“Even our abstract characters are personal,” singer Matt Berninger admits a few months after beginning work on The National’s fifth studio album. “They’re just a melding of your own obsessions, insecurities or fears. It might not be exactly true but it definitely comes from a true source.” Over the past decade, Berninger and his bandmates (brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Bryan and Scott Devendorf) have used those characters as the basis for one of indie rock’s most intelligent and introspective bodies of work. Though Berninger acknowledges that the band members’ divergent backgrounds of classical and jamband have now made a bigger impression than on previous records, the “songs are still about obsessing over romance and the insecurities of growing up.” “Those things don’t just go away,” he says.

Timing Is Not Everything

We’ve been working for several months in this little studio we built in a garage behind Aaron’s house in Brooklyn. I’ve been writing to the sketches those guys have been sending me – so we’ve all been working at home on ProTools and passing stuff around, and now we’re spending a lot more time in the studio. We are waiting to see what will eventually rise to the top. In the past, we’ve zeroed in on ten or so songs pretty quickly. This time we’re doing it a bit looser and not really belaboring any one idea too much – just writing a lot of stuff in volumes, being really relaxed about it and not worrying. We don’t have any release dates or studio schedules, and in a weird way, we’ve actually been writing faster because we’re not thinking about when we’re going to finish the record. It doesn’t matter if our record comes out this year or next year – it’s just gotta be a good record.

Melodies vs. Lyrics

We played two song ideas we have in the mix at a Tibet House benefit [concert at Carnegie Hall] in February. A lot of our songs are still just melodies and mumbled syllables that aren’t actual words. I never write lyrics to a song and then try to sing it to music. Usually, I will flip though things and find melodies. This time, I’ve been singing melodies without worrying about words at all and then later trying to come up with actual English words. I’ve even been borrowing lyrics from Yo La Tengo, New Model Army, David Bowie and Nirvana, and then changing them later so we don’t get sued [laughs]. I used to just belabor the lyrics – it felt sort of overwritten but that is happening less and less on each one of our records. This time around, melody is far more important than the words.

Short Stories

I’ve been trying not to think of records as 12 different ideas and this time around that’s even more of the way I’m trying to write. Many times our records have loose narratives, connected scraps and different songs will lock into each other. Sometimes I’ll link back to other songs like those “29 years” lyrics [which appear on the band’s first and fourth albums] and often the same line feels very different in each song.

Not Quite Classic Rock

I avoided screaming on [2007’s] Boxer because I wanted it to sound different than [2005’s] Alligator, but we’ve thrown all those strategies out the window and are following our whims. Certain songs have this not quite classic rock familiarity to them that we’ve never had before. We don’t have these abstract debates that we used to have about our image or direction. I always wanted to be in a cool weirdo indie rock band, whereas Bryce came from a more classical background. But, we’ve kind of dropped the debates about our identity and all that baggage, and it’s actually made it much easier to mix high art with some grungy G-chords.
Communities

Kids find these musical communities to identify with in high school, which is great because that gives them a sense of self – I used to identify myself as being more of a “cool artsy kid” than a jamband kid. But now we’re all in our mid-30s, and we’re starting to really pull from all the things we used to love and [trying] to find new sounds as well – so there could be some Grateful Dead moments on the next record.