The National's Fun New Record Is About Death

The National's guitarist Aaron Dessner has outlined the morbid preoccupation of vocalist Matt Berninger that underscores their new album, Trouble Will Find Me.

“It's pretty strange, it's like we've made a fun record about dying. There is a lot of references to passing, to the afterlife, to heaven, whether [Berninger] believes in it or not. For me, he seems to be exploring this idea that as you get older, you get more responsibilities, you have children, you start to think more about how your time here is not just your own life. The impact you have is felt in other people”

“It reappears throughout the record in different ways; like 'I'm secretly in love with everyone I grew up with'. This idea that you're connected to everyone you've ever known, that you leave a trace behind even after you've gone. I think all these thoughts emerged later, because at first we thought we were making this fun, bouncy record with lots of multi-layered drum-parts that give it this almost 'dancey' appeal. But, ultimately, when the lyrics start to emerge, you notice that there are all these references to death, even some seemingly suicidal references. As usual, Matt is blurring the lines between things with humour, you don't really know if he's really saying that or slightly sarcastically saying that.”

Dessner also recounts some of the creative tensions that have fuelled the band's previous albums.

“There's the story, which is true, about how we literally made 100 different versions of [High Violet's] Lemonworld,” says Dessner. “It's such a simple song that anyone would rightly wonder why we needed to make 100 versions of it, but that was just us trying to deal with these differences of opinion.''

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