- All Quotes
- News Quotes
-
I don't love being on the road.
Matt Berninger The National -
With 'Boxer,' we made the kind of music we wanted to make and didn't really worry about what the expectation was.
Bryce Dessner The National
-
A lot of my lyrics are approximate meaning without me knowing why they sound right.
Matt Berninger The National -
Being a classical musician, you can go to school for it; you can go get a degree. Even as a composer, there is a certain career path you can follow, but becoming a rock musician is a much more elusive career. How do you learn that or do that?
Bryce Dessner The National -
I don't play an instrument. I pretend. I try to.
Matt Berninger The National -
A person with grace is somebody who's socially graceful or is a classy person, but sometimes you just feel the opposite of that, and you just feel like a jerk and a loser and a weirdo.
Matt Berninger The National -
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.
Bryce Dessner The National -
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.
Bryce Dessner The National
-
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.
Bryce Dessner The National -
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.
Matt Berninger The National -
David Harrington, who's the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.
Bryce Dessner The National -
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.
Matt Berninger The National -
'Alligator' was the first record that anyone paid attention to, and it seemed like it was the screamy songs that got us that attention.
Matt Berninger The National -
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.
Matt Berninger The National
-
Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.
Matt Berninger The National -
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.
Matt Berninger The National -
Musicians are hungry for new music.
Bryce Dessner The National -
If you learn classical guitar, you play Bach, and then John Dowland. He's the greatest. He's interesting for many, many reasons.
Bryce Dessner The National -
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.
Matt Berninger The National -
I call The National my family, and I'll be doing that as long as I want to.
Bryce Dessner The National
-
We've played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.
Bryce Dessner The National -
It's not a hard sell to be asked to do something in Ireland.
Bryce Dessner The National -
Part of what I enjoy about writing classical music is communicating through the score and collaborating with such amazing musicians.
Bryce Dessner The National -
Typically, people think, 'Oh the hippies and the punks hated each other,' or that those things don't go together musically. Sometimes that is true, but we had equal parts of both in our musical DNA.
Bryce Dessner The National