The National has had a pretty huge 2010. They released Pitchfork’s #28 album of the year, High Violet, and toured the globe. More recently, they released an expanded edition of High Violet with an extra disc of new material. And in their brief respite from touring, they’ve recorded a new song for the forthcoming indie film Win Win, starring Paul Giamatti. Aaron Dessner, who runs the band’s musical side alongside twin brother Bryce, has also been recording with Brooklyn singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten.
Yesterday, Aaron Dessner chatted with us about these new projects, as well as inter-band fights, the possibility of a Dark Was the Night follow-up, and the time Sufjan Stevens tried to put fluorescent tape on the National.
Pitchfork: What are you working on at the moment?
Aaron Dessner: We came off tour a week ago or something. Every time we’re supposed to have a break, we get ourselves into some new projects with deadlines. We used to not be like that; I’m not sure what’s happening.
We came home and had to write and record a song for a movie in a few days. We just finished that yesterday, and today I’m doing some recording and producing with Sharon Van Etten, this songwriter from Brooklyn who I love. We just started yesterday in the garage behind my house; I have a studio in my garage in Brooklyn. So we did a week of recording a month or so ago, and now we’re starting again.
We decided to do the song for the movie because the director is Tom McCarthy. He wrote Up, he directed The Station Agent, and he played the corrupt reporter on “The Wire”. He’s somebody we really like, and the star of the movie is Paul Giamatti. Sideways–everybody loves that movie. They showed us the movie. It’s called Win Win, and it was just amazing. So it was one of those situations where we knew we didn’t have time, but we’ve never really had that opportunity to write something for a movie that we really liked, so we said yes. Fortunately, we finished it, and hopefully it’s good. I can’t really tell you.
Pitchfork: Given that you spend a lot of time on your albums, to write and record a song in a few days has to be a pretty big challenge.
AD: Yeah. With our records, we circle the vortex for a long time, as far as just trying everything, and we’ll try a song so many different ways that we get lost in it and kind of forget what was working about it. Almost always, we come back around to something closer to what a demo was. But in order to understand that we want to go back there, we usually have to go far away from it.
There’s no one songwriter in the band. It’s collaborative, and we all have different tastes. Basically, we don’t often agree on things [laughs], at least at first. It takes a while to find the middle ground between everybody’s ideas. Matt [Berninger, singer] and I– I’m coming from a music side, and he’s think about words, and often he’ll listen to things in their most simple form. So if something was written on a piano, he’ll just be listening to the piano, and he won’t listen to other parts or ideas that have been played to it– production, essentially. So when it comes time for the band to play a song, a lot of the new information is being played. All of those new ideas get debated. So yeah, it’s hard to do the fire-drill four-day thing.
But the music for this song already existed, and he had some melody ideas, so it wasn’t like we were starting from scratch. It was some music that I’d written for High Violet that didn’t get used, and we developed it and changed it for this movie. We’ve done this a few times recently, and I think it’s good for us to change and to break the mold of obsessing. Other bands and musicians I know work a lot faster, and I think that can be healthy and good; what comes out of that might be more spontaneous. So I think it’s good for us to realize we can work that way and we can make songs a lot faster.
Pitchfork: I interviewed Matt a few months ago, right when you guys were finishing the album. He said that you, as a band, have the worst fights when you’re making those final decisions. Taking on a song in a few days– is that just asking for more fights?
AD: Yes, probably. We had this moment of terror when we went back up to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Peter Katis has helped us with all of our albums except for the very first one. He’s somebody that we know really well, and he has this big house up in Bridgeport. There’s a studio in the attic, and we’ve spent months and months there– especially during Boxer, where we lived up there for three or four months and basically made no progress. It just drove everyone crazy. Our writing, especially during Boxer– the recording process was the writing process, which is not the way I would advise anyone else to do it. It’s just the way we had to do it because we had toured so long for Alligator. There was a lot of music, and Matt had words and ideas, but we hadn’t really put things together, and we just had to get started. It made for very slow progress and difficult moments, and the same thing happened again on High Violet; we hit walls repeatedly and there were some big disagreements about things towards the end. I think every band has that, and whenever that happens, it probably means something good is hopefully coming out of it.
But we went up there and asked, “What are we getting ourselves into?”. And yes, we did, of course, have disagreements. My brother and I were up there mixing it with Matt the last two days, and it went really well. Sometimes my brother and I– we’re twins, and sometimes we joke that we’re like a two-headed monster. We can be hard to deal with because we don’t break ranks; we stick together. And then Matt, in order to get his opinion through, has to be pretty stubborn. So that’s a recipe for tension, but we get over it quickly, and we’ve been doing this long enough. And we’re enjoying it; it’s been a really fun year, so I think we’re in a good place.
Pitchfork: Did you try to capture the feel of the movie in the song?
AD: I think there is a feeling that we captured in the music. It’s sort of hopeful, but also there’s a melancholy to it. It can be somber and hopeful at the same time. A lot of times, unfortunately– maybe it’s because of the way Matt sings or something– a lot of people see our music as gloomy. There’s a lot of catharsis, and a lot of times it’s hopeful at the same time. There are minor chords. I guess I like minor chords better than major ones, in general. But we saw the movie, and the pace and the way it ends is hopeful, but there is a lot of sadness. It’s a moving, emotional movie, but also funny. It reminded us of some of the things we try to fit into songs that have different emotions and just the right amount of goofiness in there. So the song is playful, but it has an emotional feeling in it.
We’ve never written a song specifically for a movie. We’ve had songs in movies, and my brother and I have done instrumental music for other movies. From a lyrical perspective, Matt always keeps things really blurry, and it’s never very literal. He’s not a narrative songwriter; it’s more disparate images that he’s bringing together. So the lyrics to this are also blurry, but there is something about them that relates to the movie, although I couldn’t really say exactly how.
Pitchfork: Tell me more about your work with Sharon Van Etten.
AD: We are recording a new record for her. It’s in very early stages, and it’s very casual, so I would say we’re making a new record together. I don’t know when we’ll actually finish it because she’s touring a lot and her EP, which is basically a record, is doing so well. I think she’s going to be really busy, as are the National, but we’re trying to find time when we’re both home. It’s been really fun. It’s a little bit harder to record a whole band in our studio because it’s small. But here, we’re recording acoustic instruments, and our studio’s great for that. It’s been really nice just to get the bare bones. She has a lot of songs. It’s going to be interesting to see all of the things that we can record. She just has such an amazing voice… I don’t even know if I would call it “producing” as much as, just, we’re out there working.
Pitchfork: You just came out with the expanded version of High Violet. A lot of indie bands have been doing this lately– re-releasing their latest record with a bunch of extra stuff. That’s something I’m used to seeing from Rihanna or Usher. When a pop album is nearing the end of its cycle, they beef it up with an extra single or two and put it back out. But I’m guessing that’s not the reason you’re doing it.
AD: No. I don’t know if you saw that funny video we made. Matt’s brother Tom Berninger has been traveling with us, and he’s been making a sort of tour mockumentary, just poking fun at ourselves because that’s basically what we do all the time. He made this promotional video for the expanded edition of High Violet about how we were going to turn Black Friday violet, and it’s just a big joke.
The origin of re-releasing the album with expanded material, like you said, is a way for record labels to get rack space at holiday time; that’s all it’s about. But for us, it actually is something else. The way that we work, we make so many songs, we try so many different things, and we edit ourselves so heavily– and sometimes I think too much– that a lot of things get thrown away. At a certain point, we realized there were some songs lying around that we wanted them to have. We had re-recorded “Terrible Love” because we had the opportunity to do it. The original version of “Terrible Love” on the record is my demo, basically. Bryan drummed to it with one mic. And then when we started playing it live, we realized it was this beast of a live song and that it was really fun to play, so one day we recorded it again and it came out pretty well. So there were a bunch of things lying around. 4AD, thinking about how to keep the record going, wanted to do that. I’m very aware that I don’t want fans buying a record twice, so you can buy all those tracks individually on iTunes. And I think they were selling it for less than the original album, or something like that. But at least in our heads, it’s not some kind of crass marketing ploy.
Pitchfork: The new version of “Terrible Love” is awesome. When I heard it, I thought it should’ve been on the album.
AD: I prefer the sort of murky, blurry version that’s on the record, just because I like the guitar sound. There’s all those accidental harmonies in it that I like, but maybe that’s just me being too attached to something because I can’t recreate it. That was part of why we used it; we just couldn’t make the guitar sound like that again. But live, it is probably the biggest song off High Violet. We end the show with it. It’s really intense, and it becomes very unhinged towards the end. When we first played the song, we played it on “Jimmy Fallon” maybe two months before the record came out. So people got attached to that version that they saw on YouTube. Then, when the album came out, I think that’s why people were disappointed. It didn’t have the same kind of drumming that really kicks in. So we re-recorded it, more for ourselves. We just wanted to see how it would come out, and then it came out really well. It became the version that’s been pushed to radio. I’m glad that there’s two versions. I still think that the album version is more appropriate to the album, but it’s good that there’s this more high-fidelity version of it out there.
Pitchfork: Every album, you seem to have one or two songs that just leap off the record when you play them live, and they become way more anthemic than you would have ever expected them to be. It seems like that happened with “Squalor Victoria”, too.
AD: Yeah, you’re right. Maybe that has something to do with the way we make records, where we don’t play the songs live first. My brother and I write a lot of music, and we give it to Matt. He figures out which sketches he has ideas about, and then he starts mumbling and humming over them and listening to them like a soundtrack. It takes him a long time to actually finish a song. We start working on the music and trying things long before he sings the song. We’re not the kind of band that really gets in a room all together and tries things. I think maybe we will try that in the future, but at least for the last three records we haven’t really done that. But the way that Matt works best is by himself. In his headphones is, I think, when he thinks the best; it’s hard for him to be on the spot and sitting in the room while we bash away. So the music develops on its own one track, and then Matt is doing something on another track, and then at the end we back into the songs. That’s our weird way of writing. I guess maybe it’s a little bit like R.E.M.; I think that they record the music first.
But anyway, it doesn’t allow for discovering that a song could be much more dynamic when you play it in front of a lot of people. If we were to record “Squalor Victoria” the way that we play it live, I think it would too bombastic. I think it would be a little embarrassing, frankly. But it’s great live. I think the same thing about a lot of our songs– that they take on this other dimension live because it’s about the energy between us and the audience and the nerves of playing live. You’re standing up there in front of all these people, and we’re not that comfortable with it. Maybe it’s a way of dealing with it. But I like that dichotomy between the record and the live situation– that it’s not the same. Every once in a while, a mistake might be made. Maybe “Terrible Love” would be better for our career if the alternate version was on the record, but I still think that the weird version on the record is good. It kind of starts off in this place and goes somewhere else.
Pitchfork: Matt onstage has this crazy-old-man demeanor to him; he unpredictably wanders around and climbs into the audience. When you say that you’re not that comfortable in front of a lot of people, does that play into it?
AD: I think that we’ve grown more comfortable. Since Boxer, the crowds got bigger, and now we’ve been forced to come to terms with playing in front of so many people. But with Matt, there’s still an element of that feeling of jumping into cold water for him. When he looks drunk or looks like he’s hitting himself out of time, I think it’s just that he is actually lost in the music. He often closes his eyes because if he’s staring at the thousands people in front of him staring at him, I think he might lose his train of thought. He often will forget lyrics and things, and that’s usually because he gets caught up in the moment. He does drink some wine onstage as a way of relaxing; we all do. We’re from Ohio, and that’s like Guided by Voices. But none of us have any issue with that. Every once in a while, somebody wonders if he has some kind nervous disorder or if he’s crazy up there, but it’s really just him.
Pitchfork: I saw you in Sweden at the Way Out West Festival. Not only did you play for a very big crowd over there, but they knew the songs. Later that night, I got in a conversation with a Swedish girl about the show and what songs we thought you should have played and stuff like that. Is that weird to go halfway around the world and people still get what you’re doing?
AD: Yeah. For the National– and I think maybe it’s somewhat unique– it feels like we have the same audience in every country. It grew so slowly, and as a real grassroots back-alley-whisper kind of band, we never really benefited from hype until now. I don’t think we ever caught fire… I don’t think our production is good enough or something. I’m kidding, but we were sort of a cult band. People aren’t casual fans. Maybe now we have some, but early on we had these little pockets of hardcore fans, especially abroad. It happened first in France and then in Portugal and in Scandinavia. And that is what we experience– that people don’t just know High Violet, they know a lot of the records, and it can make it hard to figure out what to play. At least half of the people are there to hear the new record, but there are people who want to hear things from our early records, and then there’s the added problem of when you’re touring so much that you don’t have a lot of time to learn things and remember lyrics. But we’ve had an amazing experience since the record came out in May. I think we’ve played 120 shows.
We just played these three shows at the Brixton Academy in London. We’d opened for a band there a long time ago, and that’s a big cavernous space. The people in London can be kind of cold, but it was actually amazing to see people singing along. And then we went to Dublin, where we played this beautiful old theater called the Olympia for three nights in a row. And in Ireland, people are so unafraid to show emotion and sing along. People were literally singing at the top of their lungs the whole time. We were all smiling. Matt was definitely not showing his usual weird behavior; he was smiling for a lot of the time. So it was a nice feeling, and it felt like something had changed. We’ve been touring for 10 years now, and it feels like by now people know the music. So what you saw at Way Out West– that was not unusual now, but it is surreal for us. It is still surreal when you go somewhere, you’re in a muddy field in Gothenburg, and people know the words. I don’t think we’d played there before.
Pitchfork: At one of those London shows, you brought Sufjan Stevens out, which he has done in the past. He’s obviously this huge star, but you just have him singing backup. How does that work?
AD: We live in the same neighborhood. My older sister lives two houses away, and then my brother and I live on the same street. Over the last five or six years, we’ve known each other and worked together on various things, whether it’s Dark Was the Night or Bryce playing in Sufjan’s band during Illinois. My sister did the choreography for his latest tour; she’s a dancer and a choreographer and an artist. We all hang out a lot, and he came to London to hang out and see the shows.
He has helped us a lot with the records, and on “Afraid of Everyone”, he actually kind of helped solve that riddle of a song. We were struggling with that song for quite a while. Sufjan was over one day and just started playing the harmonium and singing along to it. He did it repeatedly, so it was different voices. It helped open that song up to being finished. He’s played it with us live a bunch of times, actually, so that was fun. The night after that, Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire got up and played with us; he actually plays a bunch on High Violet. We really enjoy that. Our band is really open. On all our records, there’s lots of different people playing, so that’s pretty normal with us. But I think it’s nice for Sufjan to sometimes do something random and small.
Pitchfork: Did your sister have anything to do with the costumes on his tour?
AD: No, that was another friend. And actually Sufjan, backstage at Brixton, had a bunch of fluorescent tape, and he was going to tape us all up [laughs]. It didn’t happen.
Pitchfork: Are you working on anything else in the future?
AD: My brother and I did this 70-minute piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music called The Long Count. It was a collaboration with this visual artist Matthew Ritchie, and it’s something we really want to record. So that’s something that we’re starting to figure out how to do. It’s pretty elaborate. There’s 18 musicians including the singers, and a lot of it is pretty difficult to play, so we’re still just figuring out how we can record it and release it. But we’re definitely going to do that this year.
And Dark Was the Night has been really, really successful for the charity [Red Hot Organization]. They’ve raised over a million dollars now. We’ve realized that it would probably be worthwhile to do some kind of follow-up to it or another project to benefit the charity. We’ve been batting around different ideas, and we’re definitely going to do something. I just don’t know what we’re going to do yet. There might be news about that soon, but I can’t say now.
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