Song Exploder - The National - Sea of Love

Episode Date: December 22, 2014

The National formed in 1999. They've released six albums, and have been nominated for a grammy. Their music is everywhere from Game of Thrones, to Bob's Burgers, to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. In 2013 they released their sixth album, Trouble Will Find Me, which debuted at #3 on the Billboard charts. The band is made up of singer Matt Berninger along with two sets of brothers: guitarists Bryce and Aaron Dessner, who are twins, and Brian and Scott Devendorf, who play drums and bass, respectively. In this episode, Matt Berninger and Aaron Dessner break down "Sea of Love," a song that they co-wrote. You'll hear how it went from Aaron's original guitar demo to a densely layered recording with contributions from their bandmates and others, and they'll talk about how collaboration is an intrinsic part of their process and their band identity. songexploder.net/the-national

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. The National formed in 1999. They've released six albums and have been nominated for a Grammy. Their music has been everywhere from Game of Thrones to Bob's Berger's to Barack Obama's presidential campaign. In 2013, they released their sixth album, Trouble Will Find Me, which debuted at number three on the Billboard charts. The band is made up of singer Matt Berniger, along with two sets of brothers, guitarists Bryce and Aaron Desner, who are twins, and Brian and Scott Devendorf, who play drums and bass respectively.

In this episode, Matt Berninger and Aaron Destner break down Sea of Love, a song that they co-wrote. You'll hear how it went from Aaron's original guitar demo to a densely layered recording with contributions from their bandmates and others. My name's Aaron Desner, and I play guitar and piano and other instruments and write a lot of the music. And I am Matt, and I don't write any of the music. I write the lyrics and the vocal melodies and that kind of stuff. This song just started with a demo that was kind of like a rough, loud guitar.

It kind of sounds like Nirvana playing Crazy Horse or something. I'm sketching a song humming along to it, but mainly with Matt and mine. And then I kind of leave it open-ended so that he has room to carve. Aaron and his brother, Bryce, will send me in the process of making a record, 50 or 60 little bits of ideas and some of them are developed and they have lots of different parts some of them are just really simple and rudimentary and I just work on the ones that I connect with in some way and I will just sing along to it and try all kinds of different approaches and usually it's with melody I just look for melody and I'm singing nonsense the

words start to come after I figured out a melody mostly and if it's a good melody Words will just land on it and stick there. Oh, you say you love me, Joe. How am I supposed to know? It wasn't like I had a story about a character named Joe and all this kind of stuff that I wanted to tell. It was mumbling melodies without any discernible words, probably for a while, until something stuck to it.

Hey, Joe, sorry I hurt you, but they say love is a little. lyric-wise I was listening to other things and I was listening to Hendrix. Hey Joe, sorry I hurt you, was like I was, I'd been listening to Hey Joe. Hey Joe. That's kind of a quote, I guess. And I think at the time, the idea was to, well, that's just for placement. I will figure out what that lyric is later, because I'm not just going to say, hey Joe. Then that just stuck.

I think there probably was a time when I was like, okay, I got to put a woman's name in there. and I just quickly discarded that temptation to just change it to a woman's name because I'm a man. It didn't matter at all. And I just never could let go of, hey, Joe. Oh, Joe, you fell so fast. I'm not trying to make any sort of statement

about human sexuality. It's just there's a song about, a romantic song about a man who's bitten into the apple a little bit. It's a big murky mess of all the feelings that happen between human, beings, one romance and hopes and all those kind of things. They run away with our hearts a little bit. So whenever I sing it, I am thinking about a guy. I see people on the floor, they slide into the sea.

And then the song just started to become this loose idea of how people often will fall in love and jumped into a situation. The Joe is definitely the one who's like jumping in with both feet. There's a room full of people that are all sliding into the sea of love. I see rushing down. What did Harvard teach you? What did Harvard teach you? It's just like you seem like to be such a smart person.

Why are you doing such a foolhardy thing? Of the 60 sketches, this one popped out to me just because it had this immediate, aggressive, and had a different sort of color than a lot of our. songs and I was excited by it. I think at the phase in the writing of the record, we had a lot of songs that were manicured or something, and I don't mean that in a bad way, but we felt that the record needed something a little uglier. I think I just wanted it to be almost Neanderthal, and it's when it comes out of the gate, that's why I was just just like pound eighth notes, you know, on the snare. Matt kind of likes to air drum and has good ideas, but Brian being a great

drummer and opinionated drummer often doesn't embrace those ideas, but this time he kind of like did. So that snare Brian was excited by. And he also likes simplicity if it ever really works. And in this case, it did. It was a rare case that I had a drum idea that Brian liked. It kind of came to life with the drum part. And that's, I think, when he realized that Brian is going to run with something, then we all kind of focus in a little bit and find the song. because it's not, we often have situations where we'll write a song and the kind of band element doesn't click. Whenever I have a musical idea that those guys like, I think everyone's surprised. Well, that's not true because you actually, he's Matt's a visual artist and is good about describing musical ideas and non-musical terms sometimes and that will lead to interesting places.

I have a lot of opinions on the music, but yeah, I don't have any musical vocabulary. Bryce and I went to Berlin because we do a lot of recording, you know, whether it's in my studio or in a fancy professional studio, and then we undo it or like redo it somewhere that's not at all a studio. I think because we are missing some kind of like charm or element of unpredictability or just the feeling of needing to make it less claustrophobic or something. Because I like records that have been recorded in different places. So I know for a fact that we re-recorded all the guitars on this song in Berlin and this hotel, the owners of that hotel are big fans of the national and really close friends of ours and have been really supportive. They created a studio for us in there in the hotel. It was like a cement box kind of, the rooms and old pretty war building,

and the walls were unfinished walls, and it was a cement floor, and the sound was bouncing around in there a lot, but it just sounded cool. There's a whole weave of things in there that create the moving parts and kind of like deceptive complexity to a simple chord progression. I mean, my brother plays guitar, and we did these kind of twin strikes. There's a strike of each chord on the downbeat and then one on the offbeat and they kind of answer each other. And that's definitely an old trick of ours because we play off each other a lot like that. On Sea of Love, you hear the contribution of Richard Reed Perry from Arcade Fire, who did this sort of elaborate vocal harmonies in the chorus.

We've always been an open, collaborative group of people. And like my brother and I, being twins, grew up playing music always together, never alone. And so it's quite natural to collaborate with other people and embrace someone else's idea. and also one thing may be the key to unlocking a riddle or just giving something an extra lift or making something work. And I guess the band could solve all those questions on its own, but I think it actually makes it more interesting

to have these different musical perspectives. So clearly with Richie, because he does come from this choral background, his father was a choir director, and he does think in terms of these multi-partisan, vocal harmonies and kind of like elaborate arrangements and it's easy for him to render things. With see of love, the chorus did not come easily. And so Richie, he sang, he was really inspired by Sea of Love and the music and was enjoying it and he had ideas. So we just kind of like

set up a bunch of mics and literally half an hour later there's that vocal arrangement. It's literally that quick with him but it definitely has a big effect on the song. I promised my wife that I would put harmonica on at least one song. She obsessively listens to the demos that I write, because we listen to them sometimes after I write them just like in the car, in the house, or they're just on, or she hears me making them. And so sometimes she'll have creative ideas, and she's not a nurse, so it's not like she's coming from a musical standpoint either.

But I kind of thought that was interesting, because I think it was the first time that she had suggested something. and so I kind of thought it would be worth a try. It actually just plays like this supportive role to announce the chorus and it kind of fit. But weirdly Matt didn't know it was there until like much later when the album was done because he, well, I don't know you explain Matt,

your ears were a little bit destroyed. When this was being recorded and mixed and put together, I had to fly home to Cincinnati because my grandmother died and I had a terrible cold and the plane, my eardrum ruptured. And so I got back to the story. studio without being able to hear anything on one side of my head. And I think you guys panned it over to that side on purpose so that I'd miss it.

We'd try to trick each other. I think you guys were worried that if I knew there was a harmonica, I would look for it and try to get it out of there for some reason. And you might be right. I don't know. I don't have anything specifically personal against a harmonica, but that is something I would do, you know, for no good reason, just take offense at a harmonica. The more we write together and the more we do this together, we start to lose a lot of insecurities about things.

We used to think, like, does it seem like it's the national? It's like, before we even knew what the national was, we were always trying to like sort of, oh, that just doesn't seem like us. Thankfully, we stopped trying to define, you know, what is us, or because none of us could agree anyway. And that's let us do things that maybe if one person was in charge, we wouldn't do a lot of the things that we've done. And so, yeah, now we know just to chase it all, and you never know where it's going to connect. And now here's Sea of Love by The National in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.net for more information on the National, including a link to buy this song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April.

and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In The Last Hour of Light,

and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. So I had originally planned on doing this podcast as an experiment for a year to see how it went and see what happened. And that year ends with this episode. I want to thank you for listening.

And I want to thank all the musicians who've taken a chance on letting me into their process and giving me the latitude to edit and present their songs from the inside out. It's been fascinating for me personally, and I'm excited to keep going with it and see what next year brings. So coming up next time on Song Exploder, The Making of the Battlefield by Ghostface Killup. Hit me up on Twitter at Song Exploder or on the Song Exploder Facebook page. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. You, I'm back at the nine years.

That's 36 seasons. Shit is changed up for all types of reasons. Staten Allen ain't the same. Shit is lame. I'm dodging the game. I want a clean slate. Radiotopia.