The issue with the National is that I, a trans lesbian in my early twenties, should realistically not enjoy the music of a bunch of painfully straight fourty-something former young professionals from Ohio as much as I do. It’s far more conventional indie-rock than I normally go for, far too prone to U2-isms, far too heterosexual. I should by no means find this sad dad band to frequently be the most painfully relatable artists I listen to.
Yet here we are. Lead singer Matt Berninger is, with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, part of the strange canon of middle-aged white guys who are inexplicably able to emotionally destroy me in a couple words. The best description of Matt I’ve ever come across maintains that he’s a ‘trickster nymph in the body of a tax accountant’, and he’s somehow capable of making me feel seen despite our lives having absolutely nothing in common. (I have no plans to visit Cincinnati, Ohio, or to quit my advertising job in my thirties to start a band. I don’t even have an advertising job.) The only rational answer is the supernatural.
Or, well, maybe it’s just that anxiety and ennui are pretty universal, and he’s just oddly good at conjuring them. Certainly a lot of his lyrics are quite obviously autobiographical, and it’s clear that the dread which suffuses his writing is not in any sense an act. His talent is in finding ways to continually dig up wretched little emotional truths and turn them into something gorgeous and heartbreaking. It’s not magic, then, it’s just writing.
But there’s nevertheless something a little mystical about the whole thing, particularly as he keeps singing about heartbreak despite having been married for several decades; his wife, the former New Yorker fiction editor Carin Besser, has even been contributing lyrics for several albums at this point. Their idea of a fun couple’s activity appears to be writing about their marital strife, which I always find a little odd but I suppose tracks.
This is all to say, though, that Matt keeps doing this thing where he offers up these horrifying emotional truths and I keep going ‘wow I feel so seen, thank you friendly Ohian dude’, but they’re not even his emotional truths. I know, obviously, that imagination is a thing, but what’s strange about the National is that it always feels like they’re so grounded and real and genuine, that creativity shouldn’t come into it.
It’s not that the music or the lyrics feel somehow raw or unpolished — in fact, I kinda struggle to think of many artists whose music feels more tightly constructed, many lyricists not named Joanna Newsom more committed to making the lyrics feel obviously ‘written’ — but that they feel like they’re so directly accessing something true. I know you’re not supposed to do this, but I want to work out how they pull off this magic trick, how they balance obvious artifice with apparent sincerity.
One thing to remember about the National is that by all accounts their recording process is — or, at least, was, apparently it got a lot more relaxed for recent albums — a deeply unpleasant experience. Read this New York Times article about the recording process for High Violet. It sounds like literal hell; you could not pay me enough to be in the room while they were working on‘Lemonworld’.
It’s a band full of perfectionists who all have slightly different concepts of what perfect means and slightly different ways of expressing it. While the guitarist Bryce Dessner went to the Yale School of Music, Matt has essentially no musical training: he can’t read sheet music and can’t play an instrument other than his voice, and according to the NYT he tends to suggest stuff like ‘a heavy metal thing’ or ‘some hot Jimmy Page scuzz’. It’s like that thing which happens when you get a bunch of autistic people in a room (not that the National band members are necessarily themselves autistic, though who knows), and then they realise that they’re all autistic in slightly different ways, so the things they have in common suddenly become aggravating instead of endearing or relatable.
This all means that the band will record the same part multiple times with slightly different approaches, all the time pulling in different directions and, at least formerly, ending up hating each other by the end. While this doesn’t sound at all pleasant, it certainly gets results, and listening back to High Violet, you can really hear the care and attention paid to every detail. ‘Lemonworld’, a song which was close to getting cut from the album because it was taking too much work, is one of my favourite songs of theirs, and that’s possibly a result of how much time it took. It took a while, but it came out perfect in the end.
Perhaps, then, the thing which makes their music feel so genuine and real and lived-in is precisely how tightly constructed it is: it’s been thought through in such depth that it can’t help but feel instinctive, like how when you master a skill it feels entirely natural. Or the emotional depth isn’t actually the anxiety or whatever but the blood and sweat poured into every note.
Neither of these satisfy me, though, most of all because that explains the music’s emotional depth more than that of the lyrics — which are apparently added last and in a much more informal, independent process from Matt and Carin — but also because I love the National most of all in live performances, where the artifice is a little stripped back, where they feel a little bit more alive. (This is not least, regrettably, because Matt’s typically drunk during most concerts.)
Part of why the lyrics devastate me emotionally is probably to do with the fact that there’s just something very relatable to me as an autistic person in how Matt engages with the world. It’s worth noting that he has never described himself as autistic, although he does suffer from anxiety, which may be part of how relatable I find his lyrics. Whatever the reason, though, his lyrics repeatedly express this kind of discomfort or ill-fittingness which speaks so closely to my experiences of autism.
Not to rehash an old newsletter, but the Alligator track ‘Baby We’ll Be Fine’ is a great expression of this:
Baby, come over, I need entertaining:
I had a stilted, pretending day.
Lay me down and say something pretty,
lay me back down where I wanted to stay;
just say something perfect,
something I can steal,
say, "Look at me:
baby, we'll be fine —
all we gotta do is be brave,
and be kind."
I pull off your jeans
and you spill Jack and Coke in my collar —
I melt like a witch and scream.
I adore these lines, just the sheer grace with which Matt expresses the devastating fact of that too-familiar discomfort from trying to be part of the world, trying to find something beautiful and reassuring to anchor you but suddenly finding everything overwhelming and exhausting. But I could just as easily, though, cite Sleep Well Beast’s ‘Nobody Else Will be There’:
“Hey baby, where were you back there
when I needed your help?”
“I thought that if I stuck my neck out,
I'd get you out of your shell.”
“My faith is sick and my skin is thin as ever —
I need you alone.
Goodbyes always take us half an hour
can't we just go home?”
I added the quote marks here (as far as I know, they can’t be found on the official lyrics), but I don’t think that there’s a way to interpret this song as anything other than a dialogue. In my reading of these lines, the first speaker — the anxious one who probably reflects Matt’s perspective — is struggling to deal with a party and feeling overwhelmed and, like in ‘Baby We’ll Be Fine’, trying to be anchored by his partner. The partner, though, is more interested in trying to get him to step out of his comfort zone, imagining that the issue is one of over-caution (‘your shell’) instead of a response to actual distress (‘my skin is thin as ever’).
I don’t know an autistic person who wouldn’t find that scene painfully relatable, or who hasn’t had that kind of interaction with a neurotypical person. What Matt’s lyrics continually get is this state of discord that comes from trying to live in a world which you don’t quite fit inside. It’s as if everything is too much, there’s too much contact and touch and overstimulation and you might just burst from the pressure of it all. In the massively underrated ‘Slipped’, he sings:
I’m in the crush and I hate it, my eyes are falling,
I’m having trouble inside my skin, I’ll try to keep my skeletons in.
Simultaneously, though, he can find himself feeling totally unmoored, desperate for any grounding or way to stay in touch with the world, like in the lines above from ‘Baby We’ll Be Fine’, or in ‘Quiet Light’ as he mourns a relationship and says:
I think about you way more than anything else —
I'm not that spiritual, I still go out all the time to department stores;
everything I need, but none of this is getting me anywhere good.
I think this essential tension — finding the world overwhelming but also fearing the possibility you might somehow slip outside of it — is the core of Matt’s best writing, and also a feeling I return to again and again.
He’s just got an uncanny ability to tap into these feelings of discord which are so familiar to me as an autistic person. They are, however, partially also just a consequence of being a person, particularly under capitalism. Take, for instance, the consumerist despair of endlessly visiting department stores to try to feel something and fill the gap of human connection, or in ‘Baby We’ll Be Fine’ when he prays all night
for my boss to stop me in the hallway,
lay his hand on my shoulder, and say
‘Son, I been hearing good things.’
This is also always going to be present in relationships and under capitalism, and that these scenes of discord frequently have to do with romantic themes is testament both to Matt’s (and indie rock’s) preoccupation with romance and the difficulty of really relating to one another. ‘Sleep Well Beast’ closes the album ‘Nobody Else Will Be There’ opens, and its first lines suggest that the entire album up to that point has been aspects of the hallway argument started in the latter track, like one broken-open moment. He sings:
We been stuck out here in the hallway
for way way too long.
I’m at a loss. I’m at a loss. I’m losing grip. The fabric’s ripped.
Go back to sleep,
let me drive, let me think, let me figure it out.
How to get us back to the place where we were
when we first went out.
Trying to find a way to locate yourself in a world which is overwhelming and in relationships which don’t quite feel right isn’t just an autistic feeling, it’s universal, and Matt captures that kind of despair better than most.
Key to how he does that is in his focus on mundanities and his repeated gestures to some originary and idealised past, this odd style of Americana which marries a kind of nostalgia with no homesickness whatsoever. In a sense, I sometimes feel like he couldn’t really be from anywhere but Ohio. Talking to the NYT, he says that
Ohio is a very common American experience. It’s much closer than New York to the typical American perspective. It’s right in the middle, and there are unbelievable tensions there — social, racial, political.
He gives a pretty good impression of someone who likes Ohio, or at least thinks it’s somehow more genuine than the coasts, but when he actually sings about the state, he tells us pretty convincingly that ‘I never thought about love when I thought about home.’ He’s so deeply attuned to that particular kind of capitalist alienation which I’m culturally conditioned to believe is most at home in the midwest, and being from somewhere like Ohio informs his writing not because it’s so genuine but because it clearly gave him an early education in what it’s like to feel out of place.
(Coincidentally, this is an odd point of contact between Matt and David Byrne; I sometimes feel like the National’s songs feel like only slightly less ironic versions of ‘The Big Country’ or ‘Don’t Worry About the Government’.)
While the National’s latest album, I Am Easy to Find, has its moments of despair (see ‘Quiet Light’), it’s also the most liberated and connected Matt’s sounded, particularly now he’s joined by guest vocalists. You can see traces of this in ‘The Pull of You’ (‘What was it you always said? “We’re connected by a thread...”’), but it’s most apparent in the title track:
How long have we been here?
Am I ever coming down?
I need to find some lower thinking, if I'm going to stick around.
I'm not going anywhere,
Who do I think I'm kidding?
I'm still standing in the same place where you left me standing.
I am easy to find.
…
If you ever come around this way again,
you'll see me standing in the sunlight
in the middle of the street
…
There's a million little battles that I'm never gonna win, anyway —
I'm still waiting for you every night with ticker tape, ticker tape
There’s a joy in connectedness here, and it’s notable that the track is entirely sung in harmony with Kate Stables. No longer stuck, like in the previous album’s title track, trying to ‘figure it out’, he’s suddenly able to admit that he’s ‘never gonna win’, and he needs to stabilise himself, find connection in someone else or just ‘in the sunlight in the middle of the street’.
Maybe this is part of why the music itself provides such an ideal home for Matt’s lyrics. Their albums do vary a lot stylistically, but their entire discography shares a certain reliability; you can trust that the band will never miss a beat, never hit a bum note, and always be able to sell emotional catharsis and carry the weight of Matt’s anxieties and despair. It feels comfortable, especially in Bryan Devendorf’s remarkable drumming which just effortlessly supports the music and propels you forwards but never feels too focused or comes in too squarely on the beat.
In this sense, what Matt introduces to the band is a human element, a way to find life around the tightness of the compositions, but it’s always reliant on that structure to secure it, to let it really sing. I love the moments in concerts where he forgets a line or comes in too soon, and while one of the Dessner twins will generally look a bit annoyed, the effortlessness with which they just play on despite it and pick right back up is always almost beautiful. What more could you ask for when things are overwhelming and difficult and strange than your mistakes being accepted and adjusted to, when you can always be brought back down to earth and once again easy to find?