It's hard to say when The National finally achieved the indie rock phenomenon status that preceded them as they prepared to release Boxer this May, their second full-length for Beggars Banquet (their fourth LP overall). Music critics' initial misconception of 2005's Alligator were nearly comical—the venerable music wonks at Pitchfork even saw fit to admit they mistakenly underrated Alligator at the beginning of their review for Boxer last month. Regardless of the reception, Alligator would eventually be widely regarded as one of the albums of the year, and so it wasn't too surprising when The National sold out five straight nights at Bowery Ballroom to kick off their tour in support of Boxer. What was surprising was that they chose to play there rather than a larger venue. COOL'EH dropped by the Bowery on a Wednesday afternoon to talk with singer Matt Berninger and guitarist Aaron Dessner about the old record, the new record, the weird alchemy of live music, and the state of rock lyricism.



So it's day three of a week's worth of shows at Bowery Ballroom. It's pretty rare for a rock band to play five nights in one place. What brought that about?

Matt Berninger: We wanted to play here because we've always loved playing here, so I think we scheduled three shows and those sold out really quickly, so they added two shows. We were pleasantly surprised that they all sold out so fast. And it's just a good room for us, the size and the vibe, and the energy we've always liked.

Aaron Dessner: We actually had a choice and I think it was like two Webster Halls or four Bowery's in a row, and we just—last time we headlined in New York we played Webster and it was fun, but it's just not as interesting or intimate or as nice a venue.

When you guys first moved here and were going to shows, did you see a lot of crowds that were as responsive as your crowds have been over the past couple of days?

MB: It's funny...I think New York generally is generally notorious for having subdued crowds, but what we're kind of surprised by and actually a little rattled by is the kind of in-between, right in the slow songs, how quiet it is. And that's very good on one level because people are paying attention, but for us, sometimes we prefer there to be ambient noise and you know, it's actually more relaxing when there's people talking in the back of the room. We don't take it for granted that everybody's paying attention.

AD: I would say actually New York's not one of the most but it's a good, respectful audience, for us it's not anything like certain places in Europe. There's certain rock cultures like London or Glasgow or Dublin where people just go wild, you know.

MB: A lot of those shows are a big party, but in New York people come to focus on the music. It can be a little bit unsettling, at times you can hear a pin drop.

Your one-sheet proclaimed in no uncertain terms that Boxer is a better album than Alligator. Why? What's different this time around?

MB: Yeah, we think it's our best record. We were able to do things with it and experiment with different ideas and the way we put the songs together. One example is the elements that are in most of the songs, there's not a lot of stuff that's just piled on top, stuff comes and goes, the orchestration, whether its the strings or the horns, even the drums, nothing is just playing a supportive role just to make it louder or fancier, so the orchestration all has its own voice and has its own personality that comes in and takes the song in a different direction, like the horns on "Fake Empire" or the drums on "Brainy". So for us that was something we wanted to do. It was kind of hard to do that, so that's one reason we think we achieved something better on some levels. But it's also just a different record than Alligator and we wanted to do that, we didn't want to make another Alligator. That's obviously a subjective thing, but at the end of this one we were, when we finally heard it from that perspective, we were all very happy with it, with the change and the evolution.

Are there things you are realizing about the new songs as you play them live?

MB: Songs on the record, live for us have always shifted, evolved, its a really different kind of energy than in the studio or in your bedroom with your recording gear and stuff, it's such a different space on stage, so we try to let whatever the space or the circumstance inform the music so the songs change a lot. An example of that: "Squalor Victoria", something happens on that live that doesn't happen on the record.

photo: ABBEY DRUCKER

Is there anything about the essential character of the songs that feels different?

AD: You're adding another element into it, which is the dynamic with the audience, the energy in the room becomes part of the song. Especially the way we all play, the way I play guitar with my brother, we will at times play more forcefully live just because there's adrenaline in the room. I think that we've gotten better at being more patient as far as, if a song's a quiet, beautiful, subtle song, we try not to loose all of that live. Early on we'd get nervous and play too fast and too loud, and as we've gotten more experienced and confident we've figured out how to just, if its a quiet song play it quiet, like that song "Daughters of the Soho Riots"; we play it really quietly but the people seem to respond to it.

MB: Especially Boxer, 'cause its such a private record—most of the characters are alone, or just two people holed up in a room somewhere—so there's a weird alchemy from playing such a private song in such a public way. So sometimes there's a tension there that's kind of weird and cool, performing "Racing Like a Pro" in front of a room full of people drinking, its such an odd kind of, where the song was born was a completely opposite circumstance. I like that.

It may just have been my perception, but it seems like the Boxer songs have a different aspect live, but maybe that's just that you've had more time with the older material and those songs have been able to evolve and grow as you said they do.

MB: There are elements of what's happening on Boxer in all of our other records, but I think a lot of people thought of Alligator, maybe in a skewed hindsight, as being this big rock record, when in truth it had some songs that were screaming rock songs, but it also had a lot of odd, whatever—"City Middle" would maybe fit on Boxer—so I think that Boxer songs, the same way that songs on Alligator shifted and mutated, sometimes for the better, sometimes you loose something that you can only get that time you recorded it in the studio. But most of the time I think things evolve and get more interesting.

Matt, you commented in an interview a couple of years ago that the perspective on Alligator was of an outsider, 'outside watching a party through a window' is the phrase I think you used. Do you feel like that's still the perspective in the lyrics and even in the music, or has there been a shift?

MB: On Alligator there was a lot of anxiety about feeling kind of like a looser and then delusional. "Mr. November" sounds like this big triumphant song but it's the internal dialogue of someone wanting to believe that they were carried in the arms of cheerleaders and stuff. There was a lot of that on Alligator. There's some of that, but there's not as much on Boxer. One of the main themes that seems to go through it is the characters and the stories and even the music is trying to hide away or avoid responsibility or avoid drama or something, and trying to just relax and hold things together and trying to get its footing and get steady, whereas Alligator was kind of the opposite in some ways. Whereas Alligator was loosing control a lot, Boxer seems like the desperation to try to gain control.

Taken as a whole, the album gives off this portrait-of-a-city vibe. Was that a conscious effort?

MB: As far as, most of it all takes place, in the descriptions and settings, either the rooms or streets, there's a definite sense of the space and environment and for me it is all New York City. All the songs were written here and I've lived here for fourteen years and it's the most, it's always just an ingredient in all the songs so, and its not something on purpose it just happens to be—no matter how much time I've lived here I still have this obsession with it, because its such a romantic, bizarre, sometimes scary place. Pretty much all of Boxer is set somewhere in small apartment or in city streets at night.

Did you ever have any sense of a summation of all these little vignettes.

MB: Of the big picture?

Yeah.

MB: Not until we were finished could we get that sort of perspective on it. There were about seventeen or eighteen songs that were coming together at the end, and we started picking the ones that felt that they went together and felt right together, but we didn't have a design in mind, as far as what you're talking about, it just sort of happened that way and it was just in the last weeks that we figured out the songs. And even the sequence changed the whole nature of the record a lot, we had a lot of different sequences and it was a very different record. There were a few songs that we ended up realizing, a song called "Blank Slate" and a song called "Santa Clara", and they felt like a part of something else and so maybe that'll be the next record. So it was at the very end that the figure emerged from the carpet, as they say.

Although you've had orchestral elements in past albums, those elements played more of a roll this time around. Was that a conscious effort?

AD: It's actually my brother [Bryce] and Padma Newsome, they're both classically trained musicians and really active outside of rock and roll. They play in chamber orchestras, Padma writes for all kinds of orchestras, so part of that is just natural because they play that kind of music and we listen to some of that music, and then I think also with this record we were interested in having different colors and texture shifts and one way to do that is with brass or woodwinds, like at the end of "Mistaken for Strangers", all the guitars and bass go away and it's just brass right there, we did that in a lot of different places in different ways, whether it's playing behind the bridge on the guitar or using a bowed guitar or using brass or woodwinds, just trying to have different textures come into it. So I think it's just a natural thing. It wasn't like, "Let's go out and make an orchestral pop record." If you hear classical guitar it's because my brother plays classical guitar.

It seems like there was a more socially critical tone to the lyrics this time around, and one of the indicators of that was that there seemed to be more use of the word "you".

MB: [Laughs] Somebody said the exact opposite. That there was more of an accusatory 'you' thing in Alligator, and more of a 'we' in this one.



So, were we both wrong or just me?

MB: There was never a conscious thing, but there's a couple of songs that—"Fake Empire" is the most obvious one that has been interpreted as a critique of American ambivalence or something. But it's not really that, it's not the way I thought of it. It's more of an admission of the desire to want to just not deal with anything, so anywhere there's social commentary it usually reflected on ourselves or pointed at ourselves. I couldn't even say it's an indictment, it's more of just an observation, or sort of a need to want to just zone out and forget about—the war and the politics and stuff are way in the background, there aren't even songs about that stuff, the war is on television in one song, that's about as close to commenting literally on any of that stuff the record gets. And in truth if there was a theme to Boxer it was the attempt or the need to escape all that stuff or not think about that stuff.

Were you a writer before you started writing song lyrics?

MB: No, and I used to steal Scott's [Devendorf] term papers and copy his stuff because I was such a bad prose writer. I was always more artsy. I studied sculpture and graphic design, words weren't one of my tools. It was only when I started being in a band that I started to write song lyrics or anything like that.

Once you started doing it did you look at other songwriters?

MB: Well, I was obsessed with people like Nick Cave and Morissey and Cohen and Dylan, and actually the Violent Femmes were the first time I remember hearing lyrics, I can't remember which song, but they took these weird chances and said things and sung about certain ugly things, I had never heard that done before and I remember, those are the sort of musicians and songwriters that stuck with me the most, I definitely learned from those guys. And actually Bob Pollard, I remember in 2000 I was obsessed with his lyrics because it didn't sound like he was trying very hard, but he would just say things in these bizarre, totally heartbreaking ways, I think he literally does, he said he writes ten songs a day or twenty songs a day. I write ten songs in a year, so it takes me a long long time.

Why do you think Alligator had the particular trajectory that it did, starting out under the radar and then ending up on a lot of critics' album of the year lists?

MB: It seems the word grower has been part of almost everything anyone has written about us. And we used to be kind of chafed by that, it was frustrating, like "well why does it take..." But then we were O.K. with it because it's the way we write the things. The songs that we end up still liking after several weeks or months of working on them are usually the ones that are not immediate, so it makes sense that people listen to the records kind of the same.

AD: Alligator and all of our albums are diverse in terms of the kinds of songs that we write, we don't have one thing like a lot of bands have one thing that they do really well, and they have a particular sound or they have a style or the singer has one way of delivering, like you know when its a Decemberists song immediately, whereas I think with The National, sometimes we joke that it's a variety show because it's like, that's the classical guitar song, and this is the loud, Sonic Youth one, and the records go to a lot of different places. So when we make the records that doesn't bother us but if you try to digest it in one sitting the first time you hear it, if you don't know the band you might be a little perplexed. So they don't always hit people right away, although usually something does. And the other thing is we musically tend to, we're so paranoid about cliche and banality, because rock music can be very banal, we try to avoid some of the obvious things that you could do to make something really immediate-sounding, not to say that we don't write catchy music, but the for example the single on this record, "Mistaken for Strangers", is actually a very long chord progression. It was challenging to write a song with this wild guitar texture, it's kind of harsh when you hear it live, but I think it's just the product of having five people in the band that love music and are critical of music, so it's hard for us to finish any song that doesn't seem a little odd or off-center or challenging in some way. I think it's natural that Alligator took a while to get out there, but I think once people did accept it and pay attention to it it was something they could be passionate about. There weren't really casual fans of it because its hard to be casual about it.

MB: There's not a hit or anything.

What was the net effect of having more people involved in creating Boxer?

MB: We had a lot of people work on Alligator too, but this one specifically Padma Newsome got involved earlier in the process, he was in the trenches. He was in Australia but we were sending him stuff early on, just little sketches and stuff, so he was just involved more at the beginning of the process, his ideas are featured more this time around, and then Thomas Bartlet, he's someone who plays most of the keyboards and organs and stuff like that, he's just someone we knew and had seen play and got to know and he's just amazing, he's got this feel for delivery on any kind of keyboard instruments so we brought him in and had him do stuff, and Sufjan's on two songs, and we specifically wanted him, the way he plays the piano on those couple of songs. What we did is we found people—Marla Hansen is an example, we'd never had any female backing vocals before—and we wanted certain textures and ideas and certain flavors that only these people specifically can do, so the musicians that are on this were chosen for what they do and how they do it, and featured in a way that its not just playing along, adding something, piling it on like I said earlier, they were brought in for a specific space and character and sound, and we hadn't done it in that way before.

Was there a conscious effort to increase the palette?

AD: Yeah. When we first wrote the songs, when Padma was hearing them for the first time he would say, "Oh, I can hear trombones, what do you think of that?" or, "I can hear bassoon and bass clarinet," and every idea we were like yeah, yeah, yeah. Even flute, there's flute on "Brainy" and "Racing Like a Pro", and that's just because, partly it's because it's just fun to hear these instruments and record them, and part of it's just trying to find different textures and colors that would seem new to us. And then there is something going on in the album that's taking something that's, like if you play "Slow Show", just play the chords to it, it has a really poppy progression, and so we kind of intentionally dirtied it up with that bowed harmonic guitar, all of a sudden it started to have some kind of feeling in it that the music, we were more excited about it, so then we did the same thing to "Brainy", gave it an odd beginning and there's the same thing in Mistaken For Strangers, that kind of thing, it happens throughout the album. I remember Peter, who recorded the album, when we first did that he was like, Apartment Story just the sound of it is grungy, it's really dirty and thick and almost sounds like a grunge song, but that was another thing we were just looking for a texture we'd never done before and felt like it had a lot of emotion in it, and in a way like give what is a really simple chord pattern a little something else, so yeah we were definitely trying to expand the use of sound and pay more attention to the way we used it, we spent more time getting sounds that we really liked, instead of worrying about it later we worried about it as we were doing it, we still worried about it later but with Alligator we recorded everything and figured it out later, which was a good approach, but this time we were a little more paranoid about if something didn't seem, like if the guitar didn't seem right or the drums, we kept redoing it, so actually a lot of the recording was redone in my attic, a lot of the instruments. A lot of the actual guitar playing was redone with bad mics in an attic just to give it something else.

How would you describe the state of lyricism in rock music?

MB: I don't know, it's hard to say. There's a lot of greats. It's always something I focus on and with the band its the only thing I do, I can't play the guitar so it's my job and I guess I pay a lot of attention, (AD interjects: You play cymbal now.) Oh yeah, I play cymbal now, one handed. I don't know, I mean Dylan, and when the Beatles started going from pop to doing more interesting things, those were the guys that made songwriting lyrics a different thing than they had been before. Not to say that there aren't great lyrics before them, but it was kind of a sea change, not just to write something that was pleasant or entertaining, but actually was kind of digging into some weirder or darker places, well I don't want to say darker, but just human condition and the empathy for people or whatever. But now, I think it's really good.

Where do you see yourself in the landscape of songwriters, not historically, but in terms of what's out there currently?

MB: I'm up there. I'm really good, I think. I think Wynn Butler has got a great way of writing about things and choice of words, it's also his voice is, I think, one of the most beautiful rock voices that's ever been; it sounds both sad and full of energy, and it's triumphant and sad at the exact same time. I actually think Julian Casablancas is a great lyricist and an amazing singer, but it's a whole different kind of palette that he uses and the type of things and his choice of little details, conversational things and turns of phrase, is unique and unbelievably effective and yeah, he's brilliant.