The National Were Never Cool

"Bryce and I, we were never cool," says Aaron Dessner, guitarist of New Yorker moodists The National. He's referring to he and his twin brother, the guitarists of the indie-rock titans, who've issued six increasingly popular, much-acclaimed LPs across their 17 years together. That lack of cool applies, Dessner reasons, to the band's other set of brothers, the rhythm-section of the Devendorfs, and, even, to the band as whole. "Bryan and Scott, they were never cool. I don't think The National, at any point, laid claim to being cool. We came up during the time of The Strokes, Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, bands that were really stylish and fashionable. And whilst we love the Velvet Underground and The Clash, bands that were the epitome of cool, we also love Simon & Garfunkel and The Grateful Dead."

"I don't think The National, at any point, laid claim to being cool."

And, oh, how the Dessners do love The Grateful Dead. As kids in Cincinnati, they raided their dad's record collection, which was full of jazz, classical, and classic rock. But they were drawn to the Dead — to the songs, the chops, the jams — and, when they first started playing together — the twins and Bryan, their childhood friend, in the Devendorfs' attic — it was covering Grateful Dead songs.

Their lifelong love is being unveiled for all to see with the upcoming tribute album Dead Hot, a compile curated by the Dessners for the Red Hot organisation. In 2009, the brothers assembled the state-of-indie-rock American songbook Dark Was The Night ("it really showed us — our community, our friends — that we could do something that was really fun, but also had a huge positive social outcome: it raised over $2 mil for AIDS charities"), and, emboldened by its success, immediately set about following it up with something even more ambitious. "It's over six hours of music. It's going be like 11 vinyl or something," Aaron says, of Dead Hot. "It's not just that there's so many songs that it's hard to choose — we did 59 songs, we could've done a hundred —  there's such a legacy to the Grateful Dead's music."

The compile features people ranging from minimalist composer Terry Riley to soul-man Charles Bradley, and singer-songwriters like Will Oldham, Cass McCombs, and The Tallest Man On Earth. And so many more. "It features pretty much all of our friends, and people we look up to," Dessner offers. "There's the guys from Grizzly Bear, and Justin Vernon, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Courtney Barnett, Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth, Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo, Stephen Malkmus from Pavement, War On Drugs, Phosphorescent... it goes on and on. There's literally over 60 artists. It's kinda crazy. It started out as fun, but then it became this giant thing. Hopefully it becomes a cultural document of the way which these legendary old bands, their music seeps into culture over the years. There's all these radically different interpretations, which I find interesting."

"There's the guys from Grizzly Bear, and Justin Vernon, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Courtney Barnett, Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth..."

The National are currently showing all the signs of a band on hiatus. Not only have they been quiet following the release of 2013's Trouble Will Find Me, but they've all been doing different things: frontman Matt Berninger unveiling his other band EL VY, the Devendorfs their side-project LNZNDRF, Bryce working on the score for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's epic The Revenant, and Aaron producing albums for local expat folkies Luluc, Scotch-rockers Frightened Rabbit, and Irish folk singer Lisa Hannigan.

But, beneath the surface, The National are stirring; currently at work on their seventh album. "I've been writing a lot of National songs this [past] year," Dessner says. "We're deep into writing. I've done a lot of work on my own, and Matt's definitely off in his corner writing lyrics... We have a pool of about 20 songs, but we're writing as we're recording. It's hard to say exactly how what we have will translate to the finished album, [because] we're about six months to a year away from being done with it.

"There's definitely an interest in throwing the doors wide open. There's no one guiding thematic or sonic idea. There's different sessions that we've done, and they kind of all sound different. It's hard to say, right now, which way we'll go. But I think we're really into the idea that we've gotten this far because of how we are as a live band. And so everything is quite live off the floor, there's not a lot of layering, it's just us as we're playing it. The last time we did something like that was on Alligator. But it's not like it really sounds like Alligator, either. In the past, other albums felt more like an architecture project, like we're building a building, assembling individual elements one at a time. This time, we're just treating it as something that we want to play live together."