The National’s Matt Berninger On His New Solo Album

How to describe an interview with The National frontman Matt Berninger? Like talking to Moby or Liz Phair (who along with Robert Plant might be the smartest interview in music) it is a fascinating labyrinth of cerebral twists and turns where you just hold on and do your best to keep up.

It is as compelling and enlightening as his music. Which is saying a lot because along with Nick Cave and the timeless Bruce Springsteen, Berninger, with The National and on his own, has been, to me, the most consistent rock act in the first quarter of this century. Once again, Berninger stuns with his second solo album, Get Sunk.

A gorgeous slice of life that, like the writing of Raymond Carver, is deceptively complex and profound, Get Sunk is, as Berninger describes it, a romance with ghosts. As we discussed, it is a record of memories, of life, of hope.

Steve Baltin: I’m a big believer in environment affecting writing. So, was it Connecticut that lit the spark for this album?

Matt Berninger: The Connecticut part of it maybe colored the process. This record has a lot of Midwestern atmosphere with creeks and trees and animals and bike rides along rivers and stuff. I’ve always been writing about that stuff. But yeah, getting to Connecticut, back in an area that is like what it was like in my youth and particularly on my uncle’s farm. The place I live now, I have a barn, and I have a little bit of land. But I have all this stuff and there are trails in the woods and creeks all around where I live now. And that’s where I spent all my most memorable stuff of my childhood, it all happened at that farm in Indiana. So, Connecticut really inspired that part of it. But I think anytime you uproot and go to a new place, or take a vacation, you’re riding a train through Italy, like suddenly, you’re going to write differently and be inspired to write different kinds of stories. So, I do think, I think changing the soil you’re in every 10 years is really smart.

Baltin: So that’s something that you’ve done regularly, move every decade or so?

Berninger: Yeah, I’ve moved from Cincinnati, moving out of your house or your parents’ house, and then going to college in an apartment, that feels like two different types of living. Then I moved to New York City in ’96, and I was there for maybe 15 years, and that’s where I met my wife, that’s where my daughter was born. We’d been in Brooklyn for close to 15 years or something. Then we just felt we had squeezed New York for every drop of inspiration and so we moved to Venice, California. We lived out there for 10 years and then I wrote five or six, seven records, did so much stuff out there and met Mike Mills and became a collaborator with all these amazing filmmakers and stuff. So that was an amazing decade of creativity and then my daughter was about to go to high school, and we all wanted something new, and we had family in Connecticut and it’s so close to New York. I didn’t want to move back to Brooklyn, but I really want to be close to New York again. I go to New York every week and ride the train. So yeah, it’s really new and inspiring and I think that is really good and it does jolt me, although some of this record I started five years ago in Venice. Even some of the songs that are talking about Indiana, and the Midwestern pastoral scenes were written when I still lived in Venice during the lockdown. So maybe I was just dreaming of wandering the woods or going back to a time. But I always write about that stuff. But moving and changing your environment does change your brain.

Baltin: Would this album have been made anywhere now at this time?

Berninger: Yeah, I feel like this would have been made anywhere at this point in time. I do, and I have been saying this recently because I’ve been trying to answer that question. Because yeah, a lot of this record does go back and it’s a really conscious effort to try to reshape, not in the details and truth, but in the emotional memories of things and write a great story, and of a great 45-minute immersive connected experience. And it was really important for me on this record more than anything I’ve ever done, I think. But you’re right, what is our past? What is it? And often, I’ve been saying this, that our past is a story we tell ourselves. and we remember it differently. Our memories of it change and our memories are memories of memories. So, it’s our own version of (the game) telephone constantly going as we go and try to retell the stories of what happened and why am I like this and what was my childhood like and what were my relationships with my parents like and what was it? It’s all fantasy and it’s just the same way your future is a story you’re telling yourself. What you want, why you’re doing what you’re doing and where you’re trying to go and how long you want to live and what you want in your life and what experiences you want to have going forward is also just a story. And what experiences you had in the past so you’re just telling your story of those experiences. All those things, traumas, good things, can totally shape you, yes, but sometimes we can be confined by our own definitions of ourselves and that we create a little bit of a prison or a trap around ourselves and we say, “I’m this way because of this and that’s why and I’m going to stay this way.” And right now you’re seeing in the world, everybody, it’s an identity crisis. People don’t know. I’m a Catholic, but there are so many Catholics identifying with something else that is so un -Catholic. And that kind of thing, but there’s so much, “But this is me now, I’m this and I identify with this.” I think we really trap ourselves into our ideas of who exactly we are and I think it’s a dangerous thing. I was trapped in an idea of what I was. Like I was this type of guy. I’d written all these stories. I had manifested becoming this melodramatic, unhinged character. And then I was leaking into that facade or that story I had told had started to become a little real. And it wasn’t real. And so, yeah, I think that this record is trying to maybe go back and kind of recontextualize some of the beauty and I think the good things mostly. There’s a lot of darkness in this record, but I’m a happy person. I’ve had very unhappy times. I’ve had very dark, long depressions. Everyone has, but my core is optimistic, hopeful, kind, brave, and happy mostly, and I remember that. And I learned that from my parents. I learned that from my cousins. I learned that from my uncle. I learned that from nature. I learned that from the farm. I learned that early, and that hasn’t changed. I identify as those things, but sometimes you get lost in these other prisons of other things that you think you are, but you’re not.

Baltin: That’s so interesting on so many levels. As The National started getting bigger, do you feel like personally you became a character people wanted you to be?

Berninger: I was actually in my early 30s before we got successful. But when you get your first taste of success and people are really reacting to your work that is some of the most extreme, darkest parts of your personality, or the saddest parts, and those become the best songs because I’m being honest about something. But when you’re writing those songs in your 30s, and then you get successful, I’m sure subconsciously I’ve elevated that idea of that guy in my head. There’s more currency to that character, I realize. And so maybe you start to manifest it, and you keep building this weird sculpture of these little Legos of melodrama and anger or rock and roll songs and all these things. Then they become this really weird cool sculpture that everybody buys tickets to see. And then the next thing you know, you’re stuck as this thing that wasn’t what you intended.

Baltin: You and I have talked over the years too about literature being inspiring and I feel like there were very literary and cinematic points of this album. Right when we got on the Zoom, I was listening to the record again. I love “Silver Jeep.” That one has almost like a Raymond Carver feeling to me.

Berninger: Yeah, there’s a few of them. Some of them are more kind of blurry, abstract, impressionistic, emotional descriptions of emotional things or descriptions of process, like “Nowhere Special” is a totally different song from a lot of the other songs and so is “End of the Notion.” I don’t think about it when I go in but I see that I’m often trying to write a type of song I’ve never written but I’ve written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs. But “Silver Jeep” and “Bonnet of Pins” and “Frozen Oranges,” those are three examples of songs that are like scenes. Or “Bonnet of Pins” is maybe just an hour or a couple of hours of reconnection between two people. Then “Frozen Oranges” is a whole day, a long bike ride filled with medicines and joys and fruit and sunshine and bugs and juice and it’s a really healthy song. Then “Silver Jeep” is a is an echo of the same character from “Bonnet of Pins.” That character is not really present much in “Frozen Oranges.” But then at the end of the record, I think “Silver Jeep” and “Bonnet of Pins” are a little bit of a return to that relationship or that dynamic. What is it? Well, they’re always chasing each other. They’re always seeking each other, but they’re always there. The line in “Silver Jeep” that I like is, “I see you out there somewhere in a silver jeep.” Maybe only in my mind but you’ll always be there whether I ever see you in person again, you’re never leaving. This person might already be dead. The whole record is about a ghost but it’s not a singular ghost, it’s not one person, it’s a ghost of something. It’s a really romantic record. It’s a romance with a ghost, I guess.