WEDNESDAY, the first day of March, and Hudson in upstate New York, lies quiet and still. The antique shops shuttered, the grill bar empty. Snow piles on the rooftops, and a lone car motors up Warren Street. Malcolm Gladwell sips coffee in the café on the square.
A short drive from here, past the fruit farms and the frozen fields, the five members of The National are rehearsing material from their ninth album, First Two Pages Of Frankenstein. Amid the assemblage of keyboards, guitars and drums, Matt Berninger sits on a blue ergonomic stool, behind him a view of the long, snow-covered pond that gave this studio space its name.
It has been a difficult couple of years for the singer; a long, mute season in which the days grew disconnected and he found himself unable to write. “Usually when I’m in a troubled place, I can make something out of it, and write a song about it, and that does a lot to solve it,” he says. “This time, I didn’t want to. I was uninterested in my own grief. I was uninterested in my own problems. I was maybe even a little embarrassed by it.”
He stopped drinking, stopped smoking weed, commenced a course of antidepressants. But nothing seemed to help. Far away, his bandmates wondered how to reach him, how to reconfigure The National to work again. “It’s this intensely intimate relationship between five people and it’s complex,” says Aaron Dessner. “Sometimes it feels like a riddle that nobody can solve. But weirdly, the beauty of the music meant we found a way through. This record is really powerful because of it.”
It is now a delicate moment in the release of the album: this week alone brings a visit from Uncut, a turn on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and a special performance at Bearsville Theater in Woodstock. It will be a chance to try out songs, but also an opportunity to discuss the events of the last few years, when one of the world’s most beloved bands came the closest they have ever come to falling apart.
It has been four years since The National released a record. The touring of 2019’s ambitious, multi-voiced I Am Easy To Find gave way to the early days of the pandemic; dates were rescheduled and duly rescheduled again, and in the interim, the band members occupied themselves with individual projects: Berninger worked on a solo album, Serpentine Prison; Bryan and Scott Devendorf, the brothers who make up the band’s rhythm section, joined longtime touring member Ben Lanz to release new material as LNZNDRF. Bryce Dessner focused on classical composition and several film scores, created in collaboration with his twin brother, Aaron.
But it is Aaron for whom the last four years have been most transformative – at least in the public perception. Alongside his work with The National, he had long produced other artists, including Sharon Van Etten, Lisa Hannigan and Ben Howard. But his role helming Taylor Swift’s phenomenally successful lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore sprung him into the world of uber-producer, a flurry of artists suddenly now eager to record with him at Long Pond. In the week we meet, Aaron is announced as the producer and co-writer of Ed Sheeran’s fifth record, – (Subtract).
In one light, The National now return a band gilded by popstar association, although since their earliest days external forces have played a crucial part in the band’s process and identity. The National operate less as a simple five-piece, and more as a kind of constellatory configuration. At any one time they can draw, they enlisted the director Mike Mills as a creative collaborator. For …, contributors include Swift, Sufjan Stevens and Phoebe Bridgers. There are several mainstays: the writer Carin Besser, also Berninger’s wife, co-creates many of the band’s lyrics; the French singer Pauline de Lassus Saint-Geniès, aka Mina Tindle, who is married to Bryce Dessner, often provides additional vocals. “They’re a really great ecosystem,” says This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables, who sang on , and has supported the band on several tours. “They’re thoughtful and generous and a community.”
