QTheMusic.com

Ahead of the release of their fifth album High Violet and to tie-in with their guest edit of Qthemusic.com we caught up with The National's lead singer Matt Berninger and guitarist Aaron Dessner for an interview that covered the band formation, their approach to songwriting and composition and of course the new album and the stellar list of contributors.

First things first, we talk about the band's formation and the early years, including The National's live debut and perhaps soon-to-become-legendary events that were Matt's work office parties... here's a lightly edited transcript:

Q: Starting at the beginning then Aaron and Matt, can you tell us a wee bit about how the band came about?

Matt Berninger: We all ended up in New York for totally different reasons, for jobs, or Aaron went to school at Columbia and I had been living in New York for five years before we started getting together just to goof around for fun on weekends to make songs, and the only reason we actually did that was because at the time I was living in a loft that had tons of space but it was cold and had rats and I was like well what do you do with a place like this?

One thing, you had room to set up drums and kinda have band practice space and I had been in a band very briefly in college with Scott, and his brother was in a band with Aaron and Bryce. So we kind of just got together on a weekend or two and just threw together some rough songs, just for fun, and before we knew it we were doing that more and more often and then we decided we'd record a record and that got one or two good reviews and it was just very slow progress from that to where we are now.

Q: Was that 1999 then, when you first got together?
Aaron Dessner: Yeah, It was the end - so November 1999, and all of 2000 was spent writing songs. We liked the first... it was kind of shocking how much we liked our first little demos from the first weekend because none of us really knew, it was just for fun, it was casual. I didn't even know Matt could sing

Matt: {unfazed} Really...

AD: Or write good lyrics and all of a sudden it was like, woah. But 2000/2001 - 2001 was just spent writing and making the first record which was really quite casual actually, it wasn't ambitious.

Q: So from the first weekend then, you already had songs, it wasn't a case of jamming covers for a while or anything like that?
AD: Yeah, we never played covers or...

MB: We never 'jammed'

AD: We've never jammed either... he has a real aversion to 'jamming'

MB: It was mostly just like throwing down some little bits, guitar bits and then me singing over them y'know something, or looking for little words, and stringing together things that sounded like... hey that sounds like a song, you know. That was as much as we sat around and thought about it. It took a while before we were like let's come up with a name, let's name this thing and think of it as a band. I didn't start that way.

Q: When you named it, did that give it any more official meaning to yourselves or to anyone else, you weren't just meeting every weekend now it was a proper entity?

BD: The only reason we named it was because we were asked to play Matt's office party, so then we had to have a name. That was the actual impetus to name it then we played his office party for around Christmas time and we also played...

MB: In the rain

AD: We played both your office parties, six month's later we played a summer office party and it rained on us so we could barely... we couldn't really play

MB: It was in our bosses driveway of his country house and it was raining and we were under a tarpaulin...

AD: We had good looking Swedish girls already at both those gigs {laughter} so we knew...

Q: Something was going right?

AD: Something was going right. We were getting more girls immediately.

MB: I didn't tell Aaron they all worked for the company I was working for.

AD: Something was going right...

Q: In terms of seminal musical moments and gigs that very few people were at, up there with the Sex Pistols and things then, there's now The National's office parties

MB: My bosses driveway in the rain, yeah - circa 1999 I guess.

AD: It was like... {pauses to think} Talking Heads at CBGB's {laughter}

MB: Exactly...

Q: Musically, do you have much memory of what you played at your first gig then, or what happened in between songs, it must've been quite nerve-wracking for a first gig to play in front of lots of people you knew and worked with?

AD: We were playing across the street in a building in Soho that was directly across the street from Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore's apartment and it was kinda like, it was funny because we were sort of in the shadow of all this great stuff but I don't really remember anything except that the bass was too loud and nobody could hear anything and Matt at that time was not really projecting above it - we didn't know how to play a little bit quieter so you could hear him but there were definitely early songs like Cold Girl Fever and Son. We already had something you know, a couple of songs...

Q: How many songs were you choosing from to decide the first album then?

AD: There had been 30 or 35 like, things...

MB: Really?

AD: Yeah, well if you think about things like Quiff Dwellers

MB: Oh yeah... Halo Chagrin

AD: Red Badge Of Courage

MB: Oh yeah...

AD: No Professionals, Big Man, actually we had a lot of promising songs, Matt used to write actually quite quickly and we used to just like churn out these very, y'know, casual... back then it was like kind of - not slacker - but it wasn't like we agonised over what we were doing. That happened later.

Q: Was that the same period as Minor Star of Rome?

AD: Exactly, Minor Star of Rome was another one, though we re-wrote that later for a Believer thing [Compilation]. But those lyrics came from something long ago.

MB: That's true, and now I've just re-used this old "Minor singing airheads" is in a song on this new record [England], yeah I guess there are lots of pieces from the past.

Q: You did that on the last album Boxer aswell where you brought in elements of 29 Years from your first album.

MB: That was an example - the 29 years thing - was an example of the song Slow Show needed to go somewhere completely new for it to work when we were doing Boxer. There's a huge shift that happened in the music so Aaron said "Why don't you, just for now, sing anything over it. Why don't you sing 29 years over it, y'know?".

AD: There was actually two songs on Boxer, that we were having a really hard time finishing, well more than two - several - there were a number of them but that one used to have this kind of triumphant bombastic jam at the end, when we played it at Koko [London gig in 2007] it was like that. That didn't really feel right. And I wrote this key change to happen at the end with the melody and as I was doing it at that stage of the record I was so... kind of like frustrated because we weren't getting anywhere, I did start to think somewhat consciously about it.

[On 29 years] He didn't sing the melody that you hear that comes in at the end of Slow Show but it's kind of, it seems connected and it seems to work thematically. When he sang it - it's the first take that he did on the record - and everybody got goosebumps. It was like a weird shot in the dark that rarely works, usually it's like a bad idea but actually cos that song was on the first record and it was actually the only song where Matt did everything himself, no-one else plays on that song. {Looking at Matt} On 29 Years, I think that's all you...

MB: Yeah

AD: Or I think maybe Scott played some weird guitar

MB: There's keyboard, and I was playing a weird guitar thing, it wasn't plugged in... just clicking the strings.

AD: It's a cool song but it was...

MB: It's not really a song

AD: It made sense to somehow re-visit it but actually Gospel [on 2007's Boxer], is a similar story where actually those lyrics are taken from the song No Professionals which I don't think people have heard. It was a similar thing where we had two parts that were working but it needed to go somewhere so we wrote this other part and some of those lyrics were taken from No Professionals, it was just a weird thing where somehow with Boxer it made sense to do that.

Q: I think there's maybe a version of No Professionals kicking around the internet...

AD: No Professionals? Em, may-bee... "Feathers are falling at my feet"

MB: That's in another song too...

AD: No Professionals? It's actually a really good song

MB: Alot of the lyrics [from it] get used in... where is it? "Feathers are falling at my feet"

AD: Karen?

MB: See! Who knows...

{laughter

Q: They'll pop up on the next record aswell...

Interview: Andy Thomson

Part 2: Tomorrow, where we discuss the new album High Violet, the guest contributors , Matt's take on writing lyrics and the band's composition process. Plus we also have the band's recommended reading list and get them to name their musical influences.

The National guest edit Qthemusic.com.

2:40 PM | 10/05/2010