Last week, I went to dinner with my friend Eva and her person/Big Love/boyfriend/soul-husband/One True, who we’ll call P. You might have read about it in Eva’s newsletter. Before I could even sit down, P mentioned that one time he had seen Matt Berninger at this restaurant we were at, and then that he knew Matt from being at the University of Cincinnati at the same time. To write this, I had to ask Eva what the anecdote was that P had told; it hadn’t registered because I was so stunned by the coincidence: just earlier that day I had written a post about The National and sent it to Eva to read. “That’s wild you know Matt, I just wrote about them today, I love The National, they’re my favorite band.” Then P said that he thought Scott (Devendorf, the one who saved Alligator from being a total wreck of a record) was really the coolest of them all, and I said that held up based on my one experience of being backstage with The National and Scott being the only one of them who came around and said hey to people he didn’t know. Maybe he’s just the only extrovert in a band full of sad sacks.
One time someone told me that people say listening to The National means you’re a white dude, and I told them I think it just means you’re a sad sack. I guess both things can be true, but I’m definitely neither white nor a dude. In this same vein, one time I had some friends over for dinner, and my friend Johnathan said that The National is “for men,” which has become a running joke now with him and his girlfriend Rachel and the rest of the people in the pandemic pod we formed last fall.
Another time I was walking down the escalators with a comrade at the McCormick Place hotel in Chicago, and The National was playing over the speakers, and I said damn, I love this song, but really their best album is Alligator, and they looked at me like I’d just said something insane but then said I think so, too, and we went from comrades to friends in a single second.
Yet another time, I was at Old City Java in Knoxville, Tennessee, when my friend Lindsay called me and said “Bryce Dessner is at Tomato Head.” (Bryce Dessner plays guitars in The National, and Tomato Head is a pizza restaurant in Knoxville’s Market Square.) I dropped everything I was doing and ran the three-quarters of a mile between the Old City and Market Square — I mean I literally ran, I was like 20 years old, I did this kind of thing at the time — and then slowed down when I got there and pretended to walk by and notice Bryce sitting outside. I stopped to say hi and ask him when he and Sufjan Stevens were going to finally record and release Planetarium, and he said “soon, after Sufjan is done touring.” I am not sure if I walked away after that or if I went inside to see Lindsay or if she was already gone by the time I got to the restaurant, or if actually I had gone inside the restaurant first and then come back out to see Bryce.
The thing about memory is that the facts end up mattering less than the feelings of things. Sometimes we rearrange the facts a little to better support how something made us feel, because so often the facts and our feelings are not connected by straight lines of causality. It’s not even on purpose that we do this; sometimes the mind just does it for the sake of communication, if only to itself. When I saw The National at Treasure Island Music Festival, one of the last years it was still actually on Treasure Island, Matt dove, as he does, into the crowd, right where I was. His glasses stuck out of his front pocket, and I thought about taking them but then decided that would be rude. I watched aghast as someone else did it — that was my idea!! I don’t have to try very hard to think about taking Matt Berninger’s glasses from his front pocket and to then believe that’s what actually happened.
Here are some things that actually happened: I saw The National at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 2016 with my friend Brianna. I bought a t-shirt, which I never do. But I liked the design, which is a minimal-cum-cubist face in profile with the words “The National” in the top left corner in black Helvetica Bold. Shortly thereafter this shirt developed some disgusting pit stains thanks to a brief stint of using Tom’s of Maine natural deodorant (don’t recommend), so I cut it off into a crop-top that I wear to do stuff around the house and sometimes to sleep in. Every time I wear it, I think about the Greek and about Brianna and about how very sad I was that summer we saw The National and how kind she was to go with me even though she wasn’t a fan.
So many things that have actually happened come with a National song attached. I didn’t get “Terrible Love” until the end of a long relationship, after which the line “it takes an ocean not to break” suddenly made so much sense. A friend and I always text each other a line from “About Today” — “hey / are you awake” — in tough moments when we need the other. “Start a War” reminds me of the time I was at a coffee shop with my friend Melissa, and the guy working the counter noticed I had been listening to that song on my iPod (lol) and said something about how good it was and then asked me if I had seen the documentary about them that Matt Berninger’s brother made. Later Melissa had to tell me the guy had been flirting with me. I can be really dense.
There are a few things that hold my life together, that make it easy for me to access the feelings of things, even if I can’t quite recall the facts. The National is one of them. At this point they feel so intertwined with my life that their presence at key moments seems inevitable. Ultimately the coincidence of P’s anecdote was shocking but not at all surprising. Of course he knows Matt. Of course he loves Eva, my life MVP. Of course The National was playing on those escalators, and of course “Terrible Love” came on Spotify Radio as I crossed on the train from Manhattan into Brooklyn on Tuesday of last week.
I wish I remembered who introduced me to them so I could say thank you.
This is one of a few pieces on The National. You can read the other ones here, here, and here.