2007 Innovators Q&a: The National

A tiny, subtle diamond in a field of ten-foot neon exclamation points, Boxer, the stately, flawless fifth record from the Brooklyn group the National, draws strength from the power of suggestion. "Let's not try to figure out everything at once," Matt Berninger sings softly in the glowing opener "Fake Empire," and that line could be a statement of theme: On Boxer, the epiphanies take their time. Since their relocation from Ohio to New York, the National has built a career on writing wry songs that express sympathy for the bedeviled. Boxer is about the first step after the Big Dream fails. It's a record about the implication but not the explanation, the clues but not the mystery. It's a record full of down-payment dreamers, ruined princes and glowing young ruffians who are learning to be satisfied with everything they haven't got. They're beaten but grinning — half awake in fake empires, but waiting around to see the sun.

eMusic caught up with National frontman Matt Berninger while he was on tour in Copenhagen to find out if — and how — success has changed them.

I feel like 2007 was the tipping point for you guys in a lot of ways — at what point did you start to become aware of the fact that people were starting to wake up to your band?

There have been these small turning points for years. Definitely in 2005, toward the end of touring for Alligator, we felt something shifting. That was the first time where we felt that suddenly there was a broader scope of attention. Now this year, it's taken another huge leap forward. It's one of those things where it's hard to judge what's going on, but when the shows are all selling out and venues are adding second shows, you can tell something's going on. We know a lot more people have Boxer than all of the records before it put together.

One of those new fans was Bruce Springsteen. How did you find out about his interest in you?

We had heard that he'd been using some of our songs in his pre-show walk-in music. He had "About Today" from Cherry Tree and a few other songs. Then we were asked to take part in a tribute concert to his Nebraska album, and we were excited and happy to do that. We didn't realize he was actually going to show up. Sure enough, right before we went on stage to do "Mansion on the Hill," I turned around and he was standing right behind me with Patti. And suddenly, it became a much more nerve-wracking experience.

At the end of the event, it was raining, it was a horrible night, I'd been out all day, and my wife and I just wanted to go home. So the two of us left almost immediately to watch TV and I turned my phone off. The next day I had all these text messages from the guys in the band like "Where the fuck are you? We're sitting here getting drunk with Bruce!" Apparently, he went directly over to [guitarist] Bryce [Dessner] and wanted to get a drink with us. They spent an hour and a half just talking with him. He was asking specific things about specific songs and asking about the meanings of certain songs — it was very obvious to them that he actually had all of our records and listened to them a lot. It's a really surreal thing to think that he's listening to our records in his house.

So to backtrack just a little: if you'd started to sense a tipping point near the end of Alligator, you went into the studio for this record with an awareness that people were catching on. Did that impact the making of this record in any way?

It had two effects: there was a moment toward the end of Boxer where we realized we didn't have any "Abel"s or any "Mr. November"s on this record. Those seemed to be the songs on Alligator that got the most attention, so there were a few days of "Should we try to write one of those songs?" I've never been able to do that — to write a specific kind of song. The times where I have done that, it just felt unnatural. I didn't want to deliberately try to turn any of the things we were working on into an "Abel." And, you know, I don't think those were really the songs people ultimately latched on to. They might have been the first things people liked, but I don't think they were the only things people were connecting with. I was confident that I didn't want those kinds of songs. I didn't care, and I wasn't that worried. Because Alligator was something of a "grower" for most people, I think it gave us a kind of confidence. We felt we should just do what we do and not worry about it. We should just make a record that we love, because that's what we've always done, and now it seems to be working. Finally.

At the same time, there was a lot of internal pressure to make songs that we all like. It's very democratic, which means there's a lot of debate. And it was taking me forever to write lyrics for this thing, so that was really stressful. Those guys were really worried. After eleven months of working on this record, I only had lyrics done for two songs. All of my lyrics come in pieces, and I didn't want to go into the studio and lay down any lyrics on something that I wasn't 100% happy with. If I put something down that's just temporary, the rest of the band tends to get attached to whatever those lyrics are. So I could be talking about eating cat food, and if I tried to change it to something actually really good, they would be like, "Oh, I liked the thing about the cat food." So that's one of the reasons I wouldn't go in and start to just sing anything until I was completely happy with it.

I know that caused a lot of tension and a lot of fear and anxiety in the band. I know [guitarist] Aaron [Dessner] was, towards the end, a little out of his mind. He was honestly wondering, "Do we have a record here?" It did take a really long time — well over a year. People at the label were saying, "you have to make this deadline or the record won't come out for another three months." I'm just happy that we didn't make the mistake of rearranging our schedule for that. We ended up breaking all those deadlines, and that caused stress for the label, it caused stress for us. We were going into the studio and spending money and we realized that we weren't moving forward. So then we'd leave the studio and go home. Now I feel good about the fact that we stuck to our guns, but if the record had sucked… I mean, it took Aaron a while to even listen to this record after it was done.

The songs that take us more time to fall in love with are the ones that end up on the record.

That was my next question: after such a laborious creative process, how long did it take you to actually get the space and distance to listen to it and enjoy it?

It's really hard, because sometimes even when you're listening to a 'finished' song, you'll find ten little things that you want to change. It's like getting dressed for something, but you get ketchup on your shirt. No matter how good the rest of your outfit looks, all you can see is that ketchup. To make matters worse, the first mastered copy we got of the record was completely fucked up — when we got it we thought "OK, finally, now we're done!" And then we put it in and there are all these problems. When we finally got the fixed, final master — that's when I poured a big drink and put my headphones on and took it for a few spins.

Yeah, you know, I feel like "Abel" and "Mr. November" were just kind of candy-trails that lead people into Alligator, whereas with Boxer you are sort of forced to take it as a whole.

Sure. And we expected it to take a little bit of time for people to really like it. That's the way it is when we're writing songs: it's the songs that take us more time to fall in love with that end up on the record. The ones that are immediate we usually get bored with pretty quickly.

One of the things that I love about your songs is that they grapple with the idea of getting older, but still wanting to behave like a young man. Is that something that occupies a lot of headspace for you?

Yeah. I think it occupies my dad's headspace a lot, too. The more responsibility you take on, whether it's marriage or a job or kids, you know that you're not gonna be able to do everything that you want. The funny thing with me is, I never did those things in the first place. I was never out dating lots of women, but it's the idea of being a slut. I never really did any drugs, either, but it's the realization that you can't really do them anymore. That's scary. You don't want to give up the idea, even if it is only a fantasy. The other thing that comes up a lot is having a job and trying to pay the rent — not really feeling you're particularly good at this thing, but trying to fake your way through a professional life feeling like you're a fraud. Those are the anxieties I have, and are probably the things I think about the most.

You know, so many of your songs are about suffering through a day job and hoping that one day you get to live the dream. But now you guys are living the dream — how does that impact the way you write?

I mean, that's a real worry. I do have a fear that, if this band becomes the only thing I do, what will there be to write about? I wrote more and better sitting at work when I hated my job and had to come home and try to work on songs. I think there was something I was fighting against then. There was a very distinct goal, to kind of "buy my freedom" from that 9-to-5 thing. And now…I don't know. I don't want to write songs about how hard it is to be in a band. When we're done touring behind this record, I'd like to just get away from it all for a while. The next record might take a long time because I kind of want to go back to work. I want to have those water cooler conversations. I want to talk about things that aren't music. You have to fill your brain with other things. If I can, I want to try to figure out how to walk away from this as much as possible.

At the same time, there are a lot of songs on this record about finding safety in relationships. I thought that was kind of a nice resolve. One of my favorite lines on the record is "tired and wired, we ruin too easy" — the idea that you're not being ruined alone anymore. There's two of you, ruined together. It's a nice compromise resolution: we're both fucked-up, but at least we're fucked-up together.

Yeah, there's a lot of that, a lot of wanting to come home and just be stupid and just be with the person you can be ugly and dumb with. A lot of the record is just about avoiding the reality of socializing, politics. "Fake Empire" has been interpreted as a political song, but most of that song is about trying to pretend that there are no politics. It's the idea of trying to stay in the "rosy-minded fuzz," trying to pretend that everything's fine when it's not really fine. It's wanting to be irresponsible, wanting to hide from everything. There aren't any messages in the songs, but it's the stuff that was stressing me out.

One last thing I have to ask about, just from a fan's perspective: I was really happy to hear that lyric from "29 Years" — "You know I dreamed about you/ for 29 years before I saw you" — get re-used on "Slow Show." Was that meant as a knowing reference for longtime fans, or did you just feel like that lyric hadn't been properly spotlighted on your first record?

It wasn't either, actually. It was simply that the song needed to go somewhere different, and I think Aaron said "for now, just sing the lyrics from '29 Years.'" It ended up just working for the song. I thought, "Well, I steal from everything else, so why not just steal from myself?"

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Here the author Edward Keyes writes about the Q & As with the National bands frontman Matt Berninger while he was on tour in Copenhagen. For more information on various albums, check with emusic.com’s online music. You may also enjoy the mp3 downloads from there.

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