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The National: High Anxiety

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.”