The National is without a doubt my favourite modern band, but it's a bit of a challenge for me to figure out why. I know my weaknesses. I know the kind of thing I go for, and most often it's the kind of music I do myself. That definitely doesn't describe The National. Perhaps a deep dive will uncover just what's going on here and why I love it so much. Maybe it won't. But I also wanted to look at the career of someone whose catalog doesn't go back half a century, someone I could plausibly describe as a modern, contemporary artist. A band whose history actually begins in the current millennium.
The band is made up of singer Matt Berninger and two sets of brothers: drummer Bryan Devendorf and bass player Scott Devendorf, along with guitarists Bryce and Aaron Dessner (who are identical twins.) They all grew up in Cincinnati, think of themselves as mid-westerners, and formed their first bands in their hometown. Berninger and Scott Devendorf were in a band called Nancy, before moving to Brooklyn. Bryan Devendorf and the Dessner twins played in a number of local bands, before finding their own way to New York to hook up with Berninger and Scott Devendorf.
The National emerged as part of what was sometimes called an indie-rock revival - more to the point, they were part of a specifically New York scene. And the leaders, the obvious heroes of that scene were The Strokes. The National very much thought of themselves, then and now, as timid little fellows following in their mighty wake. The Strokes debut album preceded the National's debut by a mere three weeks - but of course the Strokes debut had been released internationally a few months earlier (the release dates were synced up with their tour stops), they had issued The Modern Age EP at the beginning of the year, and had already built themselves a formidable reputation as a live act. The National had never even played a show. They were simply rehearsing a collection of songs.
National songs as regularly described as "growers" - it often seems, on first listen, as if not much is going on. And then something deep and fascinating just seems to somehow emerge from these shadows, haunting and unforgettable. Their career has followed a similar arc. Each album seemed to build on its predecessor, showing more and more of what the band was capable of doing, until reaching its first full flower on High Violet, their fifth album. The three albums since have each looked, in its own way, to expand upon what they had built, while at the same time trying to avoid the trap of simply repeating what they had done before. It's clearly something that worries them, it's probably one of the reasons they seem to go out of their way to work with so many outside musicians.
For one of the most distinctive things about The National, more than almost any other band I can think of (even more than Radiohead!) is how much each member appears to enjoy collaborating with outside musicians (many of whom end up contributing at times to National projects.) This is partially a reflection of how, after twenty years together, the band members have very much gone their separate ways. Scott Devendorf is the only band member who still lives in the New York City area. He has also been the least active outside of his work with the band, although he did join up with his brother Bryan and trombonist Ben Lanz in a project they called LNZNDRF, which has issued two albums of experimental, improvisational music.
Bryan Devendorf has returned to Cincinnati. He gives chatty, entertaining interviews and pursues a number of other side projects - besides LNZNDRF, he has another experimental band called Pfarmers, as well as something marginally closer to popular music called Royal Green. He's also been a regular contributor to Aaron Dessner's many projects as a producer.
Matt Berninger now lives in Los Angeles, with his wife Carin Besser, a poet and editor who has been contributing lyrics to National songs from the very beginning. Berninger made a record as part of a duo called EL VY with Brent Knopf of Ramona Falls. He has lent his baritone to work with Phoebe Bridgers, Andrew Bird, Joy Williams, Chvrches, Julia Stone. He finally made a solo album with none other than the legendary Booker T. Jones at the helm.
Bryce Dessner lives in Paris - his wife, Pauline de Lassus pursues her own career as a musician under the name Mina Tindle. Naturally, she has lent her voice to National records and performances. He maintains his own career as a classical composer, and has collaborated with an enormous range of artists, from Philip Glass and Steve Reich to Jonny Greenwood and Sufjan Stevens.
Aaron Dessner is now based in upstate New York, where he has built his own studio. He maintains, along with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, a second band, the Big Red Machine. They've made two albums, with a remarkable group of guest singers working with Vernon and Dessner: Phoebe Bridgers, Lisa Hannigan, Kate Stables, and the Staves all appeared on the first album; Hannigan, Anais Mitchell, Sharon van Etten, the Fleet Foxes, and Taylor Swift performed on the second album (which is really, really great.) Dessner has produced albums by numerous artists, including Gracie Abrams and Sharon van Etten. Most famously, he collaborated with Taylor Swift as co-writer and producer on her two remarkable pandemic albums, folkore and evermore. As Bryan Devendorf said, you may have heard about it.
The pandemic didn't faze them much - as Scott Devendorf explained, "we've been working remotely for a long time." The engines for new material seem to be Bryan Devendorf, generating beats, and Aaron Dessner, generating melodies. They record these ideas and share the files with one another. Berninger fastens on the ones that suggest melodies he can hum. The words will come later. Scott Devendorf and Bryce Dessner do contribute songwriting ideas, but their largest contributions seem to come when the five of them finally assemble together in the same room and work out how to turn all these interesting fragments into actual songs. It's a band without a real leader, so this is a process that involves a lot of talk, a lot of playing, a lot of experimenting, and a lot of arguing until they discover how it all fits together. It's a process that's led to some rather strange and interesting songs.
And I think maybe this is where I come in. Songs are what I like. I've been writing them for most of my life. Songs are what I'm in it for, songs are what I care about. Even before I discovered rock'n'roll this was true. There were two kinds of music around the house when I was a little wee person - my father's jazz and my mother's folk music, mostly traditional Irish folk tunes, rebel songs and drinking songs. Those were what I went for, from the beginning. It was always songs that I wanted, songs that had words, that told stories, that said things. You could learn them, you could sing them too. That's what always appealed to me, far more than a guy blowing his horn.
Folk songs tend to be very simple in structure - most of the time, they're just a succession of verses. Sometimes they have a chorus, sometimes merely a tag line at the end of the verse, sometimes not even that. (This happens to describe every composition of each of Bob Dylan's first six albums.) By the time I began writing songs I had absorbed the far more sophisticated songwriting of Lennon and McCartney, and everything they'd learned from their American models, Goffin and King in particular. Still, I always knew where I was in a piece of music - this is the intro, this the verse, this the chorus, this the middle eight, this is the coda. But it turns out I also like not knowing.
It's much harder to get a song to hold together without the support of those sturdy structures that are so well-tested - but when it works, it can be magical. Late stage Beatles experimented with this on occasion, in songs as elaborate as "A Day in the Life" or as apparently simple as "Birthday" (never mind "Happiness Is a Warm Gun") but they didn't last long enough as a band to take it much further. Various songwriters have dabbled in these types of song structures - Kate Bush and David Bowie come quickly to mind. But two of the most interesting contemporary artists who are in the same moment performing songs - that is, a discrete musical piece - that make less use of the traditional song structures than usual are Radiohead and The National. While both bands began playing more or less traditional type songs that they had written, as their careers have unfolded the song structures have gotten stranger and stranger. Liam knows much more about Radiohead and how they operate than I do, but I have the impression that their process involves a lot of jamming, with Thom Yorke free associating over top of it, all seasoned by the berserk genius of Jonny Greenwood. The National's process seems to involve assembling a bunch of bits together into some kind of whole, stitching unrelated pieces of cloth into a usable garment. One doesn't always know exactly where one is in one of their songs, except that it's a damn cool place to be.
8. The National (October 2001)
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Berninger arrived more or less fully formed, but the band was still finding itself. Not only had they never played a show; they had yet to give up their day jobs. They certainly didn't seem to realize what an awesome resource they had in drummer Bryan Devendorf, with his remarkable capacity to create grooves out of extremely unusual rhythmic figures (he does do double duty as the cover model.) Bryce Dessner wasn't even a member of the band at this point (he appears as a guest.) The song structures are rather conventional, built around Aaron Dessner's acoustic rhythm playing. It's not bad, not at all - it just doesn't sound even a little like what the band would eventually become. Only two songs - "American Mary" and "Theory of the Crows" - even hint at what they would eventually be capable of.
I'll have nobody left to forget
I guess that's what assholes get
7. Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers (September 2003)
This was a small step forward, but most of it still resembles the debut. It's strange now, but these were the days when the National was regularly described as an Americana band, playing alt-country music, vaguely related to a band like Wilco. There are some interesting developments - "Available" sounds like a song built around one of those early U2 guitar riffs and "Murder Me Rachael" is the first song that sounds like what the National would become. No strumming acoustic guitars there - the track is driven by Devendorf's drumming and the Dessner brothers playing wild, complementary electric guitar parts.
Stiff and pissed and lost and loose
6. Alligator (April 2005)
This was the big step forward, an album regarded by many as the first real National album. It's an outstanding work, but still mostly because of the quality of the material. The band is still not quite as present, as essential to the whole proceeding, as they would eventually be. But they're getting there. From the beginning, The National have had an exquisite understanding of the power that comes from restraint - but restraint is even more powerful when set against its opposite, and this record is the first time they let it loose. It takes a while to get there. We begin with the secret meeting in the basement of Berninger's brain, and tour some of the strange places that always involves - especially good is "Daughters of the Soho Riots," with the inevitable question "how can anybody know how they got to be this way?" Everything comes to a ferocious head on "Abel", as Bryan Devendorf is finally unleashed while Berninger screams, over and over, "my mind's not right." We finish with "Mr November," their first great anthem, a twisted lament for faded glory and the strangest campaign promise ever: "I'm Mr November, I won't fuck us over." And they've arrived.
5. Sleep Well Beast (September 2017)
This seems an effort to make a few different kinds of noises - lead single "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness" features a furious guitar solo (from Aaron Dessner - Bryce usually does most of the lead guitar work, and it's not usually featured on record), the frenzied "Turtleneck" was almost The National doing punk rock, and the title track starts strange and just gets stranger. It's the work of a band just a little worried about repeating themselves, and trying to make sure they didn't fall into that particular rut (that's right - this record is to them what Monster was to REM.) I think it's a little uneven - not all the experiments are entirely successful - and as often happens, a couple of songs would only find their best selves after being taken on the road for a while (especially "Guilty Party," which is perfectly fine on the record but truly remarkable in concert, where the Dessner twins always tend to be more assertive with their guitars.)
Let's just get high enough to see our fathers' houses
4. Boxer (May 2007)
Their first masterpiece. It's still the material that is the star, but the band's importance to the whole continues to grow. It's where I came in, the first record by them I heard. So my introduction to the band was the remarkable "Fake Empire" built on that peculiar piano pattern (a polyrhythm according to Bryce Dessner who wrote it, four over threes) and Berninger mumbling away, occasionally tossing out a lyric that simply makes you sit up straight - "it's hard keeping track of you falling through the sky." Which is what he does all the time, it turns out. Just one great song after another, but "Slow Show" will always be my favourite. Irresistible.
I leaned on the wall and the wall leaned away
Can I get a minute of not being nervous
And not thinking of my dick?
3. High Violet (May 2010)
I seem to regard this as the true full flowering of the band, as a band. It takes a while to get going - the opening "Terrible Love" wouldn't really emerge as a great song until they took it out on performance for a while - the version here is somewhat tentative. But the record simply catches fire about halfway through, with "Afraid of Everyone" and "Bloodbuzz Ohio" and doesn't let up. "Afraid of Everyone" opens with a wheezing harmonium and Sufjian Steven' sighing harmonies as Berninger confesses his fears and how he hopes not to hurt anyone, but there's a problem - "I don't have the drugs to sort it out." A gnarly guitar lick makes its first appearance, the drums kick in, and he vows to defend his family. But he still doesn't have the drugs to sort it out. And everybody slowly goes nuts - the drums, the guitars, and Berninger howling that something has stolen his soul. Simply stunning. "Bloodbuzz Ohio" follows, beginning with Bryan Devendorf pounding his drums and one of Berninger's best, and strangest, stories - it makes no sense at all, and it stays with you. He was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees? Whatever - the real business is "I still owe money to the money to the money I owe." It all concludes with the haunting "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks," which often features as the final encore. The Dessner twins take up stations at opposite ends of the stage strumming acoustics, with all the other musicians standing in between them, singing along. Berninger prowls the centre, off-mic, bawling out the lyrics. It's indescribably weird and completely awesome. Imagine thousands of people singing along with this:
Man, it's all been forgiven
Swans are a' swimming
I'll explain everything to the geeks.
2. Trouble Will Find Me (May 2013)
This takes the template of High Violet and expands on it somewhat. I sometimes think it's slightly uneven - but that's probably just what I think when I'm not actually listening to it. The same way I think it may have too many ballads sharing a similar mood, or that the uptempo songs are not among their best... no, not really. When this music is playing, it draws you in completely. The ballads may sort of share a similar mood - Berninger is always going to be Berninger (the band has positively embraced the Sad Dad tag often hung on them - they actually had t-shirts made.) Still, each track manages to give Berninger a musical setting that sounds unique, each approaches with a musical taste all its own - the electric guitar motifs of "I Need My Girl" and "Fireproof," the piano chords of "Pink Rabbits" and "Heavenfaced." And the uptempo songs are pretty great, too. The opening "I Should Live in Salt" harkens back to the sound of their first two records, with its strummed acoustic guitars, but at a level far beyond what they were capable of back in those early days. And "Don't Swallow the Cap" is one of the greatest songs and recordings they, or anyone else for that matter, has ever made. It's been their show opener of choice ever since. I'm fascinated by the song's structure, and the occasional stunning line that Berninger lets slip along the way ("I need somewhere to be but I can't get around the river in front of me.") It begins with a quick four bar intro that slips into the main verse melody, and Berninger sings a quick verse. Then we get the first pre-chorus: "Everything I love is on the table / everything I love is out to sea." Berninger sings another verse and the pre-chorus again, which is extended this time: "I'm not alone, I'll never be / And to the bone I'm evergreen." We then get a completely new melody for a different kind of verse, ending with "I see a bright white beautiful heaven hanging over me" - and finally we get the complete chorus, going from everything he loves through his not being alone to "if you want to see me cry play Let It Be or Nevermind." But it's a song, of course. Not only do we not know if he wants to hear the Beatles or the Replacements; we also don't know if he's suggesting Nirvana as an alternative or telling us not to bother. Ah, ambiguity! They do this second type of verse again, with a full chorus, and conclude with one of their raveups, with Bryce Dessner torturing his guitar. It's so freaking great.
Careful fear and dead devotion
I can't get the balance right
1. I Am Easy to Find (May 2019)
Made as a kind of collaboration with the film maker Mike Mills, as a companion to his short film of the same title about a woman's life (Alicia Vikander, no less, played the lead and it's her face on the album cover.) Mills contributed song ideas and lyrics as well as the overall vision, and the project took the band to some brand new places. The most significant, obviously, are the many female voices we hear on this record. Until this record, all National songs - like those of pretty well any typical rock band - had been various types of male monologues. Many of those monologues are addressed to women. On this record, the women not only get to sing along - they get to answer back. David Bowie's longtime bandmate Gail Ann Dorsey is the voice most often heard, but Kate Stables, Lisa Hannigan, Eve Owen (daughter of Clive), and Bryce Dessner's wife Mina Tindle (Pauline de Lessus) also feature prominently. Only the gorgeous final track, "Light Years," is a Berninger solo performance. One of the tracks, "Rylan," had been a concert favourite for years without finding its way on to a record. Here it's a duet with Berninger and Kate Stables that seems to be addressed to someone's troubled child: "Is it easy to keep so quiet? / Everybody loves a quiet child." The remarkable "Where Is Her Head" is mostly a duet with Aaron Dessner and Eve Owen, with Berninger interrupting in the middle to complain that he's hitting the wall. And "Not in Kansas"... I don't even know where to begin with this remarkable track. It's absurdly simple for a National song - a repeated sliding riff from Aaron Dessner's guitar and a long intense, absorbing, stunning, recital from Berninger that is at once a tour through childhood memories, an account of spiritual homelessness, a worried look at America today... all these things, and quite a bit more. Into the middle of it all is interpolated a chorus (sung by Dorsey, Hannigan, and Stables) from "Noble Experiment" by the extremely obscure 90s indie band Thinking Fellers Local Union 282 (never heard of them, either!) and then Berninger resumes his strange confession. The same female chorus concludes the track with the assertion that it's time to call an end to this noble experiment, move on from humanity, and find some new creature to be.
In the summer of 2022, with the pandemic sort of behind us, the National went back out on the road. They've let it be known that they're working, in their usual unhurried way, on a new album. Several candidate songs have been regular parts of their current live set, along with the tremendous new single, "Weird Goodbyes." The core five have regularly brought in reinforcements on the road - Ben Lanz and Kyle Resnick have been fixtures in their touring lineup for many years, providing additional keyboards, vocals, and the occasional horn part. Whichever of the many, many singers the members have worked with over the years always seem to be happy to show up and help out if they're in the neighbourhood. And of course the very nature of the songs on I Am Easy to Find required augmenting the band with two women for many of the vocal parts - Kate Stables and Mina Tindle usually assumed this duty on the road. They're a truly great live band - the evidence is all over YouTube, folks - and many of their songs only seem to find their best, ultimate form after being worked over, and over again, in front of an audience.
So I guess I have to go see them, don't I?
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