The National - Anthems

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You’re 5. You’re walking along in your scarf and Wellington boots, kicking up a firestorm of autumn leaves when something glints momentarily in the corner of your eye, just holding your attention long enough to prevent you from taking a running jump into that enticingly muddy puddle. You kneel down and thrust your hand into the leaves, rubbish and mud and grab it. You open your hand. It’s a penny, a little dulled by the elements, but a penny nonetheless. Your penny, your treasure, your secret keepsake.

This is The National. They won’t dazzle you from the outset; they’ll enchant and entrance you, enticing you with all the splendour of their 2005 masterpiece, ‘Alligator’. Let ‘Abel’ beckon you through or ‘Looking For Astronauts’ gently lure you in, and at the point where you’re totally absorbed, that’s when they lock the gate behind them. They should have made the soundtrack to ‘The Secret Garden’…

“If we could make the musical equivalent of ‘Eternal Sunshine from the Spotless Mind’ then we’d be really happy – it was such a beautiful film.”
Well…close enough.
From his window, Aaron Dessner, guitarist and unsurprisingly pleasant interviewee, is overlooking the ever bustling Tottenham Court Road and the much fabled Astoria in which The National are playing later that week. On the band’s last visit to the UK, they played to a triumphant and ludicrously packed out KOKO and a year on, the band are rightly gracing the bigger stages their music deserves much to the excitement of Aaron.

“I never thought we would play the Astoria. I’ve been there once before and it was just an amazing, huge place with a lot of history. It’s a little frightening because it’s an important venue but we’re excited about headlining it and flattered we have the opportunity to play there,” he says. A brief stop off as part of a considerable two-month transatlantic tour, despite having to traipse through most of central Europe as well as their intensive stateside dates, they’ve managed to pencil in a five night marathon at the Bowery, NY as well as a slot supporting the Arcade Fire. It’s quite the workload. “We’re supporting the Arcade Fire in May, and then we get a little time off before we do a couple of European shows – London, Paris, Berlin – then a big US tour and back to Europe for festivals. It’s around two months so it’ll be pretty intense and it’ll take a lot out of us.”

For many bands, venue upgrades typically denote success and/or progression and while The National are content to play the bigger venues, the disconnection from the humbler venues is a transition that doesn’t always sit well. “There’s some big venue’s that just don’t feel right and it’s hard to get connected to the audience. I think in England – even the bigger venues – are still fun to play there even though they’re pretty large. We prefer playing the intimate venues. In New York we chose to play the Bowery Ballroom, which has about a 600 capacity, but we’re doing it for five nights in a row. It is exciting to see the audience grow,” Aaron explains.

Adopted New Yorkers transplanted from Cincinnati and Ohio, (Matt Berninger, Aaron Dessner, Bryce Dessner, Bryan Devendorf, and Scott Devendorf), The National released ‘Alligator’ to a swathe of critical acclaim that saw a mass of new admirers stumble wide-eyed and open hearted into their grandiose, introspective world of observation and mild fantasy.  “I think Alligator was definitely our breakthrough. We loved the album when we finished it, but at first it was very quiet and took a lot of time for the response and for it to creep out there and become this underground success. It was mostly word of mouth and people writing about it on the internet and we’re really grateful it became this gradual, transforming process for us as a band - it enabled us to play to bigger audiences all over the world.”

The success of the album only served to heighten the collective external pressure on the band and it’s a pressure that Aaron is only too aware of. Still, it seems there’s no higher benchmark than a personal one regardless of commercial pressure. Talk about a rock and a hard place…
“We only really felt pressure in an internal sense within the band because we just wanted to make another album we believe in. We did believe in Alligator but I think for a long time we struggled to realise that it was an album with a shelf life and something we could stand behind. We’re not delusional; we have a lot of self-awareness. Sometimes we’re too hard on ourselves and that’s the internal pressure. There’s always going to be some commercial pressure in the back of our minds: ‘will people enjoy this? Can we play it live?’ But it’s never going to be enough to influence because it’s hard enough to get five people to collaborate and make a song without worrying about what the rest of the world thinks.”