WE’RE ALL MAKING IT UP AS WE GO ALONG, BUT WE’RE NOT ALL MATT BERNINGER
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CURRENTLY A RESIDENT a resident of Connecticut, formerly of Brooklyn and Los Angeles, originally of Cincinnati, Matt Berninger is a dapper chap, a fellow of some style, often in suits, portrayed on the cover of his first solo album, Serpentine Prison, dressed like an American man of letters sojourning in Biarritz in the mid ‘50s. The kind of man of who actually was a successful graphic designer and art director in Madison Avenue advertising, before quitting to help form The National.
That would be the band whose sometimes grand, usually intense and ultimately emotionally freeing songs – sung by Berninger in a low tenor that can dip into rumbling baritone – made Barack Obama take notice and everybody else realise middle-aged men weren’t always the worst thing around.
As such, Berninger, about to tour Australia, is the antithesis of the too-small-suit/too-keen-on-his-torso manchild currently parading through the interwebs playing at being a secretary of war, rapist guide for lost boys or FBI director. (Not least because he happily collaborates with, and publicly celebrates, his wife, literary editor Carin Besser, with whom he has a daughter. Something which must really piss off the small men of the manosphere.) He may be needy – aren’t we all? – but not full-time, and not in desperation.
That is why today, in the absence of online male dress guru, Derek Guy (“do you think he has advice for me?” says an amused Berninger, politely. Oh no sir, the opposite.) the singer is exactly the kind of man I would ask pertinent style questions. And I have some.
Is he a man who wears, or indeed encourages the wearing of, comic socks?
“Ah, that is .. that is … I used to,” he says. “I’ll admit that I did have a phase where I did feel the need for the [comic] sock occasionally. A lot of them were gifts from fans and I would wear them feeling like if I didn’t I would be cursed in some way.
“But I will honestly say I don’t have a single pair anymore, as far as I can tell, in any of my things. But I did have a pair of fake Louis Vuitton that has the pattern, that blue and pink and yellow. I got it at a deli along with a hot dog and some potato salad, and they were great. I wore those for a long time and I think people thought ‘wow’. I think that’s where I got the reputation for being fancy.”
Nothing says fancy like buying your sock at the deli. Especially when they came as gift-with-purchase of a hot dog. And it must be said, a bold source given his occasional habit of removing his boots and handing them to an audience member, as he did with his new RMs at a National show in Sydney not too long back.
If anything, this only enhances my description of Berninger the lyricist, with The National and solo, as the patron saint of the not-that-bad guy, the trying-and-often-getting there guy, the wanting-to-be-better-and-improving-in-small-steps guy, the I-love-and-I-love-that-I-am-loved guy.
“I’m the patron saint of the above-average-striver or the below-average-striver,” Berninger helpfully expands. “Yeah man, that fits. In most of my songs I am trying to pep myself up, give myself a fun … even if it’s a sad song I’m feeding myself melodrama that I can live inside. I’m writing these little scripts where sometimes I’m the hero and sometimes I’m the villain or whatever. I’m always trying to put myself into that uphill climb.”
Far from a putdown I reckon a lot of us men of a certain age would see him as a sign we aren’t without hope, not out of place or out of time, and not without hope given we have tried to change.
“Wow, if I’m somehow inspiring any of that stuff I’m very … that’s nice to hear,” he says, chuckling. “Maybe it’s because I started writing songs when I was kind of already in my late 20s, early 30s, and I’d already sort of had a job and kind of done something and become a little bit successful at a kind of a corporate thing, and I wrote about that. I have been able to do something else and I’m often writing songs about trying to reinvent.
“I’ve got through all kinds of things, ups and downs and periods where I didn’t have anything to write about, I couldn’t, I wasn’t inspired by anything. Then I had to refigure how to rewire yourself and reinvent yourself and re-excite yourself and rekindle your spirit for life and everything. So, I think I write pretty well about the spots where you don’t have any idea of what you want to do or any optimism or any clue. I write pretty well about that because I’m often in that spot where I don’t have a clue.”
We feel ya buddy, working it out ourselves as we go along. We’re all making it up, even if we might not have had the long, debilitating writer’s block that delayed a National album and ended up fuelling the songs on his second album, last year’s Get Sunk. Or indeed the ability to capture that in sometimes elliptical songs that somehow say even more.
“I write a lot of things that’s just spilling random, raw thoughts. Sometimes it’s just the sound of words, but occasionally it’s like over-hearing a conversation: you’ll hear a fragment or have a fragment of a thought and I don’t know why but that feels more honest than all my other thoughts around that. It might not even say anything specific but it feels like there’s something honest in there,” he says.
“You can’t have a song that has nothing but that but for me a song has to feel not only trying to pep you up but also be honest how maybe this is all bullshit and it’s not gonna work. I only trust songwriters who feel a little bit like you can’t trust them totally, and then I know I can trust them.”
People who are prepared to say that they don’t know or who aren’t certain are the people I trust. I don’t trust people who tell me they have no doubts.
“But even the writers that are winkingly showing you that they are an unreliable narrator, I love that writing because I love to be swept up in the writer’s own fantasy and you can tell they’re in their own fantasy,” Berninger says. “I’m always writing stuff that are not true stories but they do have lots of true fragments. I like to write that way.”
He has said that certainly since The National’s 2007’s breakthrough album Boxer, he sees lyrics as a visual and sonic collage, an idea more than working within clear lines, and the truth emerges from that. But that doesn’t mean abstract; they can be very specific or direct.
“In songs you’re floating and dancing and interacting with this whole other world of rhythm and emotion, so I’m reacting a lot to that music and the writing starts to become like fragments I’ll mumble in and certain things will start to stick to the melody, like flies sticking to flypaper a little bit. It’s a long process,” he says “Sometimes it happens fast and I have songs that are just no editing, just whatever, stream of consciousness, and that’s a different kind of song. But a lot of it a slow crafting of a blurry image and if a line is too specific it can break the spell.
“Songs are like hot air balloons that you just have to keep clipping wires until it floats up and you get the right amount of helium in there. They’re mysterious.”
There’s something in that mix of tone and rhythm that really struck home for me prior to this interview as either side of playing Serpentine Prison [on whose cover, it’s worth noting, Berninger appears sans socks) I played Neil Diamond’s early recordings on the Bang label and Joni Mitchell’s mid-70s masterpiece Hejira. That sequence had not been planned but it did feel aligned.
“Serpentine Prison, that record, [Stax keyboard master] Booker T Jones was a big part of that and he brought a real atmosphere and cohesive personality to that record in a big way. He’s also on Get Sunk here and there. I think with both those records I was trying to create an atmosphere or a season of a [TV] drama, a melodrama I guess. They’re very different seasons but the show’s still me.”
Rhythm matters to that cohesion and that storytelling.
“Yeah. When I’m singing along, trying to find a way or sitting in the studio with Sean O’Brien who I wrote most of the songs on Get Sunk with, what we start out with is trying to find something where we’re not paying attention, just bobbing our heads and feeling, then all of a sudden I’ll start singing along. It’s a real kind of a gooey, messy, slow, iterative process.”
How much of that approach to writing is based in or similar to the making of visual art I wonder given he is a painter like his parents. It turns out he doesn’t write out whole lyrics in notebooks as such, though he has them around the place too, more likely to scrawl lines and thoughts on baseballs, whiteboards, anything to break the process up, treating everything as a notebook.
“My mom’s a painter and I did art. I did some sports and Little League and stuff but art was really the first thing that the world told me I was good at,” recalls Berninger. “The National started happening as I was becoming a successful designer in New York city but I always thought of songwriting in a lot of the ways I think about design or painting – making the process organic.
"Part of it is I try to change my process every once in a while just to rewire myself and reinvent. I’m a collector of thoughts and I put them down everywhere and I make stuff out of those thoughts.”
Simple. Any (middle-aged) man with the right socks could do it. Sure.
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Matt Berninger plays:
Sydney Opera House, for Vivid Live, May 28
Princess Theatre, Brisbane, May 31
Forum, Melbourne, June 3
Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, June 5