It’s the day after The National plays New York City’s Radio City Music Hall and the group’s lead singer, Matt Berninger, is sitting inside Jimmy’s Corner, a boxing bar located a few blocks south from the venue. The walls feature images of famous fights and portraits of boxers with their gloves up. The small tables in the back are adorned with faded images of the bar’s patrons on their tops. It’s mid-afternoon.

“I’m glad that it’s behind us,” he says of the Radio City gig. “The anxiety of a show like that kind of floats over it for a while. We have a lot of shows to do, but that was a big deal.”

Anxiety is a key part of the singer’s creativity, both onstage and off. “We’ve begun to learn how to embrace it and even allow the anxiety to become part of the show,” he says.

Typically a quintet of musicians plays surrounding Berninger onstage – identical twins Aaron and Bryce Dessner (guitars), brothers Bryan and Scott Devendorf (drums and bass, respectively) and a touring keyboardist – while he sings earnestly with his eyes closed, a rhythmic, husky tenor of a voice billowing out over the audience. In between verses, he’ll often zigzag around the stage in fits and starts, hands clutching his upper arms as he paces between imaginary walls like a mental patient in a padded cell.

The physicality of his performances plays to the songs’ inherent worries. “The songs are about things that are filled with unresolved tensions that need to have some sort of solution, whether it’s a sonic explosion, scream or swelling string moment,” he offers. “That’s what these songs need – it’s their nature.”

Five albums in – the most recent, High Violet was released in May and charted at No. 3 on The Billboard 200 chart – The National have learned to trust their instincts despite their rather laborious nature. But it took two records, an EP and a change in attitude to get there.

The five members of The National hail from Cincinnati. The Dessners met Bryan Devendorf in middle school while playing basketball. Bryan had already taken up drumming and the brothers were both playing guitar. “I started drum lessons at the local music shop and my first teacher was Steve Earle who was in the band Afghan Whigs but left after the album Gentlemen,” says Bryan. “I’d never heard of the Afghan Whigs and I went to see him play. I realized you can go from the practice room to the bandstand – it’s a real endeavor.”

Scott and Bryan played the Dessner’s junior high dance in a band called Pale Faced Jimmy. By high school, Bryan was making music with the twins in a band called Equinox, which played a lot of Allman Brothers Band and Grateful Dead covers and featured the singing and saxophone playing of Kevin Seal who is now the executive producer at Internet radio site Pandora. (Earlier this year, Seal told The Indiana Musical Archive, “Equinox sounded a bit like Traffic. Sorta jammy and the product of listening to a lot of Phish and classic rock radio.” )

The twins and Bryan continued making music in college in a band called Project Nimh with three musicians from New Orleans. “It was a formative experience,” says the drummer of the band. “It was a way to keep the dream alive and kept the torch burning.” It dissolved around 1998.

Meanwhile, Scott and Berninger met and formed a band called Nancy while studying art at the University of Cincinnati. After graduation, they moved to New York City for graphic design jobs. Bryan had moved to the city too, pursuing work as an editor at the publisher Soho Press. Bryce was teaching guitar in the city as well while Aaron was nearby at Yale University working at the Holocaust Archive. Scott and Matt wanted to make more music but needed a drummer, so Scott called his brother. Bryan then called Bryce who called Aaron. And The National was born in 1999.

The band’s self-titled, self-released debut came in 2001 before they had ever played a live show. “The first record was us seeing, ‘Hey, is there anything here worth being a band about?’” says Berninger. Songs like “Cold Girl Fever,” “American Mary,” “Bitters & Absolut” and “Anna Freund” displayed the ingredients of a band with significant potential. The group had already formulated its sound – a precise, almost baroque brand of indie rock with Berninger’s voice in the center buttressed by a variety of instrumentation that managed to sound spacious yet invitingly warm. And while the singer would refine his lyrics in subsequent albums into Dickinson-like abstraction and poetics – evocative images splintered with variety of off-kilter literary devices and anthropomorphic juxtapositions – the initial sketches of soured and pained human experience revealed themselves.

The following Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers two years later – there might not be a more fitting title for a National album – saw the band build on the debut’s blueprint. “Sad Songs was us trying to figure out what kind of band we wanted to be,” Berninger says. “We tried a million different things.” Precise guitar figures, sonic layering and a rhythmic intensity defined the Peter Katis-produced effort. They also included a menagerie of electronic atmospherics that floated through the songs like dandelion blossoms.

Numbers like “Slipping Husband” ( “You’ll end up talking to the ghost/ Of your wife as if you knew her/ Your eyes will put her everywhere” ) and “Available” ( “Did you dress me down and liquor me up/ To make me last for the minute” ) heard Berninger’s vocals occasionally spill into a cathartic howl. The gut-wrenching effect, with the band at a full gallop, was riveting.

Finding success in England and France, the group decided, according to Bryan, to “strike while the iron was hot.” The result was 2004’s often-overlooked seven-song Cherry Tree EP. “It was where we were like, ‘OK, if we’re going to do this, then let’s try to be one of the best bands in the world – why not?” says Berninger. “We knew at that point we never going to be The Strokes. We also knew we were never going to be Pavement or The Sex Pistols. Those loose, crazy, fun, capturing-magic bands.”

Those bands’ personalities seemed more off-the-cuff, natural and casual to The National. “We looked at bands like Wilco and Radiohead,” says the singer. “Somewhere between those bands was where we thought we might someday try to get to.”

The entire band agrees that Cherry Tree was a tipping point. While fans may pick the EP’s triumphant “All the Wine” as the touchstone, the group unanimously points to “All Dolled Up in Straps” as the most valuable and assuring. A slow, woozy, waltz-like song, it reveals – as does the album as a whole – the members to be musical tacticians like their aforementioned influences.

Now signed to the heralded Beggar’s Banquet label, the band group delivered its third album, Alligator, in 2005 to an overwhelming amount of superlatives from the press. And, to be fair, it’s an incredibly strong record from start to finish. While Berninger’s vocals remained largely the same – rough-hewn, gritty and manic – the band’s structures around them grew in elegance ( “Daughters of the Soho Riots,” “City Middle” ), dimensionality ( “Secret Meeting,” “Looking for Astronauts” ) and intensity ( “Mr. November,” “Abel” ).

“The things that got our band noticed we largely avoided altogether on Boxer,” says Berninger in reference to the band’s following album released two years later. “Like ‘Abel’ and me screaming my head off. Boxer was a different sort of record and there was anxiety: Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by putting out this dark and stately record and not just making a brash, screamy rock record?”

The National recording process is, by all accounts, not an easy one. “It’s a psychologically stressful situation,” says Bryan. “I’m paraphrasing our co-producer Peter Katis, [but he said something like] ‘Making art should be hard and painful. If it weren’t, everybody would do it and everybody would be successful at it.” (Katis has been involved in every album besides the debut). Berninger concurs, noting that the process is “stressful” and “we fight over everything” but that it’s the only way they know how to do it.

For each album cycle, the Dessners – mostly Aaron – will send Berninger 60 to 100 pieces of music for him to listen to and see if he connects with. “Often there’s no space for me to do anything,” says the singer. “So I’ll say, ‘I like this one but can you take out all the piano, all the guitars and cut this section?’”

Out of the songs that get to the demo stage – meaning a fairly complete song structure with a sense of the vocal intonation that will go over it even if its simply scatted – they will typically throw out 12 to 20. “We write a lot and 70 to 80 percent of the stuff we write – both from a music perspective and from lyrics – we just don’t like,” says Berninger. “They’re lame and it takes a long time to find something that makes you excited and moves you in some visceral or emotional way.”

It is clear that “Fake Empire,” which opens Boxer, achieved that type of quality. “We weren’t surprised when it became a major part of the live show,” says the singer. (The song’s cinematic and emotional swell was so strong that Obama’s presidential campaign used an instrumental version of it in a television ad).

Other standouts from Boxer include those that Berninger wrote with his wife Carin Besser – “Brainy,” “Ada” and “Gospel,” although during a performance in Brooklyn in March, the singer noted that she also helped with “Slow Show” and “Apartment Story.”

For the recording of the new High Violet, there were two notable changes: the band now has its own studio in Brooklyn , which gave them more freedom to adjust songs and they debuted songs onstage before cutting them to record.

Berninger says that five songs slated for High Violet were played prior to recording them. Three made it to the final album – “England,” “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” – while two “died on the vine” – “Wake Up Yer Saints” and “The Blue Sky” (a.k.a. “Believe Me” or “A Thousand Black Cities” ).

“I sometimes worry that if we start taking something out and playing it live before we really know what we’re going to do with it, it could put the song in more jeopardy [of being recorded and released].” He cites “Bloodbuzz Ohio” in particular, which had a horn section when played live early on, but still seemed to be searching for its identity when it came to the studio. "There was something about the [horn] fanfare there that felt like “Fake Empire 2” but not as powerful," he suggests. “It just didn’t work right for that song but a lot of people were really, really attached to it because it had been there for a while.”

Bryan admits to having mixed feelings about playing songs live first but generally, he says, they’re the opposite of Berninger’s. “We rarely do it and I’ve always wanted to do it,” he admits. “If you figure out how to play them and then record them, maybe you’d get something a little more visceral and raw.”

As part of his evidence, the drummer recently saw a screening of the film Warrior starring Nick Nolte due in November. Nolte plays a recovering alcoholic and former boxer who tries to make amends with his family by training his son to fight in mixed martial arts competitions. The National’s “About Today” provides the sound to the film’s centerpiece – not the studio version off Cherry Tree but the live one from the band’s The Virginia EP. “The live version was more of an extended musical coda that worked behind this sequence of moments in the movie,” Bryan says. (The group’s music was also part of the acclaimed new documentary Racing Dreams).

“I don’t want to worry about how we’re going to do it live when we’re in the studio,” counters Berninger of figuring out songs live before recording them. “I think you put handcuffs on if you’re worrying about what it’s going to sound like live because you’re making a record right now – you’re not putting on a show.”

The results of the push-and-pull that make up High Violet take longer to reveal themselves than on the previous two records. The bombast is tempered ( “Conversation 16,” “Bloodbuzz Ohio” ) while the ethereality is turned up courtesy of composed string and horn sections ( “Little Faith,” “Runaway” ) along with angelic backing vocals ( “Sorrow,” “Afraid of Everyone” ).

The Dessners’ meticulous, interwoven guitars and Bryan’s polyrhythmic drumming still provide the foundation while Scott’s bass seems to slipstream behind singer’s vocals more than ever. The songs are nuanced – if you don’t listen to them loud or with headphones, you’ll likely miss much of their detail. One song, “You Were a Kindness,” from the sessions remains unreleased ( “Sin-Eaters” and “Walk Off” appear as B-Sides).

Berninger’s lyrics have changed their tone as well. While the hallmarks of his writing, like insect references, are still there – “I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees” or “It’s a terrible love and I’m walking with spiders” – the songs’ narrator seems to be coping with his failures and loss, appreciative to have had something to lose in the first place.

“The bitterness of a relationship song like ‘Available’ – I don’t think I’ll ever feel that bitter again,” says Berninger of the Sad Songs composition. "I’m not going to write a tough, mean song because I know people love those kinds of songs. I could never do that. I have to write about things that are true, at least on an emotional level, and that’s why I think being married and having a kid has made my emotional core completely different.
“I don’t care as much about being a glowing young ruffian or single bachelor Casanova,” he continues, referencing Alligator’s “Racing Like a Pro.” “All that stuff, it’s no longer something that has any weight to it – in my soul, head or anything – because I’m right where I want to be.”

As Berninger walks up Avenue of the Americas after leaving the bar, Radio City’s marquee comes into view. The band’s name has already been removed, supplanted by New Kids on The Block and Widespread Panic.

Just last night he was playing to 6,000 people there, climbing across one end of the first balcony to the other as he sang “Mr. November” toward the end of the show. “It’s like, ‘OK, the show’s almost over, we’ve survived another one’ and that feels good,” he says of his forays into the audience. “There’s a big desire – a physical need – to get in there with the people you’ve been standing in front of for an hour and a half.”

Not that the show was flawless for him. A third of the way through, he repeated the same line twice during “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks.” Berninger thinks he likely lost concentration by looking at the crowd too much – perhaps questioning why a few people were sitting down in the front.

“If you come to enough shows, you’ll see us have these minor meltdowns,” he says. “They’re quiet meltdowns, they’re all internal mostly, but you can see it. The tension is palpable.” Whereas a few years ago the anxiety of such a moment might have ruined a performance for Berninger, he can now handle the turbulence.
“It’s still excruciating when you’re in that moment, but at least I’ve been able to put my head on the other side and say, ‘You’ll get past this,’” he says. “‘Maybe you can pull it together on the next song or the one after that.’”