The one time I bumped into Matt Berninger, he was too busy to talk. Well, he was singing a song and heading to the bar. He had just taken leave of the stage of the Powerstation in Auckland. The rest of the National continued playing one of the wide-screen numbers from the band’s 2010 breakthrough fifth album High Violet. He was still singing as he strode to the bar at the back of the room, microphone in hand. He swung himself over the bar, grabbed a bottle of red wine, opened it, then vaulted the bar again. He was heading back to the stage when he brushed past. He did look thirsty.
That 2012 gig was during a three-night stand at the Auckland venue. It was at a time when the Brooklyn band ‒ some members, like Berninger, had headed to New York from Ohio ‒ were trading the “critically acclaimed” tag for “biggest band in American indie rock”.
Here, that rise meant the quintet, which had first crammed onto the tiny stage of Auckland pub the Kings Arms in 2008, were playing at Vector Arena in 2014, then co-headlining Auckland City Limits at Western Springs in 2016. They played at Villa Maria Estate two years later when Berninger headed into the audience but left the winery’s vats untroubled. They are back this month for arena shows, their first since the pandemic cancelled earlier tour plans.
These days – and after 10 studio albums, two of which came out last year – the National is a band in many camps, one that has won Grammys and influenced the recording careers of Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran via the production sideline of guitarist Aaron Dessner. He produced much of Swift’s Folklore and Evermore albums (the latter of which featured all five members of the National), as well as the re-recordings of her back catalogue. More on her later.
The rise has made Berninger, 52, married with one teenage daughter, owner of a nice 200-year-old house in Connecticut from where he is talking to the Listener, an unconventional rock star: one sporting glasses, a beard, a suit and the look of a man aspiring to academic tenure rather than regularly testing how far his microphone cable will stretch in a crowded stadium.
“I feel I have to, I need to, because otherwise the whole thing is behind glass … and so going to the bars, I’ll go into the bathroom, I’ll go out by the dumpsters,” Berninger says about his outgoing nature during shows. “I get out and touch as many people and sing into as many people’s faces as possible and when that happens, there’s some collective sort of energy that goes through the whole room and goes through me and goes through everybody.
“It’s like the ocean where you just have to go in and get cold and get knocked around and you come out exhilarated. If you went to the beach, you didn’t do anything unless you got into that ocean.”
It wasn’t always like this. The National emerged in New York in the early 2000s – after Berninger jacked in his graphic design job at an ad agency – in a scene caught in a throwback period to British post-punk with bands such as the Strokes, Interpol, the Walkmen, among others. Back then, Berninger felt more comfortable taking on another 1980s/90s British anti-rock stance – shoe gazing.
“The only way I learnt how to be a good performer is, for the most part, to close my eyes and actually think about the words I’m singing and to not think about the thousands of people in front of you. It was the same way at the beginning, when there were only two or 10 or 1500 people in front of us. I would have to completely shut off and look at my shoes just to be able to focus on the songs. I didn’t absorb the thrill of performing in front of people – even if everybody was loving it and people were screaming and singing the lyrics. I couldn’t take that in, I couldn’t feel that. I was just too self-conscious and self-loathing.”
They rose above that initial scene, thanks to the band’s grandly austere, guitar-scorched, and drum-churned music, recalling the likes of Joy Division and Echo & the Bunnymen behind Berninger’s voice.
They signed to the Beggar’s Group and its 4AD imprint – the British independent label that had brought the likes of the Pixies and the Breeders out of the underground in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“One of my biggest thrills was when we first went over to London after we signed, and we stayed in this little office-slash-flat, and the Breeders had just been there. We were sleeping in these bunk beds. I couldn’t believe I’m sleeping in the same bunk that [Breeders singer] Kim Deal just slept in, like last week. This is unbelievable.”
Along the way, Berninger’s voice and commanding lyrics – some co-written with wife Carin Besser, a former books editor at the New Yorker – turned the National into something akin to a Radiohead or a Wilco. That is, a band of distinctive musical texture but one that had a singular singer-songwriter personality out front. On stage, Berninger came out of his shell and never went back.
Until, that is, a bout of deep depression and writer’s block during the pandemic. That was after his 2020 solo album Serpentine Prison, where the squalling guitars of the National were replaced by the Memphis touches of keyboardist producer Booker T Jones of Booker T & the MGs.
His battles with his mental health became something of a discussion point for the release of First Two Pages of Frankenstein, which was followed a few months later by the ironically titled Laugh Track. A long interview between Berninger and American talk show veteran David Letterman ‒ a big fan of the band who had regularly hosted them on The Late Show ‒ was mostly about their shared experience of depression and led the albums’ publicity campaign. Though some might have learned more about Letterman’s battles than Berninger’s.
“I was really happy to have him be so open and vulnerable. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I think David Letterman opened up more to me than he has to anybody else.’ So, I’m grateful to him for that.
“I had to talk about it, because the records were so infused with it, and I was writing about it. It was really a great way for us to just talk about everything.”
Not having the regular adrenalin highs of being on stage may have contributed to his crash, agrees Berninger, who found treatment and medication. But the role of earnest and exuberant frontman wasn’t something he had a natural affinity for, exactly.
“I’d never been a performer and never did, you know, high school theatre or anything like that. It’s always been a kind of struggle. The act of walking on stage every night – nobody in the band is like, ‘I can’t wait to get out there.’ Everybody is nervous as shit and stressed out. And you get out there and your chemistry changes in that process … in that strange experience of performing for several hours in front of people. Then you have to go turn it off and try to sleep and then do it again. I don’t think there was anything healthy about any part of the lifestyle.
“It does create a strange, self-identity loop – you have to be genuine, and if I am on stage and I feel like I’m faking it, I hate myself. So, I have to get to a place where it’s real then it’s over. Sometimes, you have a hard time kind of turning back into a person a little bit and so that’s a big part of it.”
Today in Connecticut, where he and his family shifted after stints in Brooklyn and a decade in Los Angeles, Berninger says it’s been snowing. He laughs when the Listener says it sounds very The Ice Storm, the 1997 Ang Lee movie about nice Connecticut families behaving badly, despite the chill, in the early 1970s.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what it looks like right now. I haven’t been to any key parties but it’s very much like that.”
The band’s two New Zealand arena shows start the National’s touring commitments for 2024. They’ve become this era’s R.E.M. ‒ an American underground band that slowly took the high ground.
“We actually learnt a lot from them,” says Berninger, remembering they toured with the group late in its career. “That’s the band, in our minds that we held up to be – even in their choice to stop ‒ we still think of that as a perfect model, but we’re not quite there yet.
“I’ve been in the band for 25 years and I pinch myself – my job is to sit around, smoke weed, drink a little wine, look into the fireplace, listen to music, just think about stuff, and text it to myself. That’s my job … and some people end up wanting to hear it. I could have done something else. But I’m so happy that I stayed with it, and we kept chasing from the beginning – and it was really hard at the beginning.”
Berninger isn’t the only one in the band with an advertising and graphics design background. Which prompts the question: has the band, in fact, been a 25-year campaign for … what exactly?
“What is the National selling?” answers Berninger with a laugh.
“What is our product that I’m trying to write jingles for? Yeah, I don’t know. For me, the music artists that I fell in love with were the ones who could express a very abstract feeling and you knew exactly what they meant, even though it doesn’t mean anything on the page or anywhere. Like when I was sitting there and listening to Tom Waits, or whoever, and thinking, ‘This person understands me more than most people I know.’ You just feel like you’re not alone in the world. And I think that’s what this whole project is about.”
It’s a project that through the years has drawn in plenty of outsiders. The 2023 albums feature the voices of Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, Rosanne Cash, Bon Iver … and on the his-and-hers duet Alcott, Taylor Swift.
“I’ve been a fan of Taylor Swift for a long time. In the past few years, she has become even a bigger gravitational force in the whole industry and it’s a gravitational force that we are definitely attracted to and fans of. So, it’s been a really fun ride with her.”
Has that connection benefited the band?
“The demographic of our crowd has been pretty diverse for a long time. For the first 10 years, it was mostly dudes, but now our audiences represent a pretty wide swathe of people. I think that a significant number of Taylor’s fans are in their 30s and 40s – like ours, so there’s more of a crossover between her fanbase and ours than I think we actually realised.”
Talking of gravity, a fun fact: Berninger is possibly one of the only people on Earth who has met both Swift and Neil Armstrong. His Uncle Howard was the astronaut’s doctor in Ohio and Armstrong was a family friend who would come over to play pool. On Berninger family visits, he got pool lessons from the first man to walk on the moon. How’s his game these days?
“It’s real slow, the balls move real slow. He didn’t teach me to be a good player, but he gave me a couple of pointers.”
The National plays at Auckland’s Spark Arena, February 24 (supported by Fazerdaze), and Wellington’s TSB Arena (supported by the Beths) on February 25, as part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts..
