For What It's Worth

Just one note - but a note so distinctive, so memorable, so unique that the song is instantly recognizable. How often does that happen?

The note is a harmonic, played by Neil Young on the twelfth fret of the high E string. The player merely touches the string rather than pressing it down to the fretboard, and at certain places on the instrument's neck a tone is generated. A harmonic has tonal qualities and overtones other notes do not have.  And it doesn't decay the way other notes decay - it keeps ringing, sustained and renewed by its own vibration.

That harmonic is the signature of "For What It's Worth," Buffalo Springfield's most famous song. It's a pretty good song - it's a really great record. Stephen Stills wrote it in response to the Sunset Strip curfew riots ("the hippie riots") of November 1966. It's hardly worthy of being remembered as a riot - this same city had seen the Watts riots just a year earlier - but it was certainly a large demonstration in response to measures by the city administration clearly aimed at closing down the emerging rock clubs like the Whiskey a Go Go and Pandora's Box. Stills actually sounds pretty matter-of-fact about the whole thing, almost neutral ("nobody's right if everybody's wrong"), but it's that same noncommittal  detachment of his vocal that gets the song across.

Stills and Young are what we first notice and they're what we most remember, but it's the other three who really make this the great record it is. Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin find a deep, deep groove in these two chords - Palmer, in some sad ways the Syd Barrett of the bass guitar, is phenomenal. And it's Richie Furay's performance as the lead harmony singer that brings the real urgency to the record, along with the winding guitar lines spinning out of Young over the second half of the song. 

The San Francisco scene may have been more celebrated and more notorious, and it has always loomed larger in 60s mythology. But Los Angeles certainly had as many great bands - the Byrds, the Doors, Mothers of Invention, Love - and they definitely made more great records. And Buffalo Springfield should have been the best of them all. The very idea of the band was almost too good to be true.  Stephen Stills and Neil Young were already accomplished, distinctive songwriters and guitarists. Richie Furay was a wonderful singer with tremendous stage presence, and Stills was pretty good himself. And Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin made up what was by far the finest rhythm section of any American band - no one else came close. 

It didn't happen, of course, and it was probably never going to happen. Neither Stills nor Young are cut out to collaborate with anyone - Stills is so insecure that he has a desperate need to be in charge, to take control of every situation he finds himself in. Young, far more passive-aggressive, simply does whatever he likes and chances are it's going to be something very different six months down the road. It held together for less than a year. They had enough time to build a reputation as a sensational live act, find professional management, and get a recording contract. 

It all went south from there. Their management-production team botched the recording of their first album. Bruce Palmer kept getting arrested and deported. He would sneak back into the country, get busted and deported again, and sneak back in again. Neil Young had trouble coping with his first brush of public notoriety. The stress of it all provoked his first epileptic fits, which put him in hospital and would plague (and terrify) him for the next several years. He soon embarked on his own course of erratic behaviour - quitting the band, coming back, quitting again.  They managed to make a second record, which is rightly regarded as their masterpiece, and it is indeed one of the great albums of 1967 - but the band is only fully present on one song, Young's "Mr Soul," with the rest of the album was made by various partial configurations of the band.

The legend - Ahmet Ertegun, no less, said they were "the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none" - of their live shows lives almost entirely in legend. There are a few bootlegs. Inevitably for audience recordings from 1967, these are of pretty poor sound quality. Moreover, they are all from the band's final weeks, after Palmer had drifted into the ozone and Young had come and gone and come back multiple times. Nothing appears to have survived from what everyone remembers as their peak, when they were blowing everyone away at the Whiskey in the summer of 1966.

It was probably always too good to be true.

Dreaming

 I dreamt I was back in high school, or something very much like it. As you can imagine, it was an enormous relief to wake up and escape.

People I know do inhabit my dreams, but they always seem two-dimensional somehow. Even those closest to me, who I've known the longest, in "real life." But it's as if I'm not encountering the actual person, just the limited representation that is my own mere perception of them. It's the people I've never met who seem exactly as real as they ever were - the ones where all I ever knew was my own partial understanding, from books or media.

David Bowie: The Cracked Actor

There's a Starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us

Oh, he was a thing of wonder. So noble in reason, so infinite in faculty, in form and moving so express and admirable. An angel in action, a god in apprehension. The paragon of rock stars. While there were certainly other artists in the 1970s, from Bob Dylan to the Clash, who made records as good as Bowie's best work, no one (with the possible exception of Neil Young) comes close to matching his overall achievement during that decade- its breadth and variety, its daring and ingenuity. He didn't think he'd blow our minds. He knew.

He recognized no barriers. He simply shattered them when he didn't disregard them entirely. Small, petty things that could not possibly contain him. It was one thing to be a rock'n'roll star before Bowie. It was something very different afterwards. Lennon and McCartney had set out the initial terms of the discussion. McCartney's conception of stardom was more traditional, rooted in the role the entertainer in general and that of the musician in particular. It was Lennon who pointed the way toward something more ambitious - the rock'n'roll star as complete social icon, relevant to politics and morality as well as art, a full cultural representation. It was Bowie, even more than Mick Jagger, that took these possibilities further. Bowie took them as far as they could go, unburdened by Jagger's irony and cynicism (and free as well of Jagger's deep, deep roots in a specific musical tradition.) Bowie changed everything. Look out, you rock and rollers.

As a matter of social import, Bowie's claim in Melody Maker way back in 1972 that he was "gay and always had been" needs to be noted. It probably slowed his acceptance into the American mainstream, but it was both very brave (Elton John, who really is gay, didn't come out officially until the late 1980s) and very meaningful. Granted, it wasn't particularly true in Bowie's case, but that's not what matters.  It was part of his positioning himself as something alien, as some kind of freak - and it is impossible to overestimate how much that meant to every young misfit adrift in a world that didn't seem too welcoming. You're not alone, no matter what or who you've been. His fans recognized Bowie as a fellow misfit, a kindred spirit, but one who was clearly fully comfortable in his own weird skin. Quite aware of what he was going through. It was a crucial part of his appeal to so many. All this went right past me, a very different kind of misfit. But he had the songs to back it all up. Oh, he had the songs. And his songs came from a place like no other.

Bowie was not someone who dealt in truths. That's what seems especially important to me. The early 1970s had seen a glut of singer-songwriters baring their souls, providing slices of their real lives, expressing themselves.  Bowie was not baring his soul and he didn't have much to say about real life. He was not interested in authenticity, not one little bit. In the rock music world of  the day, this was almost revolutionary. Bowie was interested in concepts, and in role-playing, and he moved from one to the next as easily as he changed costume or hairstyle, much faster than anyone could keep up. 

He was always very aware of how much he owed, as a musician, and he was extraordinarily generous in paying it back. As he was finishing Ziggy Stardust, the record that would catapult him to international stardom, he learned that Mott the Hoople, a band he admired, were on the verge of breaking up. Bowie donated a great song - "All the Young Dudes" - and then produced the album that saved their career. He promptly moved on to work with that most difficult and irascible of his idols, Lou Reed. Bowie produced Transformer, and actually succeeded in getting Lou Reed a hit song, played on the radio and everything. And after that he rescued Iggy Pop, who was living on the streets and shooting heroin. Bowie produced Raw Power, Iggy's comeback, and a few years later, he would help Iggy write two albums and do service as his bandleader and keyboard player.

He was a Londoner, born David Jones in January 1947, and he kept his birth name all his life. It's what he signed on his contracts, it's the name of the man who married Iman. He had only adopted the stage name of David Bowie to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees.  He had begun his musical career in the usual way, playing in a succession of London bands. Like all the other UK musicians of his day, he was playing music based on American models - he played in a blues band (the mind boggles) and his infatuation with modern jazz led him to take up the saxophone, which he would toot on at various points throughout his career. But he was also a huge fan of Anthony Newley, who was a bit of a strange one himself. Newley's largely forgotten in North America today, although he was for a time a big success on Broadway and several of his songs have found their way into the Great American Songbook. 

One of the things that was especially distinctive about Newley, and would prove to be distinctive about Bowie as well, was the simple act of retaining his London accent as he sang. Mick Jagger certainly did no such thing. Newley did it because he was playing a London character on stage - Bowie, one has to assume, did it mainly because he admired Newley. The only other significant UK rock singer allowing his native accent to be heard was Ray Davies of the Kinks - but the Kinks were literally locked out of America at the time, and Davies was also intensely interested in a specifically English type of nostalgia, as well as some specifically English musical styles. 

Bowie, of course, was different. He never had much use for nostalgia - nostalgia is always personal and Bowie was seldom personal. And while Bowie occasionally dabbled in the English music hall tradition, his music always owed more to American (later continental) musical forms. Retaining his accent while singing rock'n'roll, which had always been an American musical form, placed an inevitable distance between the music and the performer. As if he were an alien. It's something he managed simply by being himself, which is a very neat trick indeed.  It made his work a performance rather than an expression. 

Because his work so often has little relation to real life, it's left him with a strange musical legacy. The greatness of his music, which is considerable, is almost unmusical in important ways. His songs, great as so many of them are, still seldom stand apart from the context and the concept that Bowie provided for them (very few of them have prompted cover versions.) He was an effective enough singer, he always found outstanding players to work with, but his work always depends on the concept of the moment. It's not whether the concept is clever, or if it even makes any sense, but rather the use the artist makes of it. Does this particular mask - because it was almost always a mask - work for him? It didn't always work, but when it did there was nothing else like it. He broke through somehow, he communicated things, in ways and on levels simply not available to other artists. Well, if he says he can do it, he can do it. He don't make false claims.

In the end, sometimes it seems it's as if there is no real David Bowie, no central self to fall back on, no artist presiding over this wild and mutable canvas. There is instead a magpie-like creature roaming the rock universe like a cuckoo, alighting here and there, planting its eggs in the oddest places, singing songs first heard by other creatures, making them his own. 

Except that's not really true, either. In fact, every conclusion one arrives at with regard to David Bowie ends up stumbling in the face of his infinite variety. Every time you think he was like this... you have to acknowledge that  no, he wasn't, not really. He confounds any attempt to categorize, or even describe him. He really did contain multitudes. 

And lots of hazy cosmic jive, too. We'd be nowhere without that.

25. David Bowie (June 1967)

He was barely 20 years old when his debut album was released. This isn't rock'n'roll, not even close. It 's more like a cross between Anthony Newley and the traditional music hall, with some fairy tale whimsy tossed in. Most of this sounds so conventional, so positively old-fashioned that it's a little startling to hear that voice delivering it all. The Brits have a word for this sort of thing - it's twee. The concluding "Please Mr Gravedigger" does provide a touch of the bizarre. But this is of historical interest only. He didn't really know who or what he was, or what he would be capable of. 

Just look through your window
Look who sits outside
Little me is waiting

24. Never Let Me Down (April 1987)

Bowie wasn't the only great artist to lose his way in the 1980s, the decade that music forgot. Bob Dylan sends his greetings! Neil Young and Paul McCartney would also like a word. Bowie had already had enough interesting ideas for several lifetimes, but by this time the well had run quite dry. All that was left were some not-very-interesting songs. Bowie mounted the notorious Glass Spider tour in support, an enormously elaborate undertaking -dancers, spoken word segments, videos, all manner of stage props. It made for an impressive show, but it all laboured under the burden of the 1980s music that made up the bulk of the setlist. At this point, Bowie put his career on hold and joined a band.

I got a bad migraine
That lasted three long years
And the pills that I took
Made my fingers disappear

23. Tonight (September 1984)

Bowie was running out of ideas by this time. This has just two new songs, although both of them are quite good. The rest of the record is made of covers. He's practically covering himself in some cases, as two of the songs, including the title duet with Tina Turner, were first heard on his second record with Iggy Pop. One suspects that most of his imagination, energy, and effort went into the 20 minute film he devised for "Blue Jean," but it's a pretty cool film and the song is by far the best thing on the record. OK, it's really just an insubstantial piece of fluff, but it's a really great piece of fluff.

Remember 
they always let you down when you need 'em

22. Earthling (February 1997)

After the commercial failure of Outside (his poorest sales since his 1966 debut), this was perceived to be Bowie trying to find a way back into the contemporary music world. Twenty years earlier, he had simply carved out his own place, armed only with his considerable talent and his infinite audacity. The best tracks - the opening "Looking For Satellites" and "I'm Afraid of Americans" would have been solid deep cuts on a better record. The rest simply isn't very interesting. He's trying. He's just not getting anywhere. It is, in fact, just a little dull and there's an adjective that has seldom fitted Bowie.

As lonely as a moon
Misty and far away

21. David Bowie (November 1969)

His second solo album, with the same title as his first, but a very different piece of work. This is the album best known for "Space Oddity," and why wouldn't it be? It towers far above everything else here. Bowie had written the song some months earlier, and someone had the bright idea of putting it out to coincide with the first moon landing. The BBC, despite the unhappy fate of Major Tom, actually adopted the tune as theme music to their coverage of the great event. It gave Bowie his first UK hit. The song was essentially banned by US radio stations, but three years later, after Ziggy Stardust had made him famous, an RCA reissue made it his first US hit as well. The album sank without a trace, but it definitely has its moments - the disheveled rock of "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" is kind of fun, the sprawling, epic "Cygnet Committee" is fascinating and "Memory of a Free Festival" casts a desperately cold eye on the failures of hippiedom. The writing is improving, getting much more interesting indeed, but it's all very much hit-or-miss. At least we're done with the music hall whimsy of his debut. This music is all based on Bowie's own acoustic 12-string and his always eccentric chord selections, which imposes quite a few limitations on where he could go musically. He's supported by a rhythm section and occasional electric guitars. What he really needed was a band. And some better songs. His next album would have both, and then some.

And we can force you to be free
And we can force you to believe

20. Black Tie White Noise (April 1993)

In the six years since his last record, Bowie had formed a band (Tin Machine) and made a couple of dull records with them. He'd met and married Iman Abdulmajid, and after a lifetime of endless sexual adventure, settled happily into married life. His next move was - to get back. He dissolved Tin Machine, and attempted to find a place between the commercial dance music of his 1980s records and the genre experiments that had preceded them. A couple of his oldest collaborators joined in one track apiece - Mike Garson, whose piano had been such a large part of Aladdin Sane, and Mick Ronson, who hadn't played with Bowie in almost two decades. Two of the tracks are instrumental, and much of the music is generally driven by Bowie's own saxophone and the far more adept trumpet of Lester Bowie (no relation.) Four of the songs are covers, and eccentric selections they are  - a track from Morrissey's latest album, an old Walker Brothers tune (Bowie admired Scott Walker every bit as much as he admired Anthony Newley), an old Cream tune, and a translation of an Arabic piece he found in Iman's music collection (the singer turned out to be a friend of hers.) He recorded it as a wedding gift (and indeed, several of his songs sound like additional wedding gifts.) It's a pretty lively record, one that sounds like a serious attempt to rediscover his voice as an artist, but he hadn't quite settled on how and where he wanted to go. The good news is that he sounds like he's trying at least. Even if he isn't really  succeeding.

My friend don't listen to the crowd
They say 'jump'
Got to believe somebody

19. Outside (September 1995)

Back to the scene of the crime - a sprawling (75 minutes) concept record set in a post-apocalyptic, technological society. It builds upon a Bowie short story set in the near future and having something to do with "art crimes." Six of the tracks are brief (two minutes or less) segues helping to advance what passes for a plot, leaving 13 pieces we might regard as "songs" of a sort. It continues his collaboration with guitarist Reeves Gabrels of Tin Machine and reunites him with both Mike Garson and Brian Eno. It's defiantly experimental, defiantly non-commercial, and something of a mixed bag - a little bit like the Berlin era soundscapes colliding with industrial noise. I think it's one of those records that's a little easier to admire than to enjoy, but I don't think it's ever dull. And if nothing else, this certainly brings back the old weirdness.

And there is no hell
Like an old hell

18. Let's Dance (April 1983)

A new career in a new town? After a decade with RCA, Bowie switched labels and did his best to give EMI/America a hit. He teamed up with an American hitmaker, Nile Rodgers of Chic, and delivered this extremely slick piece of product. The role he's playing here is David Bowie, Big Pop Star. It landed somewhere between dance music and the New Romanticism that was emerging as the next big thing in the UK.  "China Girl" was Bowie, for the first time, remaking one of the songs he'd written with Iggy Pop (it had first appeared in 1977 on The Idiot.)  Bowie added some cute backup vocals that took a lot of the edge out of the song, which he sang with rather cool detachment (Iggy gets positively frightening in the second half of the original record;) Bowie also remade his own theme song for the film "Cat People" and managed to take a lot of the menace out of that as well. But people bought it. He got three huge hit singles, and the Serious Moonlight Tour was very well received - Bowie with a shock of blond hair, in exquisitely tailored suits, belting out his hits like any other big pop star.

It's not really work
It's just the power to charm
I'm still standing in the wind

17. Hours (September 1999)

This would be the final installment of Bowie's long partnership with guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who has always struck me as a kind of low-budget Robert Fripp (i.e., all of Fripp's skill and weirdness but lacking Fripp's inspired, unpredictable, genius.) The album's emphasis on songs rather than sound may itself  indicate how the two men were heading different directions, although all ten songs are Bowie-Gabrels co-writes. The songs themselves aren't up to the standards of Bowie's best past work, but most of them are quite likeable and the whole thing seems like a step in the right direction. As if the artist is beginning to remember what he's good at doing.

My heart was never broken
My patience never tried

16. Pin Ups (October 1973)

Bowie clearly liked covering songs by other people - fully half his albums of original music contain at least one cover, and he was even willing to cover himself on more than one occasion, remaking songs he'd originally recorded with Iggy Pop. Strangely enough though, he didn't really have much of a gift for it. His covers are regularly the least interesting tracks on the albums on which they appear. Pin Ups was Bowie's third album release in sixteen months, and it's composed entirely of favourite 1960s tunes from various UK bands. The Spiders play them with admirable ferocity, but much of the time one doesn't quite see the point. The songs are too famous, the original versions are too iconic. Try as they might, Bowie and the Spiders aren't going to improve on the Who, the Kinks, Yardbirds, the Easybeats, Them, or Pink Floyd. They don't even bring much of anything new to it all. The album is worthwhile mainly for its take on forgotten obscurities by the Pretty Things and the Merseys.

Won't you tell me
Where have all the good times gone?

15. Heathen (June 2002)

Bowie was living mostly in New York by now. Reeves Gabrels was no longer part of his musical support group, but a figure from his past had returned to the fold. Tony Visconti hadn't worked with Bowie since Scary Monsters and the two men had barely spoken in twenty years. Reconciled at last, they marvelled over how the other had grown and changed over the years before Visconti took up both his original job as bass player as well as his longtime role as co-producer, positions he would maintain for the rest of Bowie's life. The two men were joined in the core band by the progressive jazz guitarist David Torn and veteran session drummer Matt Chamberlain. The material is a little uneven. I definitely don't see the point of two of the covers (especially Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting For You") and I've always found Bowie's deep-voiced crooner an irritating vocal tic that spoils "Sunday," the otherwise fine opening track. On the other hand, the good tracks are really freaking good - I would single out "A Better Future," and the back-to-back punches of  "Slow Burn" and "Afraid" where we hear Bowie rocking harder than he's ever done  without the participation of Mick Ronson, now ten years in his grave (and not part of Bowie's musical crew for more than twenty-five years.) Yeah, I think we all forgot Bowie could do that, too. I'd credit the special guest star on guitar on "Slow Burn" - none other then Pete Townshend - but Townshend hasn't played like this in twenty-five years either. The record gets stronger the deeper you go into it, and the second half of it is - yup - the best thing he'd done since Scary Monsters.

These are the days
These are the strangest of all
These are the nights
These are the darkest to fall

14. Young Americans (Mar 1975)

No 1970s rock star had a greater mystique, inspired more actual reverence among his peers, than John Lennon. Not even Bowie could resist the spell. It was doubtless Lennon's presence and willingness to play guitar that prompted the quite lamentable cover of "Across the Universe" we get here. This album in its time seemed like the most radical change of direction possible - the weirdo from outer space crooning Philadelphia soul music? Really? He hadn't demonstrated any interest in this type of music before, and doesn't reveal much affinity for it here. Bowie also seems to have assumed that writing an interesting lyric somehow violated the spirit of this type of music, and so did his best not to violate that rule. A key reason the record doesn't really work is because Bowie simply isn't the type of singer that fits this kind of material. Bowie always approaches a song as an actor playing a role. This is just about the exact opposite of what soul singers usually do. And after a while, David Sanborn's extremely distinctive style on the sax gets pretty tiresome. But the album did produce two triumphs - the closing "Fame," dreamed up in the studio by Bowie, Lennon, and Carlos Alomar was a piece of funk so irresistible that James Brown himself would copy it. Yes, folks - James Brown copying David Bowie's funk move. The mind reels in disbelief. And finally, the opening title track is absolutely stunning. Every now and then - not very often, maybe once every few years or so - Bowie would peel away his masks to reveal a heart so full of compassion and sympathy that it compels awe. This was one of those times. One of his very greatest songs.

We live for just these twenty years
Do we have to die for the fifty more?

13. Reality (September 2003)

Continuing to work with Tony Visconti, Reality sounds like the work of a man who knows he has fully recovered his form and is beginning to get a little cocky about it. He sounds downright frisky, delivering what is mostly a set of energetic rock music with the vigour of a man half his age - highlights are the opening "New Killer Star" and "Looking For Water." The one ballad, "The Loneliest Guy" is probably the least effective track but the extremely twisted finale "Bring Me the Disco King" more than makes up for it. Both tracks feature Mike Garson's unique piano stylings. And wonder of wonders, even the two cover songs sound great and don't get in the way of the proceedings. But on the European tour in support of this album, Bowie had a major health scare, and went quietly - very quietly, there was no announcement, he still turned up in public on occasion - into semi-retirement. And after a while, we all came to the conclusion that this would turn out to be his swan song. We should have known better. For one thing, this sounds nothing at all like an artist saying goodbye, and Bowie would never (as he would ultimately prove)  pass up the opportunity afforded by such an occasion.

I got a better way
I discovered a star

12. Low (January 1977)

Bowie's immediate priority in the moment was personal rather than musical - he wanted to escape Los Angeles and free himself of the drug addiction that he knew to be destroying his sanity. He had moved to France with Iggy Pop, who was in much the same predicament,  and the two wrote and recorded Iggy's first solo album, The Idiot. With Iggy's record completed, the sessions continued, moving on to Bowie's next project. (That's right, the first installment of Bowie's famous "Berlin trilogy" was mostly recorded in France.) Side one has five short, quirky songs bookended by a pair of rather cheerful instrumentals. Brian Eno arrived about halfway through the proceedings and helped shape the ambient instrumentals that make up all of the second side. Bowie would make use of Eno's famed Oblique Strategies over the next couple of years, as a way of forcing a decision and identifying a path to follow. (The Strategies are a deck of cards each of which bears a cryptic suggestion, such as "Honour thy error as a hidden intention." or "Work at a different speed" that one may adopt, or not, as a way to move forward.) There are people who have suggested that Low, which is certainly a very fine record, represents the peak of Bowie's achievement. That goes much too far. It's been an enormously influential work, but it's a fairly minor piece of the Bowie canon. It's still quite a bit more than a likeable detour - it's the search in real time for his next new direction, one that would be explored in much more depth on the two records that followed. It would all eventually position the artist for the revisionist reboot of Scary Monsters, which now functions as a kind of summary of his decade.

I will sit right down

Waiting for the gift of sound and vision

11. Diamond Dogs (May 1974)

This is an album stranded between two concepts. Bowie had wanted to make a musical based on Orwell's 1984 but couldn't get permission from the author's estate, so he simply incorporated some of his song ideas for that project into the bleak, dystopian, post-apocalyptic nightmare that was his other big idea. Bowie had ditched the Spiders From Mars, and assigned himself guitar duties. On the one hand, this was tragic - the late great Mick Ronson was the best lieutenant he would ever have. On the other hand, Bowie himself came up with the fabulous lick that drives "Rebel Rebel," one of his very greatest songs. Decadence and decay is very much the theme of the record, and Bowie's ragged electric guitar is actually a pretty good fit. Side one is superb from start to finish and if Bowie had been able to maintain that level all the way through this record would rank much higher. Alas,  the back half of the record loses its way most of the time, although "1984" is pretty great.

With you by my side, it should be fine
We'll buy some drugs and watch a band
Then jump in the river holding hands

10. Lodger (May 1979)

More than eighteen months had passed since "Heroes," his last record of original music - an enormous interval by the standards of 1970s Bowie, although he had issued a live placeholder in the meantime.  Bowie does a bit of recycling here - he'd had "Boys Keep Swinging" around for years before recording this version, and "Red Money" actually uses the backing track of "Sister Midnight" he'd recorded years earlier with Iggy Pop on The Idiot.  It's a transitional record, perched between the new song forms developed on the Berlin albums and the forthcoming summing-up that is Scary Monsters. Bowie is moving back towards more conventional rock music and away from the experiments in pure sound and noise - but just a little. These are very weird songs, and suggest a very twisted vision of pop music indeed.

Feeling like a shadow
Drifting like a leaf

9. The Next Day (March 2013)

Out of a clear blue sky, after almost ten years of silence, Bowie dropped this on a world that was not expecting to ever hear from him again. As if he'd never been away, picking up right where he left off. Because this album feels quite a bit like Reality, its predecessor. It too is an album of energetic rock music - it's just better. The songs are easily his strongest bunch in decades - well, he did take almost a full decade assembling them - and the production is quite a bit cleaner.  Bowie's fondness for noise had often got in the way to some extent on much his post-Tin Machine output, which can often sound a bit cluttered. The songs could occasionally get lost beneath all the stuff that was happening around them. I have to single out the gorgeous "Where Are We Now" and the storming hard rock of "Set the World on Fire," which wouldn't have been out of place on the next album in this list.

We will never be rid of these stars
But I hope they live forever

8. The Man Who Sold the World (November 1970)

He needed a band, and did he ever get one. Drummer John Cambridge and bassist Tony Visconti had both played on Bowie's second album, which Visconti had co-produced. Now Cambridge went up to Hull to recruit a guitar player he knew, a chap named Mick Ronson. (This crucial work achieved, Cambridge drops out, replaced by Mick Woodmansey.) Ronson, of course, was a miracle - a marvellously inventive and powerful guitar player who could also fill in on keyboards, and schooled enough to sit down and compose the perfect string arrangement if one was needed. They formed a ferocious rock'n'roll unit, and Bowie's songwriting took a quantum leap with these players able to give life and energy to his weird concoctions. After his lightweight debut, and the folk-rock stylings of his second album, he burst forth with some of the hardest and heaviest rock he would ever play. Kurt Cobain would one day make the title track famous, but the real great stuff is on the other side, especially the opening epic "Width of a Circle" in which Ronson instantly stakes his claim to being a legend himself. This is Bowie's first great record, although in its day it mostly sank without a trace. For some weird reason it was issued in the US - where Bowie had no commercial presence whatsoever - six months ahead of its UK release. The interval did give Bowie a chance to replace the original US artwork seen above (that's the one I had!), which he hated, with a picture of himself reclining on a couch wearing a full-length dress.

And I'd rather play here
With all the madmen
For I'm quite content they're all as sane as me

7. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (September 1980)

Why... this is just a collection of songs, with nothing in the way of an idea behind it. It doesn't represent any stylistic change, it doesn't serve some particular concept. That might be standard operating procedure for other artists, but not this one. Bowie without a concept is Bowie working without a net. It's held together by a kind of conjuror's trick - not the force of the artist's personality so much as the force of the artist's image. What was rather shocking is how much it sounded like the same old Bowie - it didn't seem to chart any new and different musical directions, it just provided a nice sampling of the sort of things we'd already heard from this artist. And that's the trick - it's Bowie music. And it's a really strong collection of songs. Bowie even got two hits out of it and it had been a while since he'd had an actual hit. Both tracks are exceptional. "Fashion" is an irresistibly catchy and truly weird goof of a song and "Ashes to Ashes" is utterly chilling and extremely hummable. 

Time and again I tell myself
I'll stay clean tonight

We should take a moment here to note a one-off single Bowie did with Queen the summer after this was released. Both artists happened to be working in the same Swiss studio, and they put together a song based on a demo by Queen drummer Roger Taylor, anchored on a bass riff from Queen's John Deacon (who always credited Bowie with the riff - what seems to have happened is Deacon forgot the original riff, and Bowie refreshed his memory.) Queen was an interesting band, and they definitely made some memorable music but I don't believe anything they did, ever, or anything else Bowie did in the 1980s, can even approach "Under Pressure."

Love’s such an old-fashioned word
and love dares you to care for
the people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way
Of caring about ourselves
This is our last dance

6. "Heroes" (October 1977)

The second album in his Berlin trilogy, and in one important way it resembles his second album - one song is so great that it seems to tower above everything else here. That would of course be the title track, led by Robert Fripp's indelible, unforgettable guitar part (played without an E-bow!) and what might be the most passionate vocal of Bowie's entire career. But this is an exceptionally strong album as a whole, taking the template set out by Low and simply doing it better. The songs on the first side are not just more developed musically than those on the preceding album - they're quite a bit more substantial as well.  I also like the experiments and soundscapes on the second side better - they also seem more fully developed than their predecessors on Low. It's a little unfortunate that such great tracks as "Sons of the Silent Age" and "Beauty and the Beast" aren't better known, but the title track does have a magnificence that overwhelms everything in its vicinity. It's  hard to even think of anything else after standing by that wall.

I can remember standing by the wall
And the guns shot above our heads
And we kissed as though nothing could fall
And the shame was on the other side

5. Aladdin Sane (April 1973)

In retrospect, I think the frantic pace of the previous eighteen months was beginning to tell. In the ten months since the release of Ziggy Stardust in June 1972, Bowie had produced Lou Reed's Transformer, and then Iggy and the Stooges Raw Power. Both albums were recorded in London while Bowie was also performing numerous shows with the Spiders all up and down the UK. In September, he set out on his first extended US tour, with the band augmented by the avant-garde jazz pianist Mike Garson. Bowie wrote most of the songs for this next album during that American trek. It was his first close-up experience of America, and it's where he picked up the beginnings of what would soon become a heavy cocaine habit. Garson's very distinctive keyboard stylings drive two of the better tracks,  the title cut and "Time." The songs vary quite a bit in quality, meaning the record isn't as consistent overall as its two brilliant predecessors. But that general sense of being frayed was somehow the point. No one knew except the artist, but it was the sound of something ending. When his tour wrapped up at London's Hammersmith Odeon a few months later, he announced from the stage (to the shock and surprise of most of the band) that it was the last show they would ever do. And it was. The Spiders were gone forever. He had to break up the band.

Perhaps you're smiling now
Smiling through this darkness
But all I had to give was guilt for dreaming

4. Blackstar (January 2016)

Bowie died two days after issuing this album - I remember spending those two days listening to the record and thinking how fully intact, how perfectly preserved his voice and his abilities still seemed as he approached his 70th year. I had no idea, of course. No one did. His death created a whole new context for the world to hear this record, but the record deserved that context. Bowie knew he was dying while he created this music. It's an almost unprecedented situation for an artist. Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash both knew the end was coming for them sooner than later, but they didn't actually know much more than that. Only Warren Zevon's The Wind truly comes from an artist in a similar circumstance, and Zevon's record feels like one last roundup, of the old themes and haunts, one last walk around the park before the lights go out. Bowie's farewell is something else entirely. He turned his death sentence into an opportunity to go where no one had gone before. It gave him one last, great concept to build his music around and he didn't miss his chance. Bowie was always most himself when he was not being himself, and he knew himself to be a dying man - but here he was, still living, still breathing, still working. Still strong enough to play at being a dying man. While he was dying.  It was cold and it rained and he felt like an actor. Structurally, the album very much resembles Station to Station - both albums open with the lengthy, sprawling title track, which turns out to be very unlike the rest of the music. The songs here are dominated by the very busy drums of  Mark Guiliana and Denny McCaslin's honking saxophone - jazz players not really to my taste, but the songs are quite good anyway. The title track is fabulous indeed - an epic in two parts, beginning like some strange invocation to the far beyond and turning round completely into a strangely tuneful, strangely mournful statement of... something or other. But the emotional centre of the record is the awesome "Lazarus", spooky, relentless, and overwhelming. And then he was gone, king of oblivion.

Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a metre then stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried

3. Station to Station (January 1976)

It's probably not really the side effects of the cocaine we get here, but certainly the white powder had quite taken over Bowie's life. It hadn't slowed him down, but cocaine doesn't slow you down. It does lots of other things, but it doesn't slow you down. This music is situated somewhere between where he had been - the Philly soul stylings of Young Americans - and where he was going - the synth based Krautrock and ambient sounds of the "Berlin trilogy." There are only six tracks - each vinyl side closed with a melodramatic, sweeping ballad. Three tracks, including the hit single "Golden Years" and the wonderfully bizarre "TVC-15" are a kind of soul music played by androids. And the sprawling title track is one of Bowie's greatest achievements, beginning with a full two minutes of machine noise, forcing itself into forward motion like the slow and uncertain steps of some grotesque monster awkardly coming to life, but ultimately achieving the headlong momentum of a runaway train completely out of control. An amazing piece of work.  Bowie would later confess he had no memory at all of about two whole years there in the mid 1970s, including the making of this album. 

Should I believe that I've been stricken?
Does my face show some kind of glow?

2. Hunky Dory (December 1971)

An absolute, wall-to-wall masterpiece. There were minor changes to the band - Tony Visconti was gone for the moment, replaced on bass by Trevor Bolder. Rick Wakeman, then with the Strawbs but moonlighting as a session player, played keyboards. Bowie had written many of the songs on piano. and a truly remarkable batch of songs they were. The songs of the first side of the vinyl were mostly based on Wakeman's piano - as well as the eternal Bowie anthem "Changes" we should mention the misfit's anthem "Oh You Pretty Things" and the magnificent, sweeping "Life on Mars?" with Mick Ronson's brilliant orchestral score (and some very fine guitar licks as well.) The guitars come more to the fore on the second side, in which Bowie pays homage to several key heroes - Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and Lou Reed - before closing with the spooky, harrowing "Bewlay Brothers." Just an awesome, lasting achievement, a record that sounds every bit as fresh, as wonderful, and as original today, more than fifty years after it was made.

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
They're immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through

1. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (June 1972)

There's always been a temptation, I think, to settle on some other Bowie record as his greatest work. For no good reason that I can see- just because. Probably because nominating Ziggy simply seems too obvious or something. But resistance is futile. This is the one, folks. It's the one that made him a star, the one that made him immortal, the one that made him unforgettable. Ziggy is undeniable, the way the end of the world is undeniable. There's nothing you can do about it. There's a concept (of course), and it's batshit crazy (of course) - humanity is doomed to extinction, with a fixed expiry date just five years away - and a rock star swoops down from outer space to... it's not clear, besides be a star and be destroyed by it all. No matter. It's startling to find so many great songs in one place. From the haunted, shell-shocked opening of "Five Years" to the numb desperation of "Rock'n'Roll Suicide." The brute power, and wild humour of "Moonage Daydream" and "Suffragette City."  And oh my heaven - the timeless, glittering, inspiring "Starman" (added at the last moment, with the octave jump in the chorus deliberately pinched from "Over the Rainbow.") Simply glorious. An amazing collection of songs, played with passion and purpose by an artist and band at the peak of their powers, and all beautifully recorded to boot. And nothing would ever be the same afterwards. One of the greatest records ever made. Then, now, forever.

Look out your window

I can see his light

If we can sparkle

he may land tonight

Every Document's Indelible: The National

The glory of it all

was lost on me

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)

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.

And if I forget you
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. 

Forgive me, girls, I am confused
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.

You were right about the end

It didn't make a difference

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 problems
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.

Looking for somewhere to stand and stay
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:

Vanderlyle, cry baby cry
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.

I have only two emotions
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. 

I raked the leaves and I started fires

Now I read whatever you give me

It's half your fault, so half-forgive me

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?