On the surface, at least, there wouldn’t seem to be very much for Matt Berninger to be sad about. The celebrated frontman of The National, 54, is chummy with with Barack Obama. He takes meetings at the San Vicente Bungalows, (the trendy member’s club gets name-checked on his new solo album, Get Sunk). And Taylor Swift is a friend and collaborator; he sang on “Coney Island” from Evermore back in 2020; she returned the favor appearing on The National’s 2023 song “The Alcott”.
But the downbeat title Get Sunk, plus several songs on the album, came to Berninger before he emerged from a deep depression several years ago — one so paralyzing, he worried he’d never perform again. Lately, however, the scruffy poet laureate of middle-aged melancholy has never been happier or more prolific, coming off a post-pandemic hot streak that saw the release of multiple National albums and now, his second release under his own name following 2020’s Serpentine Prison.
Berninger sat down with The Hollywood Reporter via Zoom to talk about overcoming burnout, his “pile of Legos” lyrics and the cosmic connection between sad dads and teenaged girls.
Hi, Matt. Where are you right now?
I’m in my barn in Connecticut.
You had lived in L.A. before that, correct?
Yes, I’ve been here for almost two years now. Before that it was a decade in Venice, California. And before that it was 15 years in Brooklyn. And before that, it was a hundred years in Cincinnati, Ohio.
And which of these places do you think has most shaped your world view?
Cincinnati, but then Brooklyn torqued it to an unrecognizable degree. And so I was changed significantly by New York. And then I think when I stopped changing, I got antsy and moved to California. When you move to a new place, your brain works differently, your body works differently, your soul works differently. I really believe that.
And your songwriting changes, too, I would assume.
Yeah. There’s also a conscious effort to change, but sometimes it can feel too obvious and you get stuck in all these effortful songs, which ends up not feeling like change at all. So you just have to trick yourself. I used to write in notebooks, then I was on my phone, and now I’m trying to get both of those things out of my hands. So I’m writing on whiteboards. I write on baseballs. I write on books I’m reading. I have a copy of Great Gatsby that probably has two albums worth of songs in it.
I caught your National show at the Hollywood Bowl last fall.
The National’s past three years have been in many respects the healthiest of our career. I had this long depression and writer’s block, which I’ve talked about a whole bunch. But making of those last two National records and touring, and making that live Rome record and then touring with The War on Drugs quickly became the best time I’ve ever had in The National.
It kind of changed my perception of you. There was something so playful about your performance, and I really appreciated your skill at a certain kind of band fronting, which is more theatrical and loose.
I’ve lost my fear of audiences. I’ve lost my fear of looking like a fool, maybe to an unhealthy degree. I think it’s because of in that period of depression, which is now about four-and-a-half years ago, I was afraid of everything. I was afraid I could never write another song. I was afraid I would never be able to go on stage again. I was afraid I wouldn’t even be able to go back to being an artist, a graphic designer.
The pandemic was part of it. But I had too many things going on. I burnt myself out and I think physically, mentally, I kind of collapsed. I was actually writing about it. My new album title, Get Sunk — and four songs on it — I wrote before I went into a really bad place. But I climbed out of that bad place. I was having more fun on stage than I’d ever had in my life. I’m not afraid of just standing still. And that applies to songwriting and everything I’m working on now. [He gestures at a whiteboard behind him covered in writing.]
What are we looking at there? I see a grid. Is each box a song, or how does it work?
Yeah. There’s a bunch of songs on there and I’m writing the lyrics on it. I’m going to write the whole record just on those boards.
That’s amazing. It reminds me of TV writers’ rooms.
It just keeps the process fun. And also writing with permanent Sharpies on a whiteboard feels wrong. It’s supposed to wipe away. But when I started writing on whiteboards with Sharpies, and it was really liberating. It was like, “oh, I’m breaking a rule.” And then it helped me break rules with the words, too.
I realized what my big mistake was: It was saying yes to too many things and believing I could juggle six chainsaws, when I can only juggle three chainsaws. I think I know what I’m doing for the next eight years, more or less. I know exactly what’s going on with The National for eight years. And I know what’s going on with my solo stuff for eight years.
What does your solo career offer you that The National does not?
The National offers me everything. I get everything I could ever creatively want out of The National, meaning I could do anything with The National. I made a documentary with my wife and brother through The National. I’ve made a short film with Mike Mills, I Am Easy to Find, which is also a very special precious record to me. Mike’s film with Alicia Vikander is a masterpiece. And I met President Obama four times through The National.
Is Obama a mega fan? Do you wind up on his year-end lists? What did you talk about?
We’ve been on his list a couple of times. One time, I think this fundraiser thing at Reese Witherspoon’s house, we were there to take a picture with him. My brother was trying not to crowd him too much, so he came around the other side of Obama. Obama didn’t know he was there. Obama jolted. My brother scared the fuck out of Obama. And then he recognized him, and he’s like, “Oh! It’s Tom! The brother!” He knew Tom the brother. Barack Obama is the most unbelievably delightful man. Just charming, hilarious, looks you in the eye, smiles and knows your name. Same thing with Michelle Obama. I got a big bear hug from Michelle Obama.
So The National has brought me everything I could dream. So what do I get out of doing stuff outside of The National? Just more fun stuff with fun people. So I only work with friends, and I have so many.
Your lyrics are obviously a big draw. Is there any obscure lyric on Get Sunk you might shed a little light on? A very personal one or one that you’re proud of?
The song “Nowhere Special” has, I don’t know, 10,000 words in it. There’s more words on “Nowhere Special” than maybe the whole rest of the record put together. The lyrics of that one took up the whole inside sleeve. It has so many crisscrossing currents of thoughts. “Don’t make me cry in the back of a black car” wasn’t even mine. My friend Jamie wrote that and gave it to me. It’s funny — the first line that jumped out to me, I didn’t even write.
I’m looking at the “Nowhere Special” lyrics now. “So I’m late for the bungalow meeting.” Now to me, that’s a very Hollywood phrase. But what does that mean to you?
That’s a terrible lyric because the word bungalow is not a good song word. It’s like saying “supple” or “custard.” But that’sa good choice because there is a story behind it. I was late for a meeting with my label Concord about this record Get Sunk because I was out of budget and I was out of time. And so we were meeting at the San Vicente Bungalows in L.A.
You now, I had a feeling that’s what it was referring to, but I didn’t want to assume.
Yeah. And I was late for that meeting. This was the day after The National played Hollywood Bowl.
No kidding. I feel so personally invested now.
I recorded “Nowhere Special” the afternoon after Hollywood Bowl. It was the last song we did for the record. We had one more day with this piece of music and it was a total Hail Mary. I pulled together all the lyrics I hadn’t put into songs yet that I liked, plus I was having a lot of problems with the latency in my headphones and the click. And so all the stuff I’m singing about the click and the latency were things that were actually happening. I just needed lyrics! So I was just writing everything down.
It ended up this stream of conscious collection, a pile of Legos. I always describe my lyrics as collaging or putting together Legos. And sometimes I’ll polish one little green Lego just to get it right for a month. But other times it’s just a pile of Legos. So I think “Nowhere Special” is the first time I’ve created a song that sounds like a pile of Legos. But it’s not random. It’s not pure refrigerator-magnet poetry, random gobbledygook.
Well, it’s beautiful chaos, what you do.
It’s fun. The more chaotic, the more fun it is. Even on stage, the more chaotic a show, the more things that go wrong during a live show are on tv, the much more fun it is for me now. It is dangerous territory, but I don’t care. Rock and roll can’t kill you.
On that tour, you were selling “Sad Dad” T-shirts, if I recall.
Most people know two things about anything. And so a long time ago, it seemed like the things that The National was known for was being sad, depressing, and being older. I am 54 and I was writing about kids before I had a daughter. I wrote a song called “Slipping Husband: before I ever met my wife.
And so you decided to lean into the stereotype with your merch?
Right. Making fun of it. OK, sure, if that’s what everybody’s saying we are — which isn’t off the mark. We’re all dads and we all struggle with anxiety and depression. So let it be “sad dads.” What’s funny is that it really appeals to teenage girls for some reason, or young women. Phoebe Bridgers [told me] there is a real similarity to the middle-aged male brain and the adolescent teenage girl brain. That weirdly makes a whole lot of sense to me. I have a teenage daughter, and we get each other.
Then there’s all the incredible stuff that Aaron [Dessner, The National’s guitarist] and Taylor Swift have done together, and me getting to be a part of it. I met Taylor seven years ago out in L.A. We’re just fans of each other. It started as friends calling and saying, “Let’s do stuff together.” Folklore is just a masterpiece. But that connection between Taylor’s fan base and The National —the sad dad, introspective, anxiety, digging, fretful, melodramatic stuff that I love to write about — it is the same.
There’s a real link between that. The teen search for joy and just fun, which is I guess pop music and Brat and all that stuff, is amazing. But that light and really dark, twisted stuff go well together. There is a real wormhole between depressing older people’s music and teenagers, because I think depressed older people are finally telling the truth. And teenagers don’t hear that from the world very often.