National Enquiries

While many hard touring all-male rock acts often refer to themselves as ‘a band of brothers’, in the case of Brooklyn-based indie darlings The National it’s actually a statement of fact. The acclaimed five-piece band is composed of two pairs of brothers – Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf – and vocalist Matt Berninger. Not to be outnumbered, Berninger’s own brother has just recently joined the fold.

“Yeah, Matt’s brother has started to work with us,” guitarist Scott Devendorf laughs. “He’s not a musician, he’s a filmmaker, and he’s now working as a kind of production assistant for the band. So he’s now working and travelling with us. It’s a little like a pirate ship sometimes.”
With three sets of brothers on board, presumably sibling rivalry can be an occasional problem?
“It definitely has its advantages – and it definitely causes some problems,” he says. “We’re all kind of opinionated people anyway, and when you combine that with the fact that we’re in the endeavour of artistic and business stuff together, it makes an interesting stew of possibilities as far as relationships go. But there’s also that thing of you’ll fight with your brother but you’ll always make up. So it keeps us together. If we were just five random guys, it’d be a lot worse.”
First formed in their native Cincinnati in 1999, The National’s career to date has been a long slow burn. Following two relatively unnoticed albums, they first tasted critical success with 2005’s Alligator. The next record Boxer came two years later, and shifted more than 350,000 copies worldwide. Earlier this year, they released the masterful High Violet, easily their best album to date, and one they’ll be touring the hell out of for the foreseeable. Having truly gone the distance with Boxer, the band are well up to it.
“We toured basically all of 2007 and 2008, part of 2009 but then we started working on the new record,” Scott explains. “We’ll probably tour for a year-and-a-half with High Violet, but we’re already starting to work on some new stuff. Hopefully it won’t take us another three years to make the next record. We’re kind of slow workers. But you know, we’re happy that people are into it and ultimately we’re happy with the records.”
Although they spend much of their working life on the road, Scott maintains that they’re getting a little better at working on new material while they’re travelling.
“When Matt’s writing lyrics he generally prefers to be in his home environment so it’s hard for us to write songs quickly on the road in that way. But sometimes things work out. By the end of the Boxer tour, we were playing some of the songs that would end up on the new record. It was helpful playing them and seeing how people reacted to them, and that influenced how we ultimately recorded them.”
Even when they are recording, it’s a rarity to find the whole band assembled under the one roof. Generally, they work separately on their material for months before coming together to make an album.
“We do demos and stuff like that and send them to Matt, and he kind of picks out the ones he can work with. We sort of go back and forth for a while before we eventually work together. But it’s never like we could sit down for two weeks and record a record.”
The fact that they now own their own recording studio in Brooklyn may help speed things up when it comes to making album six.
“At the end of the Boxer tour we’d saved a little money and then we used some of the advance for the next record, and bought some gear and revamped this garage in Brooklyn. It’s small and there are certain limitations to it, but I think we’ve yet to fully realise its potential. We did all the recording of the High Violet stuff there and then we went to [producer] Peter Katis’s studio in Connecticut for about eight or ten weeks to finish the recording and do the mixing. Our studio’s a small space so it’s hard to set up the whole band and do stuff, but hopefully we’ll utilise it more in the future.”
Part of The National’s relatively recent boost in popularity can be attributed to the fact that Barack Obama’s campaign team used their song ‘Fake Empire’ at many high-profile events during the presidential elections. Have they ever met the man?
“We haven’t met him – though we’d love to. That’d be pretty awesome. A friend of ours was working on the campaign as a videographer/editor kind of person, and she suggested the song to them. We did a benefit show in Cincinnati, where we’re from, with The Breeders before the election. We hear that at least one member of his senior staff is a fan of the band and has been to a show of ours, but we’ve never met Obama.”
Fairly regular visitors to these shores, The National are looking forward to their first taste of the Picnic.
“We’ve played a bunch of shows in Ireland. We’ve done five or six shows in the Olympia, we’ve played Whelan’s, we’ve played shows in Cork and Belfast. We’ve done Oxegen twice, but this’ll be our first time at Electric Picnic. We’ve heard great things about it so we’re all pretty psyched.”