John Lucas

Matt Berninger brings his solo tour to Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre tonight (see you there?), so it seemed like a good time to revisit the two times I interviewed him back in the 2010s. The first time was when Berninger’s band, the National, was touring in support of its then-new fifth album, High Violet . The second time, I interviewed Berninger along with his brother Tom, whose documentary about his tenure as the National’s assistant road manager, Mistaken for Strangers, was about to hit theatres.

The National seizes the day (2010)

(This article originally appeared in the Georgia Straight.)

Right about now, Matt Berninger must be wondering what the hell he’s gotten himself into. By the time the Straight catches him in Vienna, where he’s getting ready for a sound check at Arena Wien, the National’s frontman already has about four-dozen shows behind him in support of the band’s latest album, High Violet. Nor are things about to slow down: the National is booked fairly solidly right through to January, when it’s slated for a string of festival gigs in Australia.

“Yeah, it goes on and on,” Berninger says. “Next year is also being scheduled out right now, and it looks like we’re gonna be touring on and off probably through to September of next year, so there’s still a whole ’nother year to go.”

If the singer comes across as a little less than wholeheartedly enthused about the prospect of being on the road for such a long stretch, well, that’s because he is. “To be perfectly honest, for me touring has always been kind of a difficult thing,” he admits. “I’m not a good traveller. I just get homesick really quickly, and there’s something about living on a bus, and shows after shows after shows—I go into sort of a weird place.”

These days, Berninger has an even more compelling reason for wishing he could stay home. He now has a daughter, 20-month-old Isla, who recently posed with him, albeit reluctantly, for the cover of Under the Radar magazine. Because of her, he says, the National is trying to restrict its road trips to no longer than three weeks in duration.

Berninger is abundantly aware, however, that the current tour is a crucial one for his band, which has been honing its artful brand of indie rock for over a decade. High Violet debuted on the Billboard 200 in the number-three spot, a crystal-clear indication that the group’s popular appeal was finally catching up with its critical acclaim.

“We are realists,” the baritone singer says. “We’ve been in a band that’s been trying to get to this point for years. And we know that when you have some attention, it can go away so fast. It’s music. It’s rock ’n’ roll. Bands are hot and then, you know, people lose interest. So we know that we have to dive in and deliver and make our mark while we can.”

If that was also the modus operandi behind the making of High Violet, then the National has accomplished its mission. It is by turns the band’s most direct batch of songs to date (witness the churning propulsion of “Bloodbuzz Ohio”) and its most nuanced, swelling with atmospheric string parts that never threaten to swallow up the otherwise spare arrangements. Accompanied by two sets of siblings—multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner and his guitar-playing brother Bryce, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf, who play bass and drums, respectively—Berninger proves his mettle as one of the most gifted lyricists in contemporary rock. These are songs that look outward at our profoundly messed-up world as much as they shed light on the interior life of a man still trying to find his place in it.

The National recorded most of High Violet at its own studio in Brooklyn, which gave it the luxury of much-needed time. This is not, after all, a group of guys who can bang out an album’s worth of material in a weekend.

“We go into what we call ‘circling the vortex’, where we’ll find ourselves lost over and over again,” Berninger says. “With almost every song we’re working on, we get it to a point where we lose sight of what we’re trying to do with the song or the whole record. That happens to us all the time. With our band, there’s nobody who’s totally in charge, so everybody can sometimes step out of the myopic quagmire at different times and see where we are and get some sort of perspective on it and pull everybody out of it. So there’s a strange balance of activity in our band. Half the guys might be thinking that we’re just getting nowhere, and then somebody’ll put it into perspective and say, ‘This song and this song and this song are amazing. It’s almost finished.’ And we all go in and out of that role, I think.”

The biggest struggle this time around, Berninger says, was “Lemonworld”. He notes that the band attempted and rejected something in the neighbourhood of 80 different variations on the song before something finally clicked.

“It just kept getting worse and worse,” the singer says. “We did so many versions and ultimately we went back to a really early, rough version that just had the closest thing to the charm that that song needed to work. It’s a mystery why certain songs are really fragile—and especially a song like that, where, from a musical perspective, it’s not exactly high art. It’s one of the simpler songs. But maybe that’s exactly why the delivery of it had to be just right. Otherwise, it was going to feel heavy-handed or simplistic.”

Once again, mission accomplished. As it appears on the album, “Lemonworld” strikes the right balance between visceral and heady. And here’s hoping Berninger is still pleased with the song. After all, he’s going to be hearing a whole lot of it over the next year or so.

IN + OUT

The National’s Matt Berninger sounds off on the things enquiring minds want to know.

On the inspiration for “Afraid of Everyone”: “I think the song is a reaction to feeling so confused and so frustrated. It’s hard to figure out what makes sense. I don’t trust MSNBC to give an accurate portrayal of what seems to be happening. Obviously, Fox, on the other hand, almost seems to be pure fiction. Honestly, The Daily Show seems to be the only television outlet that I feel is coming from a level perspective. Jon Stewart and his team seem to be the only level-headed, honest interpretation of what’s happening in this country. And it’s a half-hour comedy show!”

On the presidency of Barack Obama, whose election campaign the National publicly supported: “I’ve been disappointed in the pace of the progress. I still completely support Obama, but my hope is that he’s just playing nice so that he wins the next four years, and during those four years he just forces stuff to happen. He’s the president. I mean, George Bush got away with unbelievable things—in the wrong direction. I don’t know why Obama’s playing so nice.”

On why Obama needs to toughen up: “You have to draw blood if you’re going to get anything done in this sort of thing. In many ways, George Bush was more effective at governing, as far as getting things done. I mean, he made torture legal for a while. How could somebody have pulled that off? If Bush and those guys can do things that are just universally illegal, and they can get away with it, why can’t Obama do good things? Just do ’em. Just fucking do ’em and tell everybody to fuck off, and answer questions later.”

Mistaken for Strangers captures backstage drama on a National scale (2014)

(This article originally appeared in the Georgia Straight.)

Matt Berninger is an atypical rock star: a middle-aged dad with a meditative croon and a penchant for elliptical lyrics. Nonetheless, his band, the National, has a track record of top-10 albums, Grammy nominations, and (perhaps most important of all) rave reviews from Pitchfork.

Tom Berninger, Matt’s younger brother, is not a star of any kind, although his directorial debut, Mistaken for Strangers, is threatening to make him one, having garnered its share of glowing critical notices from the likes of Entertainment Weekly and, yes, even Pitchfork. Opening on Saturday (April 12), Mistaken for Strangers is about Tom’s stint working as a roadie for his brother’s band on its 2010-11 tour. Well, working might not be exactly the right word. Much of the film’s drama (and humour) is derived from Tom’s run-ins with tour manager Brandon Reid.

Tom lasted eight-and-a-half months on the road before the inevitable firing, long enough for him to capture his brother and the rest of the National at their best (and occasionally their worst) with the handheld camera he just happened to have with him. At its heart, though, Mistaken for Strangers is about the relationship between two brothers. There’s a sense that the pudgy man-child lives in a completely different world than golden boy Matt. In a conference call with the Straight, Tom says the film’s focus only became clear when he started to edit the footage with Matt’s wife, Carin Besser.

“Very slowly we kept adding more of me and less of the National. And we actually did have test screenings to make sure that, like, ‘Is this the right move? Are we gonna piss anybody off?’ And for the most part, people said, ‘No, this is Tom’s story. This is the good stuff,’ ” he says, noting that things were crystallized in a scene in which he’s “wasted on the bus”.

“I thought it would be cool to have me drinking all the band’s beer on the bus while they all slept in hotels,” he says. “I partied by myself.…I didn’t know if it was ever going to be seen, but I thought it would be funny. When I saw it later in the editing room, with Carin, it wasn’t very funny. It was kind of sad. And we were like, ‘Ooh, that’s even better.’ ”

While Tom admits that the film plays up the bumbling-slacker angle, one suspects there’s more to the man than what we see on the screen. We get a hint of this when the boys’ mother describes Tom as “the most talented” of the two. Joining his brother on the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Matt readily agrees.

“Tom swims through the world with a very unique stroke,” the singer tells the Straight. “He’s got a unique taste and a very unique vision and a very unique way that he interacts with the world. And I think that’s what she means when she says he was always the most talented—meaning he had this weirdness about him that was very special. And the truth is, I think the whole family always thought she was kind of right about that. Tom has a weird light inside him that he often doesn’t recognize; some strange green light does glow from within my brother that everyone else can see but sometimes he doesn’t.”

Matt may be the rock star of the Berninger clan, but it’s Tom’s “weird light” that makes Mistaken for Strangers sing.