The National’s 2005 album Alligator is so… messy. The beginning of almost every song is just wrong, so wrong. It’s like half the band started playing on its own and the rest of the guys are rushing to catch up. The production is trying, hard, but not quite getting to the level of polish that has come to define The National — there are lots of rough edges on Alligator. If it weren’t for the drummer the whole operation would’ve been unsalvageable.
When I first heard it, I went wild for it.
I burned it onto a blank CD and drove around in my black 2003 Saab 9-3 and blasted it, loud, out of the surprisingly good speakers. I waited patiently through the nonsensical first thirty seconds of “Looking for Astronauts” until the part where Matt Berninger sings my favorite line in the song, You know you have a permanent piece / Of my medium-sized American heart, and then looked forward to when its abrupt end gives way to the only track on the record with a legitimately good beginning, “Daughters of the Soho Riots.” I let myself be lulled by its refrain: I’m here to take you now. I yelled along to “Abel:” WELL MY MIND’S NOT RIGHT MYMIND’S NOTRIGHT MYMIND’SNOTRIGHT.
Finding The National felt like someone was handing a part of myself back to me. I didn’t talk to almost anyone about them for a very long time; I didn’t know how to explain how I felt without also feeling totally exposed. There was something utterly ineffable about my love for them, something I couldn’t put into words, at least not in the way I was used to talking about other music. I knew how to break down a song, how to notice its constituent parts: what does the voice sound like? What about the drums, the guitars? Is there a bass somewhere? I knew how to pick out the best bits, the ones that make the song what it is. With The National, I couldn’t bear to even try to parse the feeling.
When High Violet, their fifth album, came out, I refused to listen to it. In her white-tiled dorm room my friend Lindsay asked me if I had listened to it yet, and I said no, I hadn’t, don’t ask me why. “Oh, it’s so good, you’ve gotta listen to it!” I’ve mentioned this before: I am slow on the uptake when it comes to art. It will find me when I’m ready.
I did eventually listen to High Violet. I heard the fuzzy, staticky guitars that open the album’s first track “Terrible Love.” I noticed “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and wondered if it was a single (it was). I liked the record right away, but what I’ve grown to like even more is the way it’s kept revealing itself to me over the past eleven years. A few years ago, “Lemonworld,” track seven, clicked completely into place for me as its galloping drums propelled me between Terminals A and B at Midway International Airport. I'm too tired to drive anywhere, anyway, right now / Do you care if I stay?
I always listen to The National when I travel. They help me feel more at home inside myself. I listened to their 2013 album Trouble Will Find Me almost every day of the five months I stayed in Helsinki in 2014. I screamed “Graceless” over and over. I let my manic energy fall into the next track, “Slipped,” as Matt starts: I'm in the city you hated... By the time he got to the song’s most devastating lines — I don't need any help to be breakable, believe me / I know nobody else who can laugh along to any kind of joke / I won't need any help to be lonely when you leave me — I felt crushingly, comfortingly swallowed by sorrow.
“Sorrow,” incidentally, is my favorite song by The National. The second track on High Violet, it sounds unlike any of the other songs on the record. It’s a cousin, not a sibling. It starts off with a persistent cymbal, then a frenetic electric guitar gets layered on top of that, then another guitar, then Matt’s baritone: Sorrow found me when I was young. The song’s no joke, its sadness completely naked as Matt sings that sorrow is “my body on the waves,” “a girl inside my cake.” The chorus comes as catharsis: Don’t leave my hyper heart alone on the water / Cover me in rag-and-bone sympathy / ‘Cause I don’t wanna get over you. Even though he repeats the last line, the Magnetic Fields reference goes barely noticed thanks to the metallic sheet of sound now draped over your head.
I’m in Brooklyn this week. My friend Jack drove through Chicago almost two weeks ago and asked me to drive back to New York City with him and I said yes. I keep seeing Matt Berningers everywhere: dads in their forties with grays and glasses, but also baby-faced recent transplants in their twenties, and also thirty-something dudes with facial hair. I keep thinking of the line in Alligator’s “Val Jester:” All the most important people in New York are nineteen. I’m a bit unmoored from myself, surrounded suddenly by complete strangers and then also by people I love that I haven’t seen in ages, far from my own bed, away from my dog, outside of my routine. In search of an anchor, I keep breathing to myself the refrain from “Gospel,” Boxer’s closing track — Let me come over, I can waste your time, I’m bored — and hoping I answer my own pleas.
This is one of a few pieces on The National. You can read the other ones here, here, and here..