I suppose it’s an easy enough distillation of reality to say “The National are a rock band”, but it fails to describe the truth and depth. To describe them as just a band represents an injustice; they are, at their core, five friends who became a band almost out convenience, all of them leaving good jobs to make a go at writing and singing songs. Music functioned as a means to release the pressure, to let off the steam from their so-called good jobs, from the ennui implicit to living in a capital world. Their first two records passed by with little more than some attention in the press, and then Alligator got some critical acclaim and sold pretty well, but it was Boxer that resulted in them becoming the beast we see today.
The National are from Cincinnati, but also Brooklyn, and lately from whatever basements of their brains they’ve built with time. Still, their songs continue to be colored by the Ohio River and the long shadows of the Carew and the PNC Towers, but just as much by the Manhattan claustrophobia and the anxious nausea of a Brooklyn life; from the glories of Graeter’s in their hometown to the wild menagerie of cultures that define most of New York, though less so maybe then when they first rippled out of Brooklyn’s dirty rivers.
I didn’t start listening until January, 2009, the dark hum of winter bustling between my ears, trains rumbling in the city distance, and the hidden fears of directionlessness bubbling to the surface of my conscious mind. I possessed certainty about, at most, two things in my life: I would marry in a few months and I loved being close to my brother. As so often happens, the darkness of doubt reveled in me, a tangible thing; I preordered Andrew Bird’s upcoming album Noble Beast and, on a whim, exhausted the rest of my budget to buy Alligator and Boxer. They would, quite literally, be the only albums I played in my car, on my ipod, my cd player, my computer, or any other place, for the rest of the winter. So many impulse decisions change lives and only a few make them better.
I found something in those songs it’s not easy to explain. I could see/hear myself in them, the life that I wanted, the life that was planned for me, the life rainbow-bifurcated paths my life might take. There is a tension between the “what-can-bes” and the “what-will-bes”, inexpressible but comprehensible; The National traffic(ked) here, in that uneasy place, straining with ideas of what it means to be. It’s heavy, for sure, but it’s also light; Berninger writes lines that make us laugh (“ballerina on the coffee table cock in hand”!) and he pokes fun at the absurdity of meaning-making while championing it. It is a serious but funny thing to be alive in this world.
At that time in my life, I took breaks at work, writing stories in notebooks; my habit when writing is to scribble lines, phrases that stick with me or define the direction of my mind. Lyrics from Boxer litter the edges and spaces of my notes from 2009, with poems and stories containing lifted phrases that I’d stolen without awareness. I gave Boxer to at least five friends as gifts, a small portion of my nonexistent, barely-above minimum wage post-college income.
And I kept buying all of their music, whenever I could, going backwards to collect Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers and the eponymous album, the EPs (gods, The Virginia EP still carries breath to my soul), and every bootleg the internet could offer. Matt’s voice continued to soundtrack my literal years with every album – High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me are contenders for favorite albums of all time – becoming something new and different with each successive release. Sleep Well Beast matched the shadowy anxiety and simmering under-hope of the late 2010s, the shows at that time filled with an untouchable and unexplainable fervor. I Am Easy to Find tempered the confusion of aging, and then last year, Frankenstein and Laugh Track gave me a new language to talk about myself.
To get to ecstasy is a beautiful, exhausting thing. To do it again and again and again is sweetly debilitating, a thing that shatters and shapes the resulting shards of self. The weight of carrying others to that ecstatic edge almost every night must take a toll, carry a sense of mania, of insanity. The National grapple with this…interplay, I guess?...across their discography, but it became especially evident in the wake of Frankenstein and Laugh Track. There be monsters, and not unlike the one made by that mad scientist, the intangible-tangible grotesqueries of our wastelands are the uncertainties anxiety, depression, the unholy terror of looming loss, a society so lost in the collective ego it forgets itself. With these records – and maybe these shows – they name and externalize the monsters outside our selves.
The glory of the live show is that we do it together.
Theirs is an oeuvre that beggars passive listening, asking its listeners to attend to the details, the flourishes the playing, the narratives. I wrote earlier that there are moments of musical and lyrical amusement, but I think, ultimately, the truest truths of their songs are Berninger’s offhanded lines, the Dessners’ explorations of static rippling with melody, the Devendorfs’ steady and endless heartbeats announcing themselves in moments of elation. Matt might be the centerpiece, but there’s still a whole fucking meal on the table around him.
Some week ago, I wrote the question, "Why wear the cross?" in an imagined dialogue with my friend Nick. Listening to the National, I keep asking it.
What, then, is the cross? Nothing more than a symbol. And symbols, of course, are the source of all meaning.
There’s a Rainer Marie Rilke poem that I think the National’s oeuvre represents well, called “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”; I imagine every english major or sad poetry kid will shake their head at me for being entirely-too-basic, and I laugh along with you. I think meaning-making is not so complex as we often like to pretend.
Rilke wrote,
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Ah, but the terror and beauty are horrifying things, so often absurd. Just keep going, Rilke says; And to the bone, I’m evergreen, Berninger agrees.
A few more photos below.
Amazing photos!!!!!
Brilliant stuff and what a band!