‘I feel like every year I’m a significantly different person’
Lead singer and songwriter Matt Berninger wants The National to keep making records for a long time, but for the right reasons and on their own terms, he tells Shaun Curran
‘IHAVE to be honest with you,” says The National frontman Matt Berninger when I ask him whether – as he wonders aloud on stream-of-consciousness new song “Not in Kansas” – he does indeed have it in him to punch a Nazi.
“I don’t think so, no,” he finally decides. “I was in a number of fights as a young man and they were traumatic. The violence young boys do to each other is bullshit. Every fight I was ever in, I got really beaten up. One in the seventh grade changed me in a really bad way.”
He takes a breath. “I think I’m non-violent. I’m not non-violent inside my soul sometimes, but I think I know now how to restrain myself physically. But I’m furious. I am filled with rage.”
Fury, rage, violence: these are not feelings in keeping with The National’s reputation as the intellectual doyens of US alternative rock – though they have been known for politicking (they have campaigned for Barack Obama; we’ll get to their ire for Donald Trump later). Their legendary live shows, fraught with kinetic energy, can become blood-and-guts cathartic outpourings – especially now that Berninger has his stage fright under control. “I feel like a powerful monkey up there, an ape that can finally look the humans in the eye.”
Over the course of 20 years and eight albums, with their success reaching Grammy-winning, festival-headlining proportions, the Ohio-born, Brooklyn-formed five-piece – twin guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner and rhythm section brothers Bryan and Scott Devendorf – have perfected a meticulously arranged, melodically lugubrious indie-rock sound that coalesces around Berninger’s deep croon and soul-searching vignettes navigating middle-class angst.
For all the musical proficiency – the classically trained Dessners have a sideline in avantgarde projects – for many, Berninger’s poetic oversharing simply is The National.
“I’ve always thought of it as visual storytelling,” says the 48-year-old former graphic designer. “I think of the architecture in terms of a well-designed poster – a little bit of honest emotion, some stupidity, some recklessness, a little bit of everything that’s swimming in your psyche.”
It makes I Am Easy to Find, the band’s eighth album, the most intriguing and ambitious of their career. The music is an exquisitely orchestrated, expansive mood board of soundscapes and subtle electronics. And, for once, Berninger is a part rather than the whole.
His wife, Carin Besser, his sporadic co-writer since 2007’s Boxer, wrote several of the tracks; the songs feature prominent guest vocalists including Sharon van Etten, Lisa Hannigan and long-time David Bowie cohort Gail Ann Dorsey. The National’s worldview is seen through a female prism.
Furthermore, the record is accompanied by a 24-minute film of the same name, produced by Mike Mills (20th Century Women), which cuts and pastes music from the album to embellish Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander’s portrayal of a woman’s life from birth to death.
At the album’s live premiere in April at London’s Royal Festival Hall, three female singers, including Kate Stables, vied for the attention normally afforded Berninger. At times he lurked in the shadows, redundant at his own sermon. He enjoyed it, he says. “Not having to steer the ship all the time is such a relief. I open my eyes and drink in the room.”
Mills, a National fan, was key. His speculative email asking to make a video for 2017’s Sleep Well Beast led Berninger to send him fragments of unfinished songs. “I felt early on I wanted to trap him into a much bigger commitment.”
Holed away at guitarist Aaron Dessner’s home studio in Long Pond, New York, Mills became an unofficial sixth member, with a role pitched somewhere between producer, muse and, crucially for a band whose internal tensions are never far from the surface, mediator.
“I think sometimes we can be very hard on each other,” says Aaron Dessner. “We have a lot of self-doubt. We ended up doing elaborate things that wouldn’t normally make it on to a National album because we normally grind each other down.”
Such as? “Mike just told us to scrap anything that sounded like what we’d done before. I could never edit Matt’s lyrics even if I wanted to. Matt would kill me. But Mike was able to do that, which was eye-opening for everyone. We’re a democracy, a dysfunctional one, but sometimes it’s helpful to have a higher authority.”
“That’s not true,” Berninger counters. “I would have hurt him. I wouldn’t have killed him.”
The band agreed on a path forward once they’d seen a rough cut of Mills’ film. First, the songs needed to reflect the theme of identity better; second, Berninger’s voice jarred too much with the femininity of Vikander’s performance. A different mode of expression was required.
Berninger relished taking on the film’s central narrative. “It’s about figuring out how to stay yourself but still evolve, which is tough. Especially in marriages and relationships, even with children. You’re never on firm, solid ground, even with your own identity. I think we evolve as adults almost as quickly as children do. I feel like every year I’m a significantly different person. It’s about what makes you ‘you’, and how temporary that is.”
Berninger accepts that people might see an album full of female collaborations as cynical. Regardless, he is amplifying calls for equality. “Men of the world have to be on the #Metoo movement as much as women. We have to recognise and listen and absorb how bad it really is. Trump and the administration have shown how disgusting, sexist and racist the roots of America still are, and the branches, and the leaves. I feel responsible. I couldn’t look my daughter in the eye if I wasn’t out swinging for her.”
For all that the state of the world riles him, Berninger cuts a more settled figure than the maladjusted character he paints in song. Like all members of The National (now scattered across LA, Ohio, NY, Copenhagen and Paris), he is no longer striving and heartbroken, but has a young family – the supposed enemy of creativity. Has he found himself mining deeper for things to write about? “Yes, but it hasn’t been an effort. It’s actually gotten easier. I am aware that I write about the same five or six things over and over again. But it’s like an onion, the more you peel back the layers of an idea about love, marriage, fatherhood, friendship… I never run out of thoughts or emotions about that stuff. The deeper I get, the more honest the emotions are, I guess. Hopefully a little wiser.”
Berninger enjoys writing with Besser, though the process is “intense and emotionally tricky”. Is anything off-limits? “I don’t think there should ever be any limits on the things that go in and out of your brain. You should share those thoughts, even if they’re ugly. Everyone has that shit in their brain. I have that vain, selfish crap swimming in my soul, too.”
It is perhaps this admission, and the willingness to confront it, that has held The National together, despite the impression they’re a band in a state of almost permanent near-collapse.
Berninger wants The National to keep “making records for a long, long time”, but “for the right reasons” and on their own terms. “A lot of the compass is pointed towards our physical health and trying to figure out how to do it right and not become leathery road dogs, bitter, coughing-up-phlegm guys. We don’t want to turn into that. But we are. We feel it.”
Maybe things will be easier on this tour, now he is sharing the spotlight? “Oh, believe me,” Berninger says, “I still hog most of it.” I Am Easy to Find is out now. The National play Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow on 6 and 7 August