{"id":4864,"date":"2025-08-30T10:46:20","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T10:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/matt-berninger-keith-richards-fence-end-of-the-road-uncut-qa-151039\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T10:46:20","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T10:46:20","slug":"matt-berninger-keith-richards-fence-end-of-the-road-uncut-qa-151039","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/matt-berninger-keith-richards-fence-end-of-the-road-uncut-qa-151039\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Berninger: \u201cI can\u2019t get over Keith Richards\u2019 fence\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Matt Berninger<\/strong> is planning to take us to church. \u201cI feel like this is God,\u201d The National frontman turned solo End Of The Road headliner told Uncut\u2019s Tom Pinnock at the first of three Uncut Q&As at this year\u2019s EOTR festival. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Matt Berninger<\/strong> is planning to take us to church. \u201cI feel like this is God,\u201d The National frontman turned solo End Of The Road headliner told Uncut\u2019s Tom Pinnock at the first of three Uncut Q&As at this year\u2019s EOTR festival. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many ways,\u201d he continued, \u201cmusic, 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\u2019s just trying to figure out the meaning of their own life and their own heart and their own existence, the good artists, that\u2019s what they\u2019re all doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a thoughtful and illuminating first crowd question, from a woman who\u2019d met her husband at a \u201ceuphoric communal\u201d 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 (\u201cThe best thing about going solo is you get a nice bedroom on a bus. The rest of it is hell\u201d) and drifted naturally to his rural home in Connecticut where, he explained, he enjoys writing and demoing in his \u201cwar barn\u201d alongside a resident squirrel named Kyle, and stalking Keith Richards.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout crossing a road or going through anybody\u2019s private property, I can reach Keith Richards\u2019 back yard,\u201d he said. \u201cHe\u2019s got a pink house. I can\u2019t get over the fence, it\u2019s a very high fence.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was in such a place, he went on, that collaborations with numerous songwriters (\u201cI\u2019m drowning in so many ideas from so many brilliant people \u2013 sometimes it\u2019s overwhelming\u201d) gave way to his first solo album\u00a0Serpentine Prison<\/em>\u00a0in 2020. Although it was initially meant to be a covers record. \u201cI was reluctant to do a solo album, that stinks of betrayal,\u201d he said, but producer Booker T Jones began probing for original material and Berninger had too much to ignore. This year\u2019s second solo album\u00a0Get Sunk<\/em>, produced by Sean O\u2019Brien, was \u201ca band record. Six of the ten songs on it I went over to Sean\u2019s and after coffee and weed and catching up\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Covers still play a party in the project, however. Often Berninger will send the most difficult songs he can find to his band \u2013 Radiohead\u2019s \u201cKid A\u201d or Nirvana\u2019s \u201cAll Apologies\u201d, which makes it into that evening\u2019s set. \u201cI get to soundcheck and they\u2019ve figured them out,\u201d he said. \u201cPart of going solo is a way to undo the package of what Matt Berninger the lead singer of The National is. Complicate that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Berninger laid out more of his norm-shattering methods \u2013 writing lyrics on whiteboards in indelible ink, or around baseballs. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing that the past few years just to make the process fun and get my phone out of my hand,\u201d he confided. \u201cThe 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\u2019ll 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\u2019t write a super-long song on a baseball.\u201d<\/p>\n

He gave one of his more colourful balls to\u00a0The Daily Show<\/em>\u2019s Jordan Klepper, but should really have read it first. \u201cIt was called \u2018Fuck Swimming\u2019. A few days later he was like, \u2018Matt, you realise most of the stuff you\u2019ve written on this thing is about urine?\u2019 Maybe I should\u2019ve given him a different one.\u201d<\/p>\n

A diversion into the New York scene of the early 2000s had Berninger learning his art on tour with The Walkmen (\u201cferocious live\u201d) and almost having his girlfriend stolen by Julian Casablancas in the Mars Bar (\u201cjust by staring at her, and it almost worked. He didn\u2019t have to say a word. I was like, \u2018I\u2019m gonna have to write better songs\u2019\u201d) before audience questions brought the chat to an elevated level. \u201cWhat\u2019s your favourite cake?\u201d asked a small girl in row five. \u201cMy mom just made the simplest cake,\u201d Berninger revealed. \u201cIt\u2019s just like, basic yellow cake with butter and cinnamon on it. I dream of it all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The post Matt Berninger: \u201cI can\u2019t get over Keith Richards\u2019 fence\u201d<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Matt Berninger is planning to take us to church. \u201cI feel like this is God,\u201d The National frontman turned solo End Of The Road headliner told Uncut\u2019s Tom Pinnock at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[669,3488,31,3535],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-end-of-the-road","category-features","category-the-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}