For a year, Matt Berninger couldn’t write. A month became two months, two months became six, and the anxiety about not writing compounded so he avoided it more. So when the National frontman showed up to record the band’s ninth album at Long Pond Studio, their Hudson Valley base of operations, he came empty-handed. “I didn’t have any songs. I didn’t have any lyrics. I don’t think anyone realized that I really didn’t have anything,” he told GQ. “It was like going to school without your homework after a year of pretending you’d done it.”
In their 20-plus years as a band, the National have dealt with their share of differences, but it quickly became apparent that Berninger was dealing with a different kind of beast. He separated himself from others, barely spoke at dinner. “We’d be hanging out, and I could barely talk. I would sit in front of a microphone and it was excruciating,” he said. This was not your run-of-the-mill writer’s block.
They came to work on the album, but they only managed to get one song out of those first sessions: “Weird Goodbyes.” Rather than bank it for an eventual record, they decided to release it as a single. “We put it out right away because there was a feeling of ‘This might be the last one,’” Berninger said. “I was afraid that I couldn’t ever do it again.”
“The long black period,” as Berninger calls it, followed a fast-paced and productive era for the National and its frontman. After releasing their 2019 album I Am Easy to Find, the band dove into an array of side projects: film scores, solo records, production gigs. Berninger released his first solo record, Serpentine Prison in 2021. And famously, the band got tight with Taylor Swift. Aaron Dessner produced her albums Folklore and Evermore. The former won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Swift calls the National her favorite band and is now a close collaborator.
Just as meaningful to Berninger, though, was a project that never got off the ground. He’d been working with his wife and songwriting partner Carin Besser and his brother Tom on a television project, what he describes as basically an adaptation of Mistaken for Strangers, the 2013 documentary about the National. They got pretty far—wrote scripts and music, cast a band (featuring Walt Martin of the Walkmen), even filmed proof of concept—but eventually accepted that it wasn’t going to happen. “I had too many plates spinning and I let some of them drop,” Berninger said.
Berninger was home in LA with his family around this time, when “the wires got loose and the machine just stopped.” What started as a deliberate break from writing became a full-on creative freeze. “Nothing inspired me. Music didn’t inspire me, TV didn’t inspire me. I couldn’t even watch movies,” he said. “It was just like the candle was totally out and I had no matches.”
Part of it, Berninger says, was brought on by burnout, but just as much of it came from the reality of who he is. He’s aware and accepting of his reputation and his band’s: “I have no problem with the sad sack, dad rock, sad dad rock [thing] we get. I embrace it. But I had a lot of self-loathing and I didn’t want to unpack it,” he said. “Night after night I’m going to these genuine places that aren’t bullshit to me. How much of that is staying with me and sinking in?”
When Berninger talks about this long black period, he uses words like “paralysis” and “self-loathing,” but he doesn’t often use the obvious one: depression. But he recognized what was going on. “It’s definitely what it was, and I knew what it was. It was your garden variety depression. I’d never had it for that long and low,” he said. He tried tackling it with medication and sobriety, which helped a little. “It wasn’t until I was back with the band that I realized it wasn’t the wine and weed that was causing much of a problem,” he said. “It was just having to get back in the swimming pool.”
So he and the band went back to Hudson. Even after “Weird Goodbyes,” Berninger was struggling to produce new material. The band would rehearse in the studio and Berninger would lock himself in a separate room to try to wring something out. He started flipping through books, not even to read them so much as to pluck out phrases as grist for the mill. That’s where he stumbled on the inspiration behind the new National record, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The word that jumped out at him was “tranquilize.” It’s not hard to imagine how the source might have spoken to him at that moment: “for nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose,” Shelley wrote.
Something shook loose. The book inspired a song and, eventually, the whole record, The First Two Pages of Frankenstein, which comes out this Friday. The band’s ninth album is another strong entry to their discography, one that balances the energy of their earlier records with the more elaborate orchestration of their later work.
In one obvious way, the new album continues a trend from the last one: other voices. 2019’s I Am Easy to Find introduced an accompaniment to Berninger’s signature baritone for the first time, with an ever present chorus of female vocalists accompanying the frontman on most of the tracks. For The First Two Pages of Frankenstein, the National tapped some of their heaviest-hitting collaborators not as easter eggs in the liner notes (though there are some of those) but as full-on featured artists.
The first of these is Sufjan Stevens. The album opens with “Once Upon a Poolside,” a song that channels Berninger’s anxiety about getting back into the swing of things. Stevens’s voice hovers over Berninger’s, lifting it out of the doldrums and into the record. (Fun fact: this is the first time Stevens has sang on a National record, but it’s not the first time he’s appeared. He played piano on two songs on their 2007 classic Boxer). As Berninger said, “Sufjan comes in and all of a sudden, a whole new window opens up and a different colored light shines in.” The song is an album highlight, a targeted dopamine hit guaranteed to light up the part of your brain that lives in the peak-indie aughts.
Sufjan showing up on another National record might very well have been on your bingo card 15 years ago, but a Taylor Swift feature almost certainly was not. But it’s 2023, and she’s here, too, dueting with Berninger on “The Alcott.” A wistful ballad about a couple negotiating their relationship, the song came out of the creative pipeline between Swift and Dessner. In a certain slant of light you could mistake it for an outtake from Swift’s Folklore/Evermore sessions. It’s clear that Berninger has tremendous respect for Swift, and he was thrilled when she contributed to the song. “She’s a writer, and the whole ‘sitting in a place writing in a notebook about somebody,’ I think Taylor immediately sort of identified,” he said.
The standout featured artist, however, is Phoebe Bridgers. Bridgers has been firmly in the National’s orbit for the last few years, performing with them live and collaborating with Berninger on “Walking on a String” for the Between Two Ferns movie. “There’s something very particular about Phoebe’s voice that feels like a memory,” said Berninger. “Her voice can do that thing where it feels like water or something, like a reflection of a voice.” An ethereal counterpoint to Berninger, she appears on two tracks on The First Two Pages of Frankenstein, including the single “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend.”
That song is the one that emerged from Berninger’s encounter with Shelley’s Frankenstein—”tranquilize” became the lyric “tranquilize the ocean between the poles”—and the one that speaks most directly to his dark year. The title is something that Besser reminded Berninger of throughout his depression, that his brain was causing the way he was feeling. Together Berninger and Bridgers sing, “Don’t you understand that your mind is not your friend again? It takes you by the hand and leaves you nowhere.” It feels like a classic National song, and an instant National classic.
One track, however, is pointedly not a classic National song, an outlier in their catalog—the album closer, “Send for Me.” It’s a love song, plain and simple, and maybe, Berninger acknowledges, the tenderest thing he’s ever written. “Those are hard songs to write, songs about good feelings and love,” he said. “They sound saccharine. Any song that can pull off the word ‘love’ anywhere in a line that doesn’t make you [he gags], roll your eyes, is a feat.”
“Ending the record on a sweet embrace of a song was important to me,” Berninger said. “I needed something bright in my soul.” In that regard, “Send for Me” feels like a triumph. At his lowest, Berninger worried the National had entered in its endgame. The First Two Pages of Frankenstein proves otherwise. With a little help from his friends, Berninger exited the long black period and made another excellent record with his band—more sad songs for lovers, dirty and otherwise. “It wasn’t until I stopped hating myself for whatever reason,” he said, “that I started to be able to write about hating myself.”