cover art, a multi-coloured cursive scribble of words, reflects The National’s new tack.
“All these words that might make sense might also just be nonsense, and that’s kind of the way we went about making the album. I think that the swarm of words and colours on the cover look like the work of a madman! It’s a big swarm of ideas and sounds that you find meaning in, but you can also find distortion and dissonance. We felt it was a good reflection of the album itself.”
High Violet (4AD/Remote Control)
Unpublished Interview Material
The cover of Boxer was very dark in tone, as was the A Skin, A Night CD/DVD set. High Violet’s cover looks brighter in tone, so is there a similarly lighter shade to the music?
“Well I think the cover reflects that, in every way, we wanted to make a different record this time and bands need to reinvent themselves. I think this album is more immediate and more fun than anything we’ve done before on songs like Anyone’s Ghost and Lemonworld, but it’s also quite dark and melancholic also. I don’t know why, but I think Matt writes about what he feels and for him to fall in love with the song it has to have an emotional weight to it or some meaning. More often than not it has to have, not a dark or sad feeling, but a weightier feeling to it. It’s hard to make happy and bright music I guess.”
To a band outsider, Bloodbuzz Ohio’s cryptic lyrics could either be genuine melancholy or alternatively the work of a dark humourist. Do you have discussions about the lyrical content of an album or can it sometimes be six months down the track before you know where Matt’s coming from?
“Sometimes we know what it’s about, but he hardly ever tells us to be honest. He does have a sense of humour and he’s not a sad person, so there’s often at least a sense of irony in the lyrics that people don’t see. When he says [on Conversation 16] ‘I was afraid I’d eat your brains because I’m evil’, it’s not serious, although there is some weird meaning to it. It’s funny, and it’s the same with Sorrow. It sounds so sad but it’s also a weird celebration of the feeling of sorrow; some people don’t get out of it because they like that feeling. Matt likes to put words together that might not mean anything but you can attach meaning to. It’s more about what the listeners feel they mean. It reminds me of Dylan or someone, because there’s a lot of misdirection.”
Matt joked to Quietus about Lady Gaga and Lil Wayne missing the cut for this album, but is there anyone in the pop world that interests you in terms of future collaboration opportunities?
“Yeah, there are so many people. I don’t know if The National would ever collaborate with people, but my brother and I are always interested in collaborating with other people and contributing to what they do. If we had the opportunity to collaborate with someone we like such as Michael Stipe, Kanye or a range of people we admire who are much more successful than we are then I don’t think it’s something we’d need to think about.”
The Dark Was The Night compilation you worked on with Bryce was incredibly coherent for an album spanning continents, genres and generations.
“Thank you, I think that’s a testament to the quality of the music and the artists. We thought it would be cohesive if we chose artists that we truly respected and admired their songcraft. That’s the thread that connects them all – the songcraft, musicianship and earnestness about it. It’s quite ironic that it’s this heartfelt feeling that makes it cohesive.”
You’re known as quite the multi-instrumentalist. Did you try out anything new on High Violet?
“A lot of it was about texture and finding new ideas for how a record should feel, so on songs like Terrible Love it was about me playing louder and experimenting with weirder guitar playing. That was really fun. I also played a lot of songs on piano, which is underplaying I guess. They’re rhythmic and moving in ways we haven’t done before. On Little Faith there’s a bassline I play that’s not typical of a National bassline – it’s fast and funky and I had fun with that. You’re always trying different things.”
Is it correct that Runaway is based around a Dostoyevsky novel called The Brothers Karamazov?
“When I wrote the music for that one I called it Karamazov, because it was one of my favourite books. When you write music and it has no name you have to title it for when you record it and give it to someone as a Pro-Tools session. That was just a name I liked, so it’s not about that. Matt changes the names towards the end of the process once he’s written the lyrics, so it takes us a long time to come around to the new names. Runaway was Karamazov, but it’s not about the book.”
So does it feel like someone’s renamed your pet when Matt takes your songs and changes the names you’ve initially given them, then?
“Yeah, it does. It feels like the music has an equal role to the lyrics so it’s always kind of like, ‘Why should you get to name it if I wrote the music?’. But we don’t want to get in a fight with him about that – we laugh about it. He has to put up with our insults, so he gets to name the songs…”
They’d been performing for years by then, but when The National’s Boxer album dropped in 2007, they emerged as New York’s best-kept secret. Reviewing the Mistaken For Strangers single at the time, I suggested, “The Brooklyn band sure aren’t the pretty boys that New York sporadically turns up, but if you’re more into vintage Cohen than vintage Converse, then this brooding and bass-filled punch will flaw you”. A hand-signed Boxer poster featuring personal messages of thanks from the band arrived in my mailbox not long after, which indicated they were nice guys as well as great musicians. Since 2007 The National’s popularity has increased dramatically, with 2010’s High Violet release confirming their international status as esteemed rock poets. I spoke to The National’s brainbox (and future Taylor Swift collaborator) Aaron Dessner just before the release of High Violet, with the guitarist giving an interesting insight into the band’s musical evolution, their humility and their love of a good in-joke.
The following is an edited version of an interview first published in Rip It Up in May 2010.
The National - What's The Frequency?
by Scott McLennan
Ever since his 1985 debut Less Than Zero shocked and excited readers, New York novelist Bret Easton Ellis has subversively revelled in text that pairs gruesome violence with incongruous pop culture soundtracks. A famous passage in his 1991 novel American Psycho found his twisted anti-hero Patrick Bateman hacking up a victim while waxing lyrical about Huey Lewis & The News, while a murder in his 1994 short story collection The Informers takes place during a Duran Duran look-alike contest.
In the forthcoming sequel to Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms, Easton Ellis has bestowed his bloody blessing on Brooklyn’s The National, with the novel’s protagonist speaking of their “muted fury”.
“We were pleasantly surprised about that, so I’m curious to read the book when it comes out,” multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner suggests while promoting new album High Violet. “Because we always make fun of ourselves and are very self-deprecating, it’s always surprising when a great artist or someone writing literature is obsessing over our songs. It’s a big surprise, but it’s a nice feeling too.”
Easton Ellis joins iconic US artists such as R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen in praising the magic melancholia of the critically acclaimed group. In the wake of their dark 2007 masterpiece Boxer, The National even joined R.E.M. on a North American tour. Dessner shakes his head that his teen heroes are now in awe of his own band’s output.
“To learn that R.E.M. – Michael Stipe and Mike Mills – were big fans was an amazing feeling. They kind of invented underground and indie rock. They became a massive band, but in the ‘80s they created this genre that we’re part of – if you can call it a genre with so much diverse music being made. I have so much respect for them and I was incredibly honoured. We’ve also gotten to know David Byrne and he’s really incredible, a gifted musician and songwriter. To be able to work with him and have his feedback and know he appreciates our work is just surreal.”
Growing up in Ohio in the 1980s, Dessner and his brother Bryce’s exposure to forward-thinking acts such as Talking Heads and R.E.M. often relied on their big sister’s LP collection.
“To be honest, most radio in Cincinnati when we were growing up was either very mainstream or country. There was the pop station playing Madonna and Michael Jackson, the station playing Led Zeppelin or The Who and then there was the country station. There was one station in Ohio called 97X that played all the cool underground rock that was going on back then, but we didn’t live close enough to get it at home. Our sister was a few years older and she had all the records and was off listening to Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smiths and the Pixies. Now she takes the credit for everything. She thinks that if it wasn’t for her we’d be married to our high school girlfriends and working for banks in Cincinnati.”
Former Adelaide University student Padma Newsome is a long-time cohort of The National, with the Alice Springs-born composer’s work with various members of the band pre-dating the inauguration of The National in 1999. Now based in Victoria, his orchestration is again on show on High Violet.
“He works in a place called Mallacoota, which is apparently a 10-hour drive from Melbourne or something like that. He does come to the States to work with us and he worked quite a bit on this album, but a lot of the songs and music he worked on are songs that didn’t end up on the record because Matt [Berninger, vocalist] didn’t finish the lyrics, but he’s on three or four of the songs.
“Padma’s not a nationalist but he’s very proud of Australia. He spends his spare time checking cricket scores and he’s so proud – he’s told us so much about your animals and the country and the landscape. I find it all very interesting, so we talk about Australia all the time actually.”
With Boxer exposing The National to a new level of worldwide interest and expectation, it was with a sense of relief that the band members took time out from the band following Boxer’s tour cycle. The Dessner brothers used this time to finalise their Dark Was The Night double-CD compilation, a charity release that featured contributions from esteemed acts such as Arcade Fire, Feist and My Morning Jacket.
“I think it did help my brother and I get our minds off The National, so it allowed us to get inside other artists’ heads and make music with other people. I think it was helpful and it was also just a good experience to do something charitable.
“There were times when we wondered what we’d got ourselves into and if we could finish it at a higher level – we didn’t want to put something out that wasn’t special. It just kept snowballing because initially it was only supposed to be one record but so many great artists were interested and we just kept collecting tracks; of course we’re going to wait for Arcade Fire, of course we’re going to wait for Sufjan Stevens. We just kept going because we wanted to make a great record, but we also wanted to sell records to raise money to fight AIDS.”
High Violet finds The National reinvigorated and willing to experiment with their sonic textures more than ever before, with the normally bleak Berninger also injecting bemusing black humour into his lyrics. Mark Fox’s cover art, a multi-coloured cursive scribble of words, reflects The National’s new tack.
“All these words that might make sense might also just be nonsense, and that’s kind of the way we went about making the album. I think that the swarm of words and colours on the cover look like the work of a madman! It’s a big swarm of ideas and sounds that you find meaning in, but you can also find distortion and dissonance. We felt it was a good reflection of the album itself.”
High Violet (4AD/Remote Control)
Unpublished Interview Material
The cover of Boxer was very dark in tone, as was the A Skin, A Night CD/DVD set. High Violet’s cover looks brighter in tone, so is there a similarly lighter shade to the music?
“Well I think the cover reflects that, in every way, we wanted to make a different record this time and bands need to reinvent themselves. I think this album is more immediate and more fun than anything we’ve done before on songs like Anyone’s Ghost and Lemonworld, but it’s also quite dark and melancholic also. I don’t know why, but I think Matt writes about what he feels and for him to fall in love with the song it has to have an emotional weight to it or some meaning. More often than not it has to have, not a dark or sad feeling, but a weightier feeling to it. It’s hard to make happy and bright music I guess.”
To a band outsider, Bloodbuzz Ohio’s cryptic lyrics could either be genuine melancholy or alternatively the work of a dark humourist. Do you have discussions about the lyrical content of an album or can it sometimes be six months down the track before you know where Matt’s coming from?
“Sometimes we know what it’s about, but he hardly ever tells us to be honest. He does have a sense of humour and he’s not a sad person, so there’s often at least a sense of irony in the lyrics that people don’t see. When he says [on Conversation 16] ‘I was afraid I’d eat your brains because I’m evil’, it’s not serious, although there is some weird meaning to it. It’s funny, and it’s the same with Sorrow. It sounds so sad but it’s also a weird celebration of the feeling of sorrow; some people don’t get out of it because they like that feeling. Matt likes to put words together that might not mean anything but you can attach meaning to. It’s more about what the listeners feel they mean. It reminds me of Dylan or someone, because there’s a lot of misdirection.”
Matt joked to Quietus about Lady Gaga and Lil Wayne missing the cut for this album, but is there anyone in the pop world that interests you in terms of future collaboration opportunities?
“Yeah, there are so many people. I don’t know if The National would ever collaborate with people, but my brother and I are always interested in collaborating with other people and contributing to what they do. If we had the opportunity to collaborate with someone we like such as Michael Stipe, Kanye or a range of people we admire who are much more successful than we are then I don’t think it’s something we’d need to think about.”
The Dark Was The Night compilation you worked on with Bryce was incredibly coherent for an album spanning continents, genres and generations.
“Thank you, I think that’s a testament to the quality of the music and the artists. We thought it would be cohesive if we chose artists that we truly respected and admired their songcraft. That’s the thread that connects them all – the songcraft, musicianship and earnestness about it. It’s quite ironic that it’s this heartfelt feeling that makes it cohesive.”
You’re known as quite the multi-instrumentalist. Did you try out anything new on High Violet?
“A lot of it was about texture and finding new ideas for how a record should feel, so on songs like Terrible Love it was about me playing louder and experimenting with weirder guitar playing. That was really fun. I also played a lot of songs on piano, which is underplaying I guess. They’re rhythmic and moving in ways we haven’t done before. On Little Faith there’s a bassline I play that’s not typical of a National bassline – it’s fast and funky and I had fun with that. You’re always trying different things.”
Is it correct that Runaway is based around a Dostoyevsky novel called The Brothers Karamazov?
“When I wrote the music for that one I called it Karamazov, because it was one of my favourite books. When you write music and it has no name you have to title it for when you record it and give it to someone as a Pro-Tools session. That was just a name I liked, so it’s not about that. Matt changes the names towards the end of the process once he’s written the lyrics, so it takes us a long time to come around to the new names. Runaway was Karamazov, but it’s not about the book.”
So does it feel like someone’s renamed your pet when Matt takes your songs and changes the names you’ve initially given them, then?
“Yeah, it does. It feels like the music has an equal role to the lyrics so it’s always kind of like, ‘Why should you get to name it if I wrote the music?’. But we don’t want to get in a fight with him about that – we laugh about it. He has to put up with our insults, so he gets to name the songs…”
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