The National Quotes
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David Harrington asked me to write a piece for Kronos Quartet for a performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I live just two blocks from the park and spend many mornings running around it. The park for me symbolizes much of what I love about New York, especially the stunning diversity of Brooklyn with its myriad cultures and communities.
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I don't play an instrument. I pretend. I try to.
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A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.
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Inviting artists to do something, you want it to be a place where they're going to feel challenged and excited and that will maybe open up some new doorway in their own lives or their own creative practice.
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I think that place is a huge part of pretty much any musician's work, in how one responds to an environment, whether it be your actual surroundings or the more figurative place we're all living in.
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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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With 'Boxer,' we made the kind of music we wanted to make and didn't really worry about what the expectation was.
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I'm a stubborn guy that loses his temper, sometimes driving the station wagon in the wrong direction for hours and hours and never admitting that he's gone the wrong way.
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If you make rock music with guitars in it, the Radiohead comparison is inevitable.
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'Alligator' was the first record that anyone paid attention to, and it seemed like it was the screamy songs that got us that attention.
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Getting on stage and performing and standing under lights is such an unsettling experience - in a good and bad way - but it's the only place I can go to feel comfortable.
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We've played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.
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A lot of my lyrics are approximate meaning without me knowing why they sound right.
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I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.
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David Harrington, who's the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.
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If you learn classical guitar, you play Bach, and then John Dowland. He's the greatest. He's interesting for many, many reasons.
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Musicians are hungry for new music.
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The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.
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Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.
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I love the physicality of instruments, and instruments as objects, like dancers are bodies.
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You don't come to our shows if you want to look cool.
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I grew up going to see my sister dance, both at the ballet and later as a modern dancer, and have always been a big fan of the ballet. So I have had a long relationship with dance.
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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.
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I call The National my family, and I'll be doing that as long as I want to.