Matt Berninger is planning to take us to church. “I feel like this is God,” The National frontman turned solo End Of The Road headliner told Uncut’s Tom Pinnock at the first of three Uncut Q&As at this year’s EOTR festival. “This is the community, this is church. The church is supposed to be a group of people who believe in trying to figure out the mystery of love and life and kindness and surviving how hard it is to be a person.”
Matt Berninger is planning to take us to church. “I feel like this is God,” The National frontman turned solo End Of The Road headliner told Uncut’s Tom Pinnock at the first of three Uncut Q&As at this year’s EOTR festival. “This is the community, this is church. The church is supposed to be a group of people who believe in trying to figure out the mystery of love and life and kindness and surviving how hard it is to be a person.”
“In many ways,” he continued, “music, rock festivals, rock clubs, Royal Albert Hall, Mercury Lounge, the Buffalo Bar, those are sanctuaries of spirituality and vision. Artists are trying to figure out God. In songs, everybody’s just trying to figure out the meaning of their own life and their own heart and their own existence, the good artists, that’s what they’re all doing.”
It was a thoughtful and illuminating first crowd question, from a woman who’d met her husband at a “euphoric communal” National show and wondered who did the same for Berninger (answer: Leonard Cohen). And it followed a light-hearted chat that opened on his tourbus Star Suite that morning (“The best thing about going solo is you get a nice bedroom on a bus. The rest of it is hell”) and drifted naturally to his rural home in Connecticut where, he explained, he enjoys writing and demoing in his “war barn” alongside a resident squirrel named Kyle, and stalking Keith Richards.
“Without crossing a road or going through anybody’s private property, I can reach Keith Richards’ back yard,” he said. “He’s got a pink house. I can’t get over the fence, it’s a very high fence.”
It was in such a place, he went on, that collaborations with numerous songwriters (“I’m drowning in so many ideas from so many brilliant people – sometimes it’s overwhelming”) gave way to his first solo album Serpentine Prison in 2020. Although it was initially meant to be a covers record. “I was reluctant to do a solo album, that stinks of betrayal,” he said, but producer Booker T Jones began probing for original material and Berninger had too much to ignore. This year’s second solo album Get Sunk, produced by Sean O’Brien, was “a band record. Six of the ten songs on it I went over to Sean’s and after coffee and weed and catching up…”
Covers still play a party in the project, however. Often Berninger will send the most difficult songs he can find to his band – Radiohead’s “Kid A” or Nirvana’s “All Apologies”, which makes it into that evening’s set. “I get to soundcheck and they’ve figured them out,” he said. “Part of going solo is a way to undo the package of what Matt Berninger the lead singer of The National is. Complicate that.”
Berninger laid out more of his norm-shattering methods – writing lyrics on whiteboards in indelible ink, or around baseballs. “I’ve been doing that the past few years just to make the process fun and get my phone out of my hand,” he confided. “The baseball helps me slow my brain down. The words go left and they go right and literally bump into each other in exciting ways and I’ll have to write in a spiral until I run out of room. The baseball is editing me by nature of its physical limitations. I can’t write a super-long song on a baseball.”
He gave one of his more colourful balls to The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper, but should really have read it first. “It was called ‘Fuck Swimming’. A few days later he was like, ‘Matt, you realise most of the stuff you’ve written on this thing is about urine?’ Maybe I should’ve given him a different one.”
A diversion into the New York scene of the early 2000s had Berninger learning his art on tour with The Walkmen (“ferocious live”) and almost having his girlfriend stolen by Julian Casablancas in the Mars Bar (“just by staring at her, and it almost worked. He didn’t have to say a word. I was like, ‘I’m gonna have to write better songs’”) before audience questions brought the chat to an elevated level. “What’s your favourite cake?” asked a small girl in row five. “My mom just made the simplest cake,” Berninger revealed. “It’s just like, basic yellow cake with butter and cinnamon on it. I dream of it all the time.”
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