The National Quotes
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My favourite store? Seize Sur Vingt in New York. They make most of my suits, and they are really cool people.
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It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.
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My background in music is classical - I did graduate school in music. At that time, I was studying composition, but I was studying classical guitar very seriously.
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Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.
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I think that becoming a successful rock band is a little like becoming a professional athlete. Nobody plans on it.
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The truth is, I'm pretty lighthearted.
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There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there's a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.
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Nobody plans on playing their own songs in front of thousands of people.
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I studied classical guitar in school, and that type of stuff has led to writing for Kronos.
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A lot of people ask how I ended up doing classical music given that I'm in a rock band. The truth is that it's the other way around. I was trained as a classical musician and then started playing in a rock band later.
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I call The National my family, and I'll be doing that as long as I want to.
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The same song can have drastically different feels and personalities just by changing some minor things. A different drumbeat or some vocal overdub could completely transform the song.
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We've gotten better as a live band. The songs have been allowed to grow with our audience. I don't think I would have done it any other way.
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I've always been in rock bands. I was in a rock band with my brother in high school. Then I was playing classical guitar recitals, and people said, 'You know, you can't really do both things.' My intuition told me they were wrong. Somehow, what was interesting about me was that I had those two things in my life.
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When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.
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When working with classical musicians, it is important to be clear as possible in the score about what my intentions are. Because there isn't a lot of rehearsal time, especially at the ballet, it's best if everything is written in the score.
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Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave know best. Although I wear a lot of jeans, I've been told that Nick Cave doesn't own a pair and wouldn't be caught dead in denim.
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The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.
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As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.
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Once you do have a child, you want to talk about every detail of it. And it is really boring to all your friends, and it should be. I was really worried about even going there at all.
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As long as I'm still growing as a musician, it keeps me inspired.
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If you make rock music with guitars in it, the Radiohead comparison is inevitable.
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Early on, I was a performer playing classical music. It's in my DNA in a way that I can't begin to extract it.
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When I'm writing for certain instruments, you want to write within what you know about that instrument but also challenge the player. Something like 'Aheym' is very virtuosic - but because I have a history of performing music, I don't like unplayable music.