On The National, or Accepting Symbiosis

I might as well explain myself.

Everyone has a favorite band. Even if you won't publicly commit to just one, you have just one that rises above all others. Maybe you don't consciously realize it, but one day it'll click. It might come as a soft realization, dawning on you slowly, gradually, like a warm blanket pulled up to your neck on a December night.

In my teenage phase, my favorite bands were Incubus and Muse. I enjoyed louder music - had a stint with Linkin Park in heavy rotation, to boot - and those two bands spoke to me loudest. At first, Incubus was the head of the pack. I had multiple screen names with some variation of their name in them (and still use them as spam e-mail addresses to this day). They were one of the headliners at the very first concert I ever attended: a Y100 FEZtival (RIP). "Morning View" was my jam, a collection of the kind of airy, atmospheric elements you hear in the softer, shoegaze-y indie of today with a good deal of fuzzy, power chord punch. The lyrics were about a step-and-a-half down from Colin Meloy's hyper-literacy while managing to safely tread above the surface of Taking Back Sunday and that style of meaningless lyrical platitudes.

I would use the 10 minutes given to me by "Just a Phase" and "11am" to fall asleep many nights, my oversized boombox plopped on the floor beneath my desk beside my bed. In the days when I'd pack a Walkman-type CD player in my backpack for the walk home, I'd love the energy of "Under My Umbrella," and still begrudge Rihanna for co-opting the phrase years later.

Then Muse slowly took over. Introduced by a former high school band mate of Baumann and I (yes, we were in a high school band and yes, recordings of our music still exist if you can find them but no, that's not a challenge), it didn't take me too long to fall in love with their bombast. Granted, this is "Absolution"-era Muse, who were still being taken somewhat seriously while being charmingly ridiculous. I spent hours and hours learning the bass part to "Hysteria." I maintain that, to this day, "Plug In Baby" from 2001's "Origin of Symmetry" is the best song they've ever done. And will ever do.

The first mp3 player I ever owned was a Rio 600, which held 32 MB. By the time I was a senior a couple years later, I had upgraded to a Creative Nomad Zen Jukebox, a box as clunky as its name. But "Plug In Baby" was a fixture on that thing, especially during photography class when I was spending time dipping prints in various chemicals.

All of that sets the stage for college, where my penchant for energetic music allowed me to immediately take to The New Pornographers in 2005, with discoveries of now-mainstays like Ben Folds and Belle and Sebastian coming around the same time. None of that, though, quite compared with the impact a certain album would have on me in the spring of 2007.

In cruising through various music boards, I'd noticed an album called "Boxer" by this group called The National was coming up fairly frequently, tossed in with the likes of The White Stripes' "Icky Thump," Bon Iver's "For Emma, Forever Ago" and Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible." The latter three I had heard plenty of. But this other group? Not a peep. Arcade Fire and The White Stripes got some limited radio exposure, with Bon Iver quickly circulating through my small college campus so that nearly everyone I knew seemed to have at least heard a snippet or two. But nothing from The National.

Curious, I fired up iTunes and navigated to the album's purchase page, looking to check out some 30-second samples. I didn't linger for long enough on the bytes of "Fake Empire" and "Mistaken For Strangers," as I was only half-listening anyway despite there really being enough to enjoy in those clips, but track number three seemed to grab me and didn't let go.

It was a haunting opening 30 seconds of a track called "Brainy," punctuated with some of the most authoritative drums I'd ever heard, probably because they weren't being drowned out by guitars or loud vocals. It ate at me. The dipping and diving guitar plucks amid those marching drums, Matt Berninger's mournful "uh huh" that coincided with the preview's fade out. I was immediately transfixed, and I had to buy the album.

So I did. At first, I was a little underwhelmed. You see, the big trick with The National is that the vast majority of their stuff lacks immediate appeal; the complexities and subtext of everything they put into a song can force them to be "growers," taking time to be fully accepted for what they are in your musical brain. And so the more I listened to "Boxer," the more I began to hear and understand lyrics, to process Berninger's malaise and relate it to my own. It was far from happy music, but it felt so relatable. And, to be fair, even though everything about the album isn't instantly likable, it has its share of memorable lines:

• "Turn the light out, say good night / no thinking for a little while / let's not try to figure out everything at once"
• "Well, you wouldn't want an angel watching over you / surprise, surprise, they wouldn't wanna watch / another uninnocent, elegant fall / into the unmagnificent lives of adults"
• "Tired and wired, we ruin too easy / sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave"
• "Hold ourselves together with our arms around the stereo for hours / while it sings to itself, or whatever it does / while it sings to itself of its long lost loves"
• "They're gonna send us to prison for jerks / for having vague ideas of the way to turn each other on again"

It's a collection of complete and utter sobriety, and it was music on a personal level that I'd never experienced before. Intrigued, I looked the band up and found their back catalog, including 2005's "Alligator." Another collection of tunes of adult musings, this time with a raw edge to many of the songs. "Lit Up" finds Berninger ridiculing the "lowlife of the party," the "bad blood for everybody" right before he assures everyone "I'm in control, and I believe," immediately rendering him the drunk guy trying to "untie Manhattan." Similarly, the protagonist of "Baby We'll Be Fine" is entrenched in a rut of adulthood and mired in a failing relationship, which is an awesome combination I myself lived through last year. So, even before my reality merged with his, I found myself connecting on a human level to Berninger. Everything about what he sang above the music played by the Dessner and Devendorf brothers felt so wizened that I couldn't help but let the music embrace me in a hug that so many of Berninger's personas could have used. It also doesn't hurt that their (arguably, of course) best song comes from that album: "Mr. November."

Things only deepened with 2010's "High Violet," a collection of songs more finely produced than the rest of The National's catalog but no less urgently somber, if that descriptor can somehow be used. There's some humor in it ("sorrow's a girl inside my cake" on "Sorrow") and there's some faulty self-awareness ("I still owe money / to the money / to the money I owe" on "Bloodbuzz Ohio"), but through it all, you somehow manage to feel as if Matt Berninger is singing about some part of you and telling your story, not just his or his characters'. After all, who can't relate to the line "all the very best of us / string ourselves up for love?"

This band tells stories people don't want to hear in a way they do want to hear. They lay bare on the table everything that's ugly about the things that come with more complex feelings and relationships and adult life. You can enjoy this music if you're in high school, but you can't relate to it. Not yet. And I say that not condescendingly but in an excited way, one that makes me really happy for those of you who've managed to pick up on this band at a younger age than I did. You've still (maybe) yet to go through the realization of having these songs hit you on some level you didn't know music could hit, and for that, I'm envious of you.

These are the songs that act as reference material for life experiences. They'll never be a huge, mainstream, commercial success - in fact, the level of fame they've achieved now is far higher than I thought this kind of music would support - but then, most things in life aren't bubblegum pop and starry-eyed love affair-type events. They just aren't. They're sometimes visceral and brutal, sometimes lovely, sometimes drunk and woozy and sometimes just melancholy, but they're always real. Nobody captures that feeling better than this band, and I'm unsure any other band ever will.

Why I Love This Song: "Behold the Hurricane"

For years, I've been wanting to do a running commentary on why I like certain songs, just throw up a music video and break down the compositional elements it comprises, to try to pinpoint what, in the songwriting, makes me put a certain song on repeat on Spotify.
And when this thing comes to fruition, it'll mostly be about the steady 90s slow-dance aesthetic in Florence and the Machine's "Never Let Me Go" or the meter changes in The National's "Fake Empire" and Wolf Parade's "I'll Believe in Anything." It'll be fun, and lighthearted, and involve as much theory as I remember from my ill-spent couple semesters as a music composition minor in undergrad. That's where this string of posts (I can't speak for Paul and Ryan) is going.


 But to start, I'm going with something a song that I connect to almost purely on an emotional level, which means this is going to sound childish and pretentious and that this blog will be born under a bad sign. But here it is.

I'm extremely open about my life on Twitter and on the sites I write for. Which is probably irritating for people who read my stuff because they like baseball and basketball, but it's the only thing I know how to do. But one place I draw the line is wallowing in personal self-pity in public. Part of that is that I'm worried that someone who wants to hire me to write about sports and entertainment full-time (which is what I ultimately want to do with my life) will read some woe-is-me thing I wrote in a fit of drunken pique and change his or her mind. Part of it is that I was granted more natural and social advantages than 99 percent of the other people on Earth, and despite having failed to cash in on those for reasons no more profound than my own fear and laziness, if you made some sort of objective scale of utility in people's lives, I'd still end up somewhere near the top. And under those circumstances it's unseemly to complain.

But my relationship with this song is rooted in having experienced what I truly hope is rock bottom for me, when, for the first time in my life I took a major risk, dropping out of grad school with no idea where I'd land.

And it backfired. I spent my age-25 season, as it were, in a hazy mix of shame, regret and frustration, afraid for my financial situation and for my future as a writer, which is really the only thing I've ever wanted to have.

So it came to pass that I spent the summer of 2012 too ashamed of my own mistakes (and too full of regret for decisions that I'd made not recently, but several steps back up the causal chain) to even show my face around my friends.

It was the perfect storm of my being a snotty privileged kid throwing a tantrum when things didn't go his way for once and my own abject failure to effectively fight a battle with depression that I'm still too self-conscious about to discuss publicly in any detail.

I coped in self-destructive ways. I rudely pushed away people who saw what I was going through offered to help. I spent more time than I'm comfortable admitting earnestly coming up with reasons not to take my own life.

This song, written and sung by Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon, is the theme song to the worst year I hope I ever experience. It's a beautiful song, a fairly straightforward rock track with a mellow, even rhythm guitar that steps back during the verses into a quiet, metronomic eighth-note drive by the combination of bass and palm-muted electric guitar that, when I was 15, I thought would be the foundation to every song I'd ever write.

Then, as you get to the chorus, you get a crescendo and one of my favorite drum set patterns, where you ignore the cymbals for a couple bars and just beat out progressively louder eighth notes on the snare and floor tom, arms open.

It's not a crescendo like "Stairway to Heaven" or even Nirvana's "You Know You're Right," but it gets you a chorus where it becomes perfectly clear how complete a despair Fallon's trying to communicate. It never gets above a mezzo-forte (or at least what passes for mezzo-forte for a North Jersey punk rocker), because it's not about showy, garment-rending despair. It's almost informational in its tone, as if in passing the object of the narrator's affection might like to know that he ages by years at the mention of her name.

This isn't a love song you play outside a girl's window. This is a love song you listen to alone, in the dark of your own home, sobbing into your fourteenth whiskey of the night.

Because when a line from a song resonates entirely with the only feeling you've felt for months, you want that line to be something other than: "I don't recognize myself. I'm not the man you love."