It was late 2017. I had just moved to Chicago and my friend Kyle was in town visiting me. We were going to see The National at the Civic Opera House. I didn’t really know the city or what we could or should do beforehand, so we just took the L up to Washington/Wells and ate salads or some sort of grain bowls at one of those office lunch break restaurants that fill the Loop. It didn’t matter: we weren’t going out to eat or drink; we were going to see our favorite band!
Kyle bought the tickets. The seats were really good, second or third row, on the right near the middle. After the show, we got to go backstage, because Kyle knew someone who knew someone who worked the lights. We walked through hallways and huge rooms full of props and sets and lights and rugs, all the sort of items required to put on any kind of stage production.
Backstage was low-ceilinged and brightly lit and mostly uncomfortable. There were trays of snack foods and sweets, and there were drinks, but I don’t think I ate or drank anything. At some point Bryan and Scott Devendorf came out and said hi to everyone. Kyle and I thought about staying until the rest of the band came out, but we’d already seen what we’d come to see and even more than that. It felt greedy and excessive to stay for something we really had no right to. We left.
I don’t remember what we did afterward, and I don’t remember anything about the set, but I remember they played “Pink Rabbits,” because I remember turning to Kyle and saying “I don’t get this song.” I remember Kyle laughing at me, and I remember feeling great because I love when people laugh at me to my face.
Since Trouble Will Find Me came out I’ve said I hated “Pink Rabbits,” that it was a bad track, that it was no good, that The National had flubbed their own song, that this cover I found on Spotify was better, that it didn’t belong, that no, just no.
But the truth, actually, was what I said to Kyle in that moment at the Civic Opera House, which is simply that I didn’t get it.
The other day I was at my friends Rachel and Johnathan’s house, and I went outside to cut basil for some drinks I was making, and I found myself singing “Pink Rabbits” completely unconsciously as I walked down the stairs, out the door into the gangway, down the gangway and into the yard, then as I clipped basil, then as I walked down the gangway again, in the other direction this time, moved the brick I had shoved in the door to keep it open, walked through the threshold and up the stairs. I knew all the words, and maybe because I was hearing them in my own voice for the first time, I finally got them.
Turns out it’s really simple. “Pink Rabbits” is a song about losing something and unexpectedly getting it back — and the impossibility of explaining what happened in the intervening period. You didn’t see me I was falling apart, Berninger sings. I was a television version of a person with a broken heart. The swingy rhythm I hated for so long is just a mirror image of the reversal of his disappointment. I'm so surprised you want to dance with me now / I was just getting used to living life without you around.
I talked to Kyle a few days ago, for a long time, and among the several things he told me about The National is that they did not play “Pink Rabbits” when we saw them at the Civic Opera House at all, that that had happened when we saw them at Treasure Island, that he remembered it clearly because there was a guy who was absolutely losing his shit at “Pink Rabbits” and that I had said “I don’t get it,” in reference to that guy and his screaming sing-along, not “I don’t get this song.”
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Brian asked me if I felt like I was ever going to run out of things on my “pegboard” to connect to each other in order to write this newsletter, and I told him that no, there was no way, the stories were infinite, and it turns out they are, but also it turns out that my memory is feeble, and fickle, and the stories might be infinite but they are also inaccurate. Do they mean any less, then? Is Kyle’s laughter at me any less disarming? Is my newfound comprehension of this song I thought I hated any less revealing?
When I sat down to write this, I thought I’d tell a story about my growth since moving to Chicago, about how now I both know where to eat before a show in the Loop and understand this song that I said I hated for years, about how we change if we want to, how we grow if we let ourselves. And I could still tell that story, but it doesn’t have all the parts I thought it would, and it’s less neat, and more incomplete.
But I love “Pink Rabbits” now, and that love doesn’t need a narrative. It doesn’t need a story to justify its existence. It can just be, because I feel it.
This is one of a few pieces on The National. You can read the other ones here, here, and here.