Ten Years With The National

Before they even come onstage, The National have got me onside. The house lights have just dimmed, and then Bob Dylan’s “Most of the Time” has come shimmering out of the speakers. It sounds magnificent, as Bob’s late 80s croak reverberates around the auditorium. It’s almost mildly disappointing when The National walk onstage halfway through, before Bob is able to take the song all the way to it’s devastating final line.

The band open their set with “Driver, Surprise Me”, a b-side to a single that was released in 2005, two years before I’d even heard of The National. It’s a bold move that immediately takes me back ten years, to the initial thrill of discovering the band, and then seeking out every album and every b-side and every radio session it was possible to find. My life is very different in 2017 compared to 2007. And The National that have just taken the stage at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver on this cold December evening in 2017 are a very different band.

I have only two emotions, careful fear and dead devotion

I was originally persuaded to listen to The National by a friend of mine. He told me they had great lyrics, kind of like Interpol but with a bitter drunk for a frontman. That was good enough for me. I went straight to Myspace — it was 2007 after all — and checked out “Fake Empire” and “Mistaken For Strangers”. I was taken straight away. That voice. So rich and deep and filled with every crack that life had given it. I had never seen Matt Berninger so I imagined a guy with a beard down to his knees, overweight from booze and disappointment. To discover he was an awkward tall guy with, at that point anyway, no beard to speak of, was a little jarring. I couldn’t understand how that voice could come out of someone who was built like me.

Soon after I bought the album, Boxer. “Fake Empire” and “Mistaken For Strangers” sounded even better emerging from my stereo speakers. But after those first two tracks there was nothing. I couldn’t get any further. The rest of the album merged into one morose mass of nothing. I tried a few times but couldn’t decipher it. It seemed so defeated. I continued listening to “Fake Empire” and “Mistaken For Strangers”, but rarely bothered with the rest of the album until, a few weeks or maybe even months later, I found myself humming other tunes off the album. First “Slow Show” and then “Apartment Story”. It was like an audio illusion; the musical equivalent of staring at a picture that you’re convinced is one thing but eventually reveals itself to be something else entirely. Where it had seemed devoid of life, suddenly it was filled with it; but not the life of nightclubs and parties, rather the real life of 30-somethings in western cities everywhere. Trying to find their place, wanting to settle down and yet constantly undermining themselves and then hiding away from the world. I was hooked, and just in time. I bought the very last ticket for their Manchester show in November 2007.

And so there I was in Academy 2 as the band started to play. Back in 2007 The National were just on the verge of the big time, having been together for eight years and slowly becoming well known in certain circles, but still a long way from the limelight. They seemed to start every song with crippling nerves, shaking as they tiptoed through the first few bars. And yet, as they started to play they became something else; losing themselves in what they were doing and turning all their bottled up nerves, emotions and human frailty into something utterly transporting

The constant tension between hyper self-awareness and total abandon made for a gripping concert. They would let the songs spin into extended outros while the singer would spin out of control. It was a side of the band I’d never realised existed. Boxer is a restrained, controlled album of subtle shades and quietly devastating lyrics. It never screams for your attention or loses its self control. But here “Squalor Victoria” continued on past its album ending, as Berninger let loose entirely, screaming the song title over and over. Songs from previous albums that I wasn’t familiar with rocked in a way that Boxer never did. It would be over two years before The National would release the follow up to Boxer, and so I had plenty of time to dig into their past. By the time I saw them for a second time, headlining the ATP Festival at Minehead Butlin’s in 2008, I knew every word of every song. By the end of the ATP set they were my favourite band.

There’s a line that goes all the way from my childhood to you

A decade later, I live on a different continent and am the father of two kids. Instead of the nervous, introverted and twitchy band that shuffled on stage in 2007, The National are a confident band who know how to perform, and are doing so in the plush surroundings of the modern, all-seated Queen Elizabeth Theatre. And yet the things that drew me to the band and the things that make them special really haven’t changed much. Their lives may have changed, but they’ve changed in parallel to my own, and the way they document life, and the myriad little anxieties that go along with it, still connect in the way they always did.

The fundamental tension that lies at the heart of the band is still there too, but now the tension is that of a band that knows itself almost too well. A band that is both professional yet able to dance on the edge of self-destruction. These moments come to a head every night as Berninger wanders from the stage, in the past during “Mr. November” but tonight during “Graceless”. It’s become his defining move, and every time gives the impression that he still wants to lose himself somewhere. Onstage all eyes are on him, Down there with us, he’s just one among thousands, lost in the music that his band is creating, and yet somehow lost in himself. He barely seems to notice the people around him — as if where he ends up is a total accident. He could just as easily (and actually has) end up in a deserted corridor rather than the crowd. The band watch him as much as we watch them. It has a tension all of it’s own — the band onstage, keeping the show together, while he walks through the window, shattering the artificial barrier between audience and spectator.

In truth, the Queen Elizabeth Theatre is not as well suited to the band’s rockier moments. Maybe it’s because I’m watching from the balcony, but the rush of guitars in “Mr. November” and “Terrible Love” get lost in the corners of the venue, wiping out the drums and creating a formless cacophony. But for the quieter performances, like the beautiful new song “Empire Line”, it’s perfect. The angular acoustics capture every nuance of the subtle shifts in structure and the build of the instruments in the second half of the song. Matt Berninger’s voice sounds rich and clear, and his lyrics perfectly capture the distance we can travel in ten years. In 2007 I had no children and neither did Berninger. Ten years later we both have kids and we’re both in our 40s. And he sings about the little anxieties, the minor triumphs and disasters of that journey into early fatherhood in such a simple, perfect way. He captures so much in the space of a single line, whether it’s the constant doubt about whether you were ready for fatherhood in “became a father when I was still a son” from new album Sleep Well Beast’s title track, or the things he misses out on when touring the world with his bandmates in “put your heels against the wall, I swear you got a little bit taller since I saw you” from the magnificent “I’ll Still Destroy You”.

Sleep Well Beast is another very good album by this very good band who, since the releases of their twin masterpieces Alligator and Boxer, now specialise in making very good albums. They’ve been doing this since 1999 and — while they make enough tweaks with each record to keep things interesting — the basic formula that the band is based on remains the same. Rather than explode into new territory they encroach on it. They know their strengths, and they know how to bend them and grow with them. To some this kind of consistency is boring, but in the modern connected world of instant pleasure and disposable stars, really it is pretty heroic. Especially considering this is now far from the gang it was in the mid-2000s. Family lives have thrown them to all corners of America, yet they can still come together and turn on the magic when they need to. The tension between the two extremes of the band is still there, but now it’s backed with a twitchy, anxious electronic layer. And Berninger, instead of playing the drunk at the bar who lurches between desperate romance and blunt inappropriateness, has now turned his lyrical voice to the minute tensions and arguments that can permeate the shadows of the postcard family life. It’s beautifully written and masterfully performed.

I’ve been tapping the table/I’ve been hoping to drink

Today, The National walk the line of being a highly professional touring band in which you sense dysfunction is only just below the surface. They are band so practiced at what they do that they can keep repeating the same song for six hours without fucking it up — and yet are still fighting the urge to have one more drink, to screw everything up, to pull the rug out from under everything. Their secret is to have the self control to channel all that ugly stuff into their lyrics and their choice of sounds. To you they might sound boring. Sometimes they certainly — and quite deliberately — sound bored. They’re a restless, creative band, who are unafraid to document the mundanity that permeates every day life; 9 to 5 jobs, putting on a smile for family, apologising for fucking up, and the deeper, darker places your mind can take you. They take the mistakes and the anxieties of everyday life and light them up in understated anthems, and let themselves go just often enough to leave you hanging around and waiting for the next explosion.

After the gig, my friend that I’m with apologises and says he’ll have to head home. Originally we’d planned to have a few post show beers, but his kids apparently have not yet gone to bed, and so he has to go home and help out. My head is still buzzing from the gig, and from the half bottle of wine and two beers I’d drunk before and during. I text another friend who I know was at the gig to see if he’s sticking around, but he too is heading home to relieve a babysitter. I’m struck that back in Manchester it would have been unheard of not to have a few beers after a Saturday night gig. But I’m older, my friends and I all have kids, and Vancouver is a different city. In fact, I’m suddenly struck that — as the urge to find someone, anyone, to drink a few beers with continues to niggle at me — maybe moving to Vancouver was simply an enormous act of self control. And so I reluctantly head home to bed at midnight… and six hours later, as our kids wake up before the dawn, I’m very glad I did.

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