The National are in a good place. Ten years after the release of their big breakthrough Boxer, they’ve entered a state of stability, operating patiently and carefully. The four years since 2013’s Trouble Will Find Me mark the longest gap between records in their nearly 20-year career, but it’s been a highly productive period for the members. Singer Matt Berninger formed a new band EL VY, while multi-instrumentalist brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner spearheaded last year’s star-studded Grateful Dead tribute set, Day of the Dead. The band members have also scored films and ballets, made music about the solar system, curated festivals, and performed a track for “Game of Thrones.”
The group hasn’t limited this exploration to musical terrains. Once synonymous with the Brooklyn music scene, the National’s members have all dispersed geographically. Berninger called us from Los Angeles, while Aaron Dessner joined from his place in Upstate New York, near the studio he built to record the National’s upcoming seventh album, Sleep Well Beast. Described as “some weird combination of our garage and a church,” Dessner’s studio became the breeding grounds for the band’s most expansive and atmospheric music to date.
“There were long stretches where we wouldn't even be thinking about when we were finishing this record,” Dessner says. “It allowed for different kinds of experiments to happen.” That sense of freedom can be heard throughout the record, from its embrace of loops and drum machines, to the guitar solo and cranked-up amps in first single “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness.” That song’s wordy title even seems to reflect a loosened grip: “It kinda slipped past the editor,” jokes Berninger, a sense of relief audible in his voice.
Pitchfork: It seems like working at the new space led to a more relaxed process for this album.
Aaron Dessner: Yeah, definitely. There were times when we would be up here and people wouldn't leave for two or three weeks—not even go to a coffee shop. It's a nice place to be, and we enjoyed it. Obviously there's more friction when we're really trying to finish something. We recorded so much music: focusing in on what the album is, that gets more intense in the old way. But this time, we weren't so interested in constructing a polished or elaborately tightly-knit kind of record. We allowed ourselves to have more sounds that are just hanging out there in the mist.
Matt Berninger: There's also a pond right outside the studio that just constantly gets wildlife—bullfrogs and turtles and herons and ducks landing on it. It's hard to be a dick when you look out the window and there's this tranquil pond. We were just sweeter to each other than usual.
One thing that caught me off guard in “The System Only Sleeps in Total Darkness” is the guitar solo. I don't know if I've heard that on a National record before.
MB: That's a good point. I don't think guitar solos used to be a big part of our band in the past... And I'm not sure why.
AD: I was maybe a little bit self-conscious. We've always avoided gratuitous noodling. This time, we were creating more space for things to happen. The way it was set up, it was so easy for me to go out, have a beer, and just play a guitar solo and be like, “Wait, that's kind of fun,” and just leave it on. In the past, we may have whittled those things down. There's a lot more interplay between everybody this time. That was part of the idea, just encouraging everybody to do whatever they felt like doing, and preserving it.
That's you playing guitar, Aaron?
AD: Yeah, my brother plays some sweet guitar solos on the record as well.
MB: Would you say that there are dueling guitar solos?
AD: There is a dueling guitar solo. But that was actually you, Matt.
MB: I directed the duel. That was fun. Yeah, there's guitar solos all over this record.
Matt, you've said this record is about marriage. A lot of the songs seem to be told in the first and second person. Was that intentional?
MB: The lyrics are direct and kind of intimate. Not all of the songs—I think there are as many silly, dumb, goofy lyrics on this as there usually are. But the serious stuff gets even more serious than usual. There is a lot of conversational stuff between people. I also collaborated more with Carin [Besser, writer and former New Yorker editor married to Berninger] from the very beginning on a lot of these songs. Writing lyrics with your wife does lead to talking about yourselves a lot. But this is not an autobiographical account of my personal marriage. It's almost about the marriage of the band.
One lyric on the new album that stuck out was, “I'm always mothering myself to bits.” Was self-care a theme?
MB: There's a lot of self-medicating. “I'll Still Destroy You” is lovingly talking about how we change our states of mind, whether it's weed or wine or whatever. It's an ingredient in my life. Sometimes we overindulge ourselves. I've always been okay with that in a funny way. I sing about that stuff a lot, and the dangers of it.
What’s “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” about?
MB: That one, for me, is a hibernation—the dark before the dawn sort of thing. That one's less about relationships than it is more of the strange way our world and our idea of identity mutates—sometimes overnight, as we've seen recently. It's an abstract portrait of a weird time we're in.
Would you characterize this as a political album?
MB: Everybody knows we're big liberals and I was a very outspoken Hillary supporter, and I still am. It's impossible for us to separate the songs we're writing from what's going on in the world. In a sense, it probably is a political album. But it's not a concept album or anything. There's political content in almost every song we've ever written on some level. It colors everything. There was no intention that this was more political than before.
In fact, after Trump won, some of the relief of finishing this record was to turn off all the politics for a while. There were some songs that had more of the political stuff that we just decided to wait on and put aside. A few weeks after the election, I stopped watching cable news and just unplugged. My way of dealing with the new situation we're in was to just work on something that I care about.
The Planned Parenthood 7” project is an example of us putting our noses to the grindstone on and trying to make a little difference. Working on that was my way of handling my own emotions about Trump. I was talking about politics for so long, I just kind of ran out of juice on that.
What did you contribute to that box set?
MB: I do a song with Jon Brion. I cover a Perfume Genius song (“Learning”), which the National has covered before. Pete Holmes invited me a long time ago to play at Largo. I was here by myself and nobody was around, so he got Jon Brion to play with me. We did a Dinosaur Jr. song, a Perfume Genius song, and then one National song. So we used the cover of the Perfume Genius song. I don't know when in the series it's coming out. I think it's on the B-side of the Elliott Smith thing that just came out, which is fun because Jon Brion's on that as well.
Where did the album title, Sleep Well Beast, come from?
MB: It's the name of the last track on the album. It feels like we're in this period where there's a tendency to just want to hibernate when things get really fucking weird. It's an escape to try to sleep through it, but the beast for me isn't a negative thing: it’s the future. We've all got kids, and when I see all of our kids... They've got a challenge ahead of them, but I feel positive about the future. The beast is like, wait until the youth wakes up. It's an abstract thing.
AD: That song, “Sleep Well Beast,” is one that took the longest to make and was also the most fun. It's impressionistic, and it goes many places. It's also maybe the longest song that's ever been on a National record, so it felt like a weird focus even though it's not a single. Somehow it seemed to sum up a lot of the energy that was going around the band.
What’s your plan for the tour?
AD: We’ve started figuring out the new songs. The songs on Trouble Will Find Me had hard things we had to rehearse a lot—weird time signatures and stuff. This record feels like it could be a lot of fun to play live.
MB: I don't know if we'll be able to do it, but we've been talking about figuring how to extend the anything goes spirit of this record to the live show. I'm not going to start playing guitar or anything, because no one will let me. But just letting loose on how we do our songs. Scott [Devendorf, bassist] and Bryan [Devendorf, drummer] and you, Aaron, have done a bunch of touring with Bob Weir. He has a vibe where he just doesn't sweat the static. There's something to that: to let go of our hyper control and let it be a little more reckless.
We've always been trying to climb this ladder that leans so hard on our own idea of what our big songs are. We realized recently that we're not a band with big songs. This tour, we're going to try to play everything as lovingly as the new stuff, and just loosen our grip on it all.
