Photo Credit: Graham MacIndoe

Despite being spread across five geographic areas, the members of The National are staying busy throughout the global pandemic, shifting to their attention to a range of solo bands and long-lingering projects

Note: This piece, which appears in our October-November issue, precedes the surprise recording and release of the new Taylor Swift album, evermore.

***

LONG POND

Drawing from his steady group of collaborators, Aaron Dessner brings the worlds of Taylor Swift and the Grateful Dead one step closer, thanks to folklore.

In late July, Taylor Swift broke the internet by dropping folklore—a new album of lush, folk-oriented songs, crafted with the help of The National multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner—with almost no advance warning. Created remotely in studios around the country during the early months of the global pandemic, the at-times somber, reflective set—which recasts Swift’s stadium-ready voice and inherently personal stories over some very National-sounding beds of music—perfectly captured the most isolating parts of the unprecedented quarantine. The unlikely pairing also seemed to shock pretty much everybody, including some of folklore’s actual contributors, who had no idea they were on a Taylor Swift album, while working on the tracks.

“[Aaron] said, ‘I’m working on a majorlabel project. I’ll let you know more when I can, thanks,’” National drummer Bryan Devendorf, who contributed drum programming to the beat-happy “seven,” says of his involvement in the secretive sessions. “There was a guide track and he was like, ‘Send me a version of this without the piano.’ I’m so dim—I had no idea who it was for. But my wife knew it immediately. She was like, ‘Oh, it’s Taylor Swift,’ and I was like, ‘Nah.’”

The roots of the left-field collaboration date back to 2014, when The National served as the musical guest on a particularly Brooklyn, N.Y.-centric episode of SNL. Since Swift’s friend Lena Dunham was hosting the show, she stopped by and met the band. They connected again a few years later when Swift attended a National show at Brookyn’s Prospect Park and caught up with Aaron and his twin brother, The National guitarist and composer Bryce.

While hunkered down at his rustic home in Hudson, N.Y., Aaron received a text from Swift about working together; they started tossing around ideas and quickly had enough tunes for a full-length album. (Longtime Swift producer Jack Antonoff—who came through the festival ranks at a similar time as The National, before crossing into the pop world with fun.—served as the LP’s other primary creative voice.)

Making good use of Long Pond studio, the chapel-like space he built on his property a few years ago, Aaron recorded a slew of tracks as the novel coronavirus reared its head—with his family just a few yards away—and started passing them around to select friends in his orbit. Bryce supplied a bit of orchestration, Bryan sent back those drum tracks, onetime touring National accompanist Thomas Bartlett played keys, The National’s horn section lent their services in different ways and Josh Kaufman, who worked with the Dessners on their Day of the Dead tribute, recorded his guitar and harmonica in a closet while his six year old was sleeping. At Swift’s request, Aaron also asked Justin Vernon, another pal, to sing on “exile.”

However, in order to keep folklore under wraps, Aaron remained vague about what exactly he was working on right up until its release. He even skirted the question when his young daughter asked him if he knew Swift personally.

“Because it’s Aaron, it did not surprise me—involving me remotely was the surprising part,” Kaufman jokes. “Once I heard the music, it made sense. [Aaron and Swift] clearly have a deep cosmic connection musically and are both able to coax each other in a beautiful way.”

Bartlett—who also joined Kaufman and members of The National for the 2012 summit with Bob Weir that led to the Dead guitarist’s 2016 LP, Blue Mountain— says that he was in the U.K. when Aaron first reached out and was unable to commit until he returned home to New York in July.

“Aaron didn’t really give me any instructions—he will often send me things to play on with a note like, ‘scribble on this if you have a sec,’ or ‘add a bit of magic sprinkling,’” he says.

In certain ways, The National’s evolution from a five-person band to a more amorphous collective has been a long time coming. When they worked with filmmaker Mike Mills and a mix of guest singers on 2019’s I Am Easy to Find, the group posited that they had long been more than “five guys in a band.”

“In the early days of The National, it was almost painful how uncool we were— we were not at all with the ‘in crowd’ or community in New York at that time,” Aaron says. “We didn’t belong to the new wave of rock that came out of New York City—The Strokes, Interpol, The Walkmen, Yeah Yeah Yeahs—around the time we started. But those bands were not outward-looking or collaborative. I guess we never fell in love with our own shadow because we didn’t have much of one. So even when we started to build a community around us, we relied on talented friends, like the Australian composer Padma Newsome of Clogs, my brother’s avant-garde chamber group. He was a big part of our community, helping arrange our songs and touring with us beginning in 2002 or 2003.”

The National songwriter says that he remembers “the feeling when we would make recordings—we would hit a wall sometimes, whether musically or technically, and need to reach outside of the five of us.” He notes that now big-name boosters like Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry and Sufjan Stevens were initially fans of Clogs, not The National, and that Bartlett was actually a journalist who had written about the group before they invited him to play keys on Boxer. “Quite literally the first thing I ever recorded with them was the piano part on ‘Fake Empire,’” he says.

Aaron and Bryce also started expanding their scope in the late ‘00s when they put together the Dark Was the Night benefit set for Red Hot, an organization that Aaron previously worked at. Likewise, Bryce’s MusicNOW festival in Cincinnati, which started in 2004, was designed to encourage new collaborations and, as Aaron says, “stepping outside of your day job musically.”

The National frontman Berninger believes the collective vibe dates back to the very beginning of the band. “The National is made up of the ashes of two other bands,” he says. “And then we started pooling in people—it’s a giant network.”

He’s referring to Nancy, his college-days project with Scott, and Project Nim, Bryan and the Dessners’ onetime 10,000 Maniacs-leaning ensemble. Foreshadowing what was to come, the latter act had a knack for grassroots promotion and even played New York’s Wetlands. (They also turned heads with their take on “Me and Bobby McGee.”)

“No one in The National asks for permission, or needs to give their blessing, for anything. And that’s how we stay together,” Berninger says. “We’re five old friends who have a lot of ideas, a lot of ambitions. And a lot of the time, those things align; sometimes they don’t. Any time that anybody has tried to put a leash on someone, they have quickly gotten bitten. The five of us are undomesticated creatures. The barn doors have long fallen off; some creatures never leave, some creatures never come back.”

It ties to the band’s overall identity, too—at a time when The National’s diaspora stretches throughout the U.S. and Europe. “We are a New York band, even though we are all from Ohio and none of us live in New York [anymore],” Berninger says. “But we weren’t five dudes who started in a room; Aaron and I weren’t in a room together writing songs until years after we both moved to New York. The National is a flexible idea.”

That idea also inspired Aaron and Vernon to start the band Big Red Machine and launch 37d03d, a more formal collective that encompasses a label, events and other happenings. Aaron also altered his approach after he spent a few years in Grateful Dead land, between Day of the Dead and his work with Weir. The looser spirit he experienced during that time has informed his ability to break down the barriers between stylistic scenes.

“Most of the music I listen to, whatever the ‘genre,’ has experimental qualities and is pushing in some direction, across boundaries. And it is increasingly hard to classify that music as one thing or another—I never really accepted that I was just an indie-rocker or something,” he says. “Taylor and I often talked about how, while making folklore, the way we clicked felt like the most natural thing to both of us, as if everything we had done our whole lives had prepared us to make this record, without ever being in the same room. There have been so many moments when I’ve realized the benefit of stepping outside my comfort zone or putting myself in a position where maybe, in a moment of self-doubt, I might feel out of my league or like I will humiliate myself.”

He thinks back to a time when Bryce convinced him to perform a guitar concerto with an orchestra.

“I was so terrified that my hands were shaking, surrounded by all of these insanely technical and trained classical musicians who sight-read perfectly,” Aaron says. “But Bryce said, ‘Just relax. No one knows how your part is written except for the conductor. So even if you make a mistake, no one will know.’”

He’s taken that freethinking approach to Long Pond, opening the studio to both his closest pals and jazz cats like Alan Braufman. During the pandemic, Aaron and Bryce even supplied the music and served as producers on a record designed to accompany their sister Jessica’s collection of poetry.

“Jessica has always been a huge artistic influence on us,” Bryce says. “We think of her as the real artist in the family. She recently released a beautiful book of poems called Complete Mountain Almanac with Ergo Press that she wrote during her yearlong struggle with breast cancer. It was a very intense family experience. It was also like healing together, in a way, because we could confront the experience through the music.”

(The Paris-based Bryce recently returned to the stage, taking part in an orchestral performance in Rome. “To play music, and also to connect with an audience, is something we had come to take for granted, either with the band or with the other things that we do,” he says. “So it was really meaningful to reconnect with that energy.”)

In terms of sales and broad appeal, folklore will likely forever be tied to the age of COVID-19, the rare album that was recorded in various silos but still possessed a unifying touch. And, though the LP continues to bring his music into stores and onto radio stations that have never even heard of The National, Aaron simply sees it as another family affair.

“Very early on, Taylor told me not to try to be anyone other than myself and that she didn’t see any hierarchy with how her music is made or mixed. She didn’t want to sound as she had sounded before—she wanted the songs to be as emotionally moving and artistically compelling as possible. That was the only concern,” he says. “If that meant that they needed to be warmer, darker and more organic than a previous record, then it didn’t matter. The more that the boundaries between types of music, and all the ego associated with that, dissolve, the better.”

**

MATT BERNINGER

The National’s baritone singer unleashes his own rock-and-roll circus with the help of a Stax legend.

A few years ago, Matt Berninger was shopping at Los Angeles’ Timewarp Records when he had an “aha moment” that ended up taking his career in an entirely unexpected direction.

“I decided to repurchase Willie Nelson’s Stardust because it was one of my dad’s favorite records—it was in the DNA of my childhood,” the baritone-voiced National singer says in late September, while discussing his reintroduction to the 1977 set of pop covers that ultimately inspired his solo debut, Serpentine Prison. “I flipped it over and, at the very top, it said, ‘Produced and arranged by Booker T. Jones.’ I never really knew that—and that’s when I started cooking this album up, saying, ‘I wanna make a record like that.’”

As it turns out, Berninger already had a loose association with Jones; through some industry connections, he landed a spot on Jones’ 2011 LP, Representing Memphis, singing the album’s title track alongside the late Sharon Jones.

“When they asked me to try a few things for the album, I said, ‘We’re talking about Booker T. Jones, right?,’” Berninger says with a laugh. “I wasn’t even sure until I got to the studio in Manhattan— when the elevator doors opened, Lauryn Hill was standing there and Lou Reed had just left. Sharon and I sang into the microphone at the same time. She was much shorter than me, so the microphone was set up to her height and I had to lean over like a right angle to sing, as if I was in that famous Norman Rockwell painting. She was just a tornado of joy and sunshine.”

Despite the surreal day, Berninger didn’t keep in touch with Jones so, around Christmas in 2018, he sent a blind inquiry about working with the Booker T. & the M.G.’s leader through the management tab on his website. And, to the keyboardist’s surprise, the next day, Jones’ daughter— who looks after his career—hit him back.

“She said, ‘He’s finishing his memoir right now, but what did you have in mind?’” Berninger says. “So I said, ‘Anything from just playing on it to producing and arranging it,’” and she wrote back: ‘He’d love to do that.’”

With Stardust in mind, Berninger started sharing a selection of “standards” from his orbit with Jones, as well as a few “half-baked” originals he’d been working on with a mix of running buddies from throughout his career.

“He started asking for more originals and, by the time we got into the studio, we were working on those more than the covers,” he says, noting that they laid down versions of tunes that ranged from expected (Morphine’s “In Spite of Me” and The Velvet Underground’s “European Son”) to unexpected (Eddie Floyd’s “Big Bird,” at Jones’ insistence) and unfortunate (Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” which they gave up on after 20 minutes). “By the time we were done, we had 10 originals and we said, ‘Let’s make that record.’” (Jones explains that they relegated the covers to bonus material or giveaways “for charity.”)

However, despite pivoting to a proper solo project, one thing that Berninger— who writes most of The National’s lyrics with his wife, Carin Besser, and has already tested out the side-project waters with his New Wave/post-punk outfit EL VY—hoped to avoid was starting a new band. “Nobody involved wanted that— me least of all,” he says. “This was just a collaboration”

“We went out there [to California] in June of last year,” National bassist Scott Devendorf says of the sessions, which awarded him the chance to observe up close as Jones was producing the record. “And then we got busy with The National again.”

While he was vaguely familiar with The National, Jones says, “I decided not to listen to The National so that I wouldn’t be influenced by them. I took what Matt sent me to the gym and started listening, and it was apparent that, in each of these songs, he had a unique way of describing these different situations. But it was the melodies that got me first.”

The final result features contributions from a slew of the singer’s favorite musicians and songwriters, including Devendorf and fellow college pal Mike Brewer, as well as The Walkmen’s Matt Barrick and Walter Martin, Andrew Bird, Hayden Desser, Gail Ann Dorsey, Teddy Jones, EL VY collaborator Brent Knopf, Sean O’Brien, the National horn section of Ben Lanz and Kyle Resnick and, as a nod to the project’s roots, Willie Nelson harp player Mickey Raphael, among many others. Berninger originally toyed with calling the combo Matt Berninger and Friends or Matt Berninger’s Serpentine Prison—a “Matt Berninger’s rock-and-roll circus sort of thing,” Berninger says. But, ultimately, Devendorf convinced him to drop the apostrophe.

“I had some hesitation, like, ‘Is it cool to do this?’ but then I thought, ‘Matt Berninger’s Serpentine Prison just sounds stupid.’ Once it clicked in my brain that this was going to be a solo album, I was really happy about that,” The National frontman says. “As a producer, Booker was so kind and relaxed in the middle of the chaos. He just was this calm center of the tornado and was able to make all these songs that were from all these different writers—these orphan songs—feel like they had the same DNA.”

The final result—which was released in October on the new imprint Jones and Berninger started, Book’s Records, in conjunction with Concord—recalls some of The National’s early, more strippeddown and folk-leaning records, before the group began adding grandiose production and eclectic orchestral, electronic and classic-rock influences to their sound. Yet, the album’s lyrics reflect the perspective on a husband and father on the edge of 50.

“When I had my daughter, and in preparation of having a child, the chemistry of my brain changed,” Berninger says. “And my wife and I had a miscarriage before that—that also changed the chemistry of my mind. It made me think about why I’m here. My thoughts about what I’m supposed to do with my life totally changed. Everything else changed, too. We are all evolving and rewiring.”

Jones also sees a direct parallel between his work on Serpentine Prison and Stardust over 40 years ago. “Matt and Willie both have an almost effortless ability to talk about relationships, especially sensitive relationships,” he says. “In just a few words, you get the context of what is going on; they are both wordsmiths.” And while Jones mostly sits back and lets Berninger dig into those stories, he does let out a Stax-worthy solo on the reflective, album-highlight “One More Second.”

“Booker’s divining rod is always toward emotion—not academic musicality,” Berninger says. “I recently asked him how he would define himself musically, like, ‘I’m an indie-rock guy,’ and he had never heard the term ‘indie-rock.’ He just takes the melody where it wants to go.”

Berninger points to “Collar of Your Shirt,” a tune he wrote with Martin, as an example of Jones’ delicate touch and straightforward approach. “He said, ‘You only have two acts of a film here— we need to finish this one,’ so we just followed Jones’ Hammond. He’s always been a lyricist. He’s always been the singer in the M.G.’s. And he is a beautiful singer. But he was discouraged from doing that because Stax had a thing going. And they didn’t want Booker to write lyrics and sing, even though he did want to. So I think he found his own way to express that.”

While Berninger hopes to tour behind his unintentional solo debut when live music resumes and has pondered making a disco record with Jones, he’s also been enjoying his time at home in Los Angeles. He says that he’s been watching tons of music and art-house documentaries and balancing those cerebral exercises with action movies and lots of TV. He was also writing “like crazy” until the end of the summer.

“I had been writing at this manic pace for five years, between Cyrano de Bergerac—the musical I did with Carin and Aaron and Bryce [Dessner]—the last two National albums, Serpentine Prison, my brother’s film [on The National] and a television show we had been cooking up,” he says. “I finally burned out and the irony is that so much of Serpentine Prison is about burnout. Making this record, I had way too many things going on in the first place. I probably should not have taken on another big project, but I ended up taking on a giant project about how I take on too many projects. But thank God I did—I feel totally rejuvenated musically, and artistically, because of this experience. I’ve felt creatively satisfied for a long time, but, with this one, the walls around all the creative possibilities just moved out a hundred yards. The National was on such a massive bullet train to capitalism, everything was going at this destructive speed, and maybe not in the right direction.”

He pauses to think back to 9/11, when he was living in New York and The National were first getting started. “The pandemic is a continuation of a series of traumas that my generation and, especially, the generation after me, has had to endure—geopolitical fascism, strong men, racism and white supremacy rearing up everywhere. We are handing people in their 20s and 30s and those who are younger—like my daughter— a flaming dumpster fire. And everyone’s in a serious state of having to rewire and rethink everything—where we’re headed and why. So that’s affected every part of my thought process. So, for however long this pandemic goes on, it’s important to take care of ourselves and each other— and listen to each other and try to reconnect, especially since we’re even more disconnected than usual. We used to at least be able to be on the subway together, in rooms together and in big crowds together. We used to be around people who aren’t like us.”

**

ROYAL GREEN

Ohio-based drummer Bryan Devendorf drops a long-gestating, homegrown project full of early-National rarities.

Bryan Devendorf has been working on his solo debut for almost as long as The National have been a band.

“I did most of the recording about 20 years ago—I’d make these little burnt CD-Rs and pass them out to friends,” the drummer says of his long-gestating Royal Green project, which finally released their self-titled debut in August. “Then, about 10 years ago, I found one of the CDs in my dad’s old-school CD changer in his car. And I was like, ‘I kind of like this.’ But it turns out that was the only copy that still existed.”

When Devendorf co-founded The National in 1999, the group was primarily a recording project and they didn’t play their first club show for a while. “Aaron [Dessner] and I were living in New Haven so we’d travel down to Matt [Berninger]’s apartment in New York, where he and my brother Scott were writing,” Bryan says. “We had two friends, Mike Brewer and Jeff Salem, helping us out, but Bryce hadn’t joined full-time yet.”

Around the same time as The National’s public debut, Bryan started messing around with the ProTools rig Bryce had setup in his bedroom, initially dubbing the project “Shit Attack.” He attempted a rehearsal for a possible live show but when that didn’t go over so well, he put the idea to bed for a while as The National began their slow ascent through the indie-rock ranks. However, after rediscovering the tracks, Bryan decided they still had legs. The only problem was his original files had long been erased.

“The computer was gone—all the original ProTools sessions were gone. So I just sent my buddy Nate Martinez that CD-R,” he says. “He added to those files and I did some percussion here and there. It was a Frankenstein project.”

Bryan and Martinez supplied most of the album’s instrumentation themselves, with the drummer also showing off his skills on various synths and nylon-string guitars—as well as his lead vocals.

Aaron added guitar to the dreamy focus track “Breaking the River” and they also enlisted longtime associate Josh Kaufman to play bass. In recent years, Kaufman has recorded with Bryan as part of the all-star Day of the Dead tribute and the longtime Deadheads toured together as part of Bob Weir’s Campfire Band, but their roots actually go much deeper. “Josh and Nate were both on the bill at The National’s first-ever show at Galapagos in Brooklyn in October 2000. Before that, we had only played a party for Matt’s office. Josh and his wife Annie [Nero] were the recipients of one of the original CDs, and they actually did a cover of the song ‘Halo Chagrin’ that’s out there somewhere. When we realized we needed some bass [on Royal Green], he recorded all his parts in a day and a half and sent us a Dropbox.”

Released in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Royal Green feels strangely of the moment, capturing a period of time when musicians around the world have been forced to stay home and dig through previously recorded tracks or collaborate remotely. In addition to Bryan’s originals, the 35-minute set boasts a cover of The Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” that quotes the Afghan Whigs, a take on Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You” that leans closer to George Harrison’s classic variation and a version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” that arrives as the tune is charting once again after going viral on TikTok.

And, blurring a few lines, the nascent National actually recorded “Breaking The River” and released “Halo Chagrin” as a B-side long before crossing over into the indie mainstream—and a number of other Easter eggs are sprinkled throughout Royal Green’s originals. “A lot of the songs are made up on unused National lyrics that Matt wrote, and the melodies are a hybrid—some are his, some are mine,” Bryan says. “I picked and chose them as an exercise. I’m not the best lyric writer and Matt’s really good, so I thought, ‘Why don’t I see if I can make some songs out of these lyrics that were passed on.’ There’s a song called ‘Robyn de Sade,’ which The National recorded, that sits inside of my song ‘What If You Are the Sick Passenger?’”

Since The National’s 2020 touring plans were scrapped due to the continued impact of COVID-19, Bryan has spent most of his time at home in Cincinnati, homeschooling his kids and trying to practice as much as he can. “I’m not that prolific, but I’ve been trying to record beats to send to people every day, even though it usually ends up being once or twice a week. When I’m on my own, it’s strangely not that different from when we’re not touring. I tend to hole up and be alone, and I’ve realized that we’re very lucky to have this luxury, this ability to cocoon and work on different stuff.”

And, as local and incidental music remain the new normal in much of the country, Bryan is also figuring out some creative ways to promote his Royal Green material. “My sister-in-law started her own Bloody Mary mix and salsa business— she’s growing stuff in her yard—and she wants to host some pop-up parties in Northern Kentucky in the spring,” he says. “So I said, ‘I’ll bring a band.’ But, hopefully, I can get together a brunch set with some friends in the area who play really well.”

**

LNZNDRF

Two of The National’s resident Deadheads let their freak-flags fly on another set of improvisations with longtime friend Ben Lanz.

When The National unexpectedly found themselves without an opening act one night while touring New Zealand in early 2011, Scott Devendorf and his bandmates had an idea—they could open for themselves.

“It was more of a concept before it was an actual project,” The National bassist says of the impromptu, 30-minute improvisational set he ended up pulling off with his brother, National drummer Bryan, and Beirut trombonist and synth player Ben Lanz, a longtime touring member of his ensemble. “We have a shared love of ‘70s krautrock— Kraftwerk, Neu! and Amon Düül. It informs these motoric-type situations that we get ourselves into.”

As he connects the dots between the cosmic sounds that the trio conjured up that night and the new, freeform EP that their LNZNDRF side-project just released, Scott is at home on Long Island chatting with Lanz, who is based in France, the way most of the country conducts business these days—through Zoom.

“Krautrock is such an interesting lens to put on the ‘70s,” Lanz adds. “There was so much heavily revered rock-and-roll coming out at that time, between Bowie, soul music, R&B and this hallowed American music. The Germans took all of those influences and these super heady, contemporary compositions and spun them around. We want to point that same lens, in terms of our improvisation, as those outlier ‘70s bands.”

During a break between National tours, the Devendorfs hunkered down at a church in their native Cincinnati with Lanz for two and a half days, recording a series of self-described “rock minimalism meets sonic maximalism” jams. Then, they edited the best of those moments down to the eight tracks on LNZNDRF’s self-titled, full-length debut. Adding to the group’s mythology, their moniker—a mash-up of the members’ surnames—is also the name of a town in Austria.

LNZNDRF and its two-song, 27-minute companion piece Green Roses were both released on 4AD in 2016, at a time when the members of The National were drifting back to their Grateful Dead roots. Scott and Bryan have always been among the group’s most outspoken Deadheads and played a major role in the expansive Day of the Dead tribute album helmed by their bandmates Aaron and Bryce Dessner. They also toured with Bob Weir’s Campfire Band, which left an indelible mark on their musical outlook in general.

“I’ve learned to breathe onstage and not to fret over playing the same thing, exactly the same way,” Bryan says. “We’re not like the Grateful Dead, but I feel less pressure now to play concisely. Playing with Bob was about relaxing and using your ears. When Bob soundchecks, he looks at the frequencies that work in the room.”

“We share a love of improvisational music in general,” Scott adds. “With LNZNDRF, our M.O. is to bring in some ideas and figure it out on the spot.”

The band played a few club shows to support their new music, honing in on a series of long, psychedelic passages that nod to their krautrock heroes as well as a number of more modern and ‘90s alternative influences. And, after wrapping up some National commitments last fall, they spent a few days laying down tracks in Austin, Texas, with Beirut keyboardist Aaron Arntz, who has since joined party. Lanz then, once again, went to work editing the sessions; he pulled out a few instrumentals that felt like their own statement, which LNZNDRF released as an EP this fall, and the group hopes to unveil the rest as another LP, likely in early 2021.

“I went to the airport after [working on the music] to head back to Paris right before Europe shut down,” Lanz says. “Everyone was looking at each other as if we were all about to grow three heads, it was so bizarre. At that point, I really turned into mission control—I spent the lockdown working on the album, passing things around to everyone to get their reactions while watching my daughters.” (He’s also making a record with Kid Millions from Oneida.)

Scott, The National’s resident record collector, jokes that the EP is basically the same length as their first album, but only contains a few songs. In addition to working toward the next LNZNDRF release, he recently hosted a handful of Grateful Dead DJ sets with his friend Conrad Doucette, formally of Takka Takka, on FANS; it’s a continuation of the series they’ve presented at Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Threes Brewing for years. A graphic designer in another life, he also worked on the art for his brother’s solo release.

“We finished The National tour in December 2019, and we were supposed to be back on the road from the spring through late summer but, obviously, none of that happened,” he says. “It might happen next year but, at this point, I don’t know. I’ve spent a lot of time just listening to music.”

Though he still lives near New York City, Scott makes a point to note that he has only been to Brooklyn a few times since March, which seems somewhat symbolic for a member of a group that has helped define the city’s sound for decades. He also notes that he’s seen a lot of people “hanging around” Long Island longer than they usually do this time of year.

“This whole separation anxiety, and just separation in general, is interesting because it makes you oddly more communicative with people, through Zoom and FaceTime,” he says. “I find myself connecting with more people than I normally would when I am at home, either about music or just life in general. In a way, it’s a lot to handle at one time—technically speaking, too. We’ll see what happens when things come back. But, right now, jazz trios in the park and stuff like that seems like the ideal format for music—just small and local.”