Albums : The National : Trouble Will Find Me
Albums : The National : Trouble Will Find Me
Listen To The National : Trouble Will Find Me
Who is The National?
TROUBLE WILL FIND ME, the most self-assured collection of songs produced by the National in its 14-year career, is a tribute to fully evolved artistic vision—and, somewhat less mystically, to sleep deprivation. Last January, following a twenty-two month tour to promote the band’s previous record, HIGH VIOLET, guitarist Aaron Dessner returned home to Brooklyn, where the fitfulness of his newborn daughter threw Aaron into a more or less sustained fugue state—“sleepless and up all the time,” as he puts it. Punch-drunk, he shuffled into the band’s studio (situated in Aaron’s backyard), where he amused himself writing musical fragments that he then sent over to vocalist Matt Berninger. Recalls Matt of Aaron, “He’d be so tired while he was playing his guitar and working on ideas that he wouldn’t intellectualize anything. In the past, he and Aaron’s twin brother, Bryce would be reluctant to send me things that weren’t in their opinion musically interesting—which I respected, but often those would be hard for me to connect to emotionally. This time around, they sent me sketch after sketch that immediately got me on a visceral level.”
In truth, the band, which includes bassist Scott Devendorf and his brother Bryan on drums, hadn’t planned on recording new music for at least another year or two. The HIGH VIOLET tour represented a quantum leap in The National’s trajectory; the venues got bigger and bigger, and the band felt the pressure to deliver the shows to larger crowds. Matt says, “We enjoyed it, but it was never easy. We always reminded ourselves that all of this is really fragile—that if we don’t deliver in, say, some festival show in Europe somewhere, we could start to slide.” Nor was returning to the studio likely to be cathartic, given the fact that The National’s last two recording sessions have been emotional high-wire acts in which the perfectionism of the five members—particularly Aaron and Matt—sometimes made for a tense time all around.
That didn’t happen this time. The post-HIGH VIOLET sound Matt was seeking, says Aaron, “was more airy, less uptight and anxious. He sent me a lot of Cat Stevens, Neil Young, Dylan and David Bowie. And Bryce and I wanted a more relaxed and open sound too. We’d been getting deeper into the world of composed music in the last few years and developing more of an interest in classic songwriting.” The Dessner twins’ pursuits dovetailed with that of Matt, who says, “I went through a big Roy Orbison phase. I listened to a lot of him. His song structures are innovative, unconventional, yet somehow still effortless.” The Devendorf brothers then supplied their insistent, intricate backbeats, and what emerged was a series of distinctly timeless musical narratives.
This isn’t to suggest that the songs The National wrote and recorded last winter at Clubhouse studios in Rhinebeck, New York qualify as simple. In addition to the self-lacerating impressionistic scattershots that are Matt’s lyrical stock in trade, they feature time signatures, mixed meter and melody frameworks more challenging than anything the band has previously attempted. Still, TROUBLE WILL FIND ME possesses a directness, a coherency and—dare it be said about such an unpredictable band—an approachability that suggests The National has at long last located its emotional target.
It’s strange that a band like this would be feeling insecure. Few groups have sustained such credibility—with audiences as well as critics—as authors of a sound that is simultaneously original, witty, moving and unforgettable. After the success of their fourth record, BOXER, The National sealed their artistic reputation in 2010 with the widely acclaimed HIGH VIOLET and spent the next two years delivering sellout performances around the world. Along the way, Aaron and Bryce continued their individual side projects (Aaron producing records for such bands as Sharon Van Etten and Local Natives, Bryce composing for Kronos Quartet and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, among others) while the band as a whole devoted work to Tibet House, Red Hot and other charities. During the 2012 campaign cycle, The National performed at several get-out-the-vote concerts in Ohio and warmed up an Iowa rally for President Obama. Adding a new creative wrinkle, Matt’s younger brother Tom Berninger filmed “Mistaken for Strangers”—a hilarious and affecting documentary of Tom’s less-than-successful stint as the band’s assistant tour manager during the HIGH VIOLET tour—which will open the Tribeca Film Festival in New York this April.
But, Matt confesses, “I feel like for the past ten years we’d been chasing something, wanting to prove something. Early on we were labeled as alt-country, sleepy miserablists, and that stung, especially because it was partly true. So for a long time, we were motivated in our songwriting to prove that wrong. We had a lot of chips on our shoulders. And this chase was about trying to disprove our own insecurities. After touring HIGH VIOLET, I think we felt like we’d finally gotten there. Now we could relax—not in terms of our own expectations, but we didn’t have to prove our identity any longer.”
From beginning to end, TROUBLE WILL FIND ME possesses the effortless and unself-conscious groove of a downstream swimmer. It’s at times lush and at others austere, suffused with insomniacal preoccupations that skirt despair without succumbing to it. There are alluring melodies, and the murderously deft undercurrent supplied by the Devendorfs. There are songs that seem (for Matt anyway) overtly sentimental—among them, the Simon & Garfunkel-esque “Fireproof,” “I Need My Girl” (with Matt’s unforgettable if throwaway reference to a party “full of punks and cannonballers”) and “I Should Live In Salt” (which Aaron composed as a send-up to the Kinks and which Matt wrote about his brother). While a recognition of mortality looms in these numbers, they’re buoyed by a kind of emotional resoluteness—“We’ll all arrive in heaven alive”—that will surprise devotees of Matt’s customary wry fatalism. Then there are the songs that Aaron describes as “songs you could dance to—more fun, or at least The National’s version of fun.” These include “Demons”—a mordant romp in 7/4, proof that bleakness can actually be rousing—and the haunting “Humiliation,” in which the insistent locomotion of Bryan’s snarebeat is offset by Matt’s semi-detached gallows rumination: “If I die this instant/taken from a distance/they will probably list it down among other things around town.”
Finally there are songs—like “Pink Rabbits” and the lilting “Slipped” (the latter termed by Aaron “the kind of song we’ve always wanted to write”)—that aspire to be classics, with Orbison-like melodic geometry. In these songs, as well as in “Heavenfaced,” Matt emerges from his self-described “comfort zone of chant-rock” and glides into a sonorous high register of unexpected gorgeousness. The results are simultaneously breakthrough and oddly familiar, the culmination of an artistic journey that has led The National both to a new crest and, somehow, back to their beginnings—when, says Aaron, “our ideas would immediately click with each other. It’s free-wheeling again. The songs on one level are our most complex, and on another they’re our most simple and human. It just feels like we’ve embraced the chemistry we have.”
Trouble Will Find Me
Most people attribute the National’s escalating popularity to their reliability: They write songs about existential dread and the real pressures that result when others are depending on you to have your shit together. And while that steadiness is certainly important, it gives short shrift to how the Brooklyn-via-Cincinnati band’s career fulfills a fantasy. Though their self-titled 2001 debut is all but written out of their history, every National album since has been more ambitious, accomplished, and successful than the one that came before it. They are strivers, and their place in the indie rock world suggests that life can be a series of upward promotions and self-improvement. But hard work is often a cover for repressed frustration, as was clear on 2010’s High Violet, an album whose wrought arrangements and violent lyrics underscored every story about what a tremendous pain in the ass it was to make. The question they ask on Trouble Will Find Me is both relatable and fantastical: When do we get a break from shooting up the ladder?
The National may find it impossible ever to relax, but they have learned to stop struggling on Trouble Will Find Me, their leanest and most aerodynamic record yet. Most descriptors of the National’s musicianship-- the exacting performances, Matt Berninger’s oaken baritone, the allegiances with the equally finicky St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens-- can double as evidence for self-serving arguments about how they’re “boring.” The only term that’s dogged the National more than that one is “grower,” a slightly backhanded remark implying that enjoying them requires an inordinate investment, or that it’s more cerebral than physical. While the National never lacked confidence or craft, Trouble is an easily accessible and self-assured work, largely because it focuses on the visceral power of Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s inventive drumming. It's a sign of trust that they can convey all of their ornate and rich melancholy without every sad note being underlined by a bassoon.
It’s been eight years since Berninger screamed on record, and now that act appears to have served as some kind of exfoliant. (He also quit smoking in 2011.) His vocals are deeper and richer than ever, as well as more tuneful and elegant. The National's dirty secret is that for all of the Dessner brothers’ orchestral ambitions, these songs are simple things: Instantly memorable melodies and minimal chord progressions become familiar after one listen, and then there’s a pivot, usually undetectable the first time around, that takes the National towards one of their proprietary grand finales. The greatness lies in when the listener connects the two and realizes they're part of the same song.
“Graceless” perfects the kind of fist-pumping victory lap featured on “Abel” or “Bloodbuzz Ohio”, and subsequent spins reveal how expertly the build is structured. Ditto for “Sea of Love”, which incrementally wells up to a cathartic call and response that extends a hand to a slipping friend with both empathy (“tell me how to reach you”) and dark humor (“what did Harvard teach you?”). There are plenty of great little moments as well; the fractious time signatures of “I Should Live In Salt” and “Demons” pushing against Berninger’s burly vocals, a tiny, chromatic guitar figure setting “Humiliation” on a new trajectory, “I Need My Girl” expressing its nervy claustrophobia through frilly filigrees. You never lose sight of Trouble Will Find Me being the result of a meticulous process conducted by professionals, though like surgeons, chefs, or interior decorators, they trust themselves to know when to put the tools down.
That’s mostly true of Berninger’s lyrics as well. Trouble Will Find Me doesn't contain his sharpest writing-- in particular, “Fireproof” and “Slipped” cross over to being a bit pro forma-- but in ditching the obtuse metaphors and playing with and against type, it’s his funniest. “I am secretly in love with everyone I grew up with,” he gravely intones on “Demons”, hinting at the dominant theme of how the self-image and relationships formed during his younger, angsty years figure in to his present reality. He brings the stakes down to a tangible level, where he’s invited to nice dinners, punk parties, and meet-and-greets, only to wind up calling his wife, feeling like his presence there is all somehow a giant mistake. “When I walk into a room, I do not light it up... FUCK,” Berninger stresses in an exasperated tone as a minor chord inversion takes away the mock scare quotes during the final chorus of “Demons”, revealing the deep-set despair at the source of all this self-deprecation.
As usual, he’s not alone on Trouble Will Find Me. Within this elemental music, compulsions towards substances, sex, and depression are likened to swamps, oceans, and agricultural decay-- natural events tentatively contained by human will. The characters are medicated, missing, and incapable of justifying their hangovers, let alone glorifying them. On Alligator, Berninger’s sociopathic tendencies felt defiant, and some may miss that; during “All The Wine”, he drank from bottomless goblets, claiming “God is on my side.” Conversely, the narrators of Trouble Will Find Me are creatures of habit attending to dull aches; a perfunctory anti-romance is consecrated with “Tylenol and beer”, and by the next song, Berninger mutters, “God loves everybody, don’t remind me.” Where he once fancied himself a cold-blooded heat-seeker and a “birthday candle in a circle of black girls,” the isolation he now feels renders him as unique as “a white girl in a crowd of white girls in a park.”
Considering the National can no longer be compared to anyone besides themselves, it’s fitting Trouble Will Find Me is their most self-referential album. Sometimes, they’re alluding to their image as the definitive yuppie band: Berninger calls himself “a 45 percenter,” “a television version of a person with a broken heart.” They’re also putting their own work up against the canon because they’re big enough to do it: Let It Be and Nevermind serve as paragons of stability on “Don’t Swallow the Cap”, Elliott Smith’s despondent “Needle in the Hay” contrasts with the pokerfaced “Fireproof”. Bona Drag plays during the luxurious piano mope of “Pink Rabbits”, LA Woman and Guns N' Roses are given malaprop name-checks on “Humiliation”.
Of all the references, the most powerful serves as the final line on Trouble Will Find Me: “they can all just kiss off into the air.” On a song which bemoans the futility of living in the past, here’s a band often mocked for aging with their music quoting a band often mocked for music that’s stuck in a permanent state of teenhood. It could be the funniest or the most heartbreaking moment on a record full of instances of both, a reminder that when Berninger sings “I was trying not to crack up” on the previous song, there’s two ways of reading it. On a similar topic, Ezra Koenig recently opined, “wisdom’s a gift but you’d trade it for youth,” and “Hard to Find” is a similar thought taken from a different angle. People stay down with their demons wishing for that trade to be a realistic possibility, and in the clearest terms his medium-sized American heart can muster, Berninger expresses his means of finding serenity when trouble tries to find him-- “there's a lot that I've not forgotten/but I let go of other things." As a culmination and refinement of everything the National have done over the past decade, Trouble Will Find Me couldn’t be granted a more fitting mission statement.
Contact The National
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Soundcloud | YouTube | iTunes
Contact Pitchfork
Website | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Spotify
Sources : The National Photo | Listen To Trouble Will Find Me | The National Biography | Trouble Will Find Me Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon | Best Buy (Digipak CD) | Walmart
Listen To The National : Trouble Will Find Me
Who is The National?
TROUBLE WILL FIND ME, the most self-assured collection of songs produced by the National in its 14-year career, is a tribute to fully evolved artistic vision—and, somewhat less mystically, to sleep deprivation. Last January, following a twenty-two month tour to promote the band’s previous record, HIGH VIOLET, guitarist Aaron Dessner returned home to Brooklyn, where the fitfulness of his newborn daughter threw Aaron into a more or less sustained fugue state—“sleepless and up all the time,” as he puts it. Punch-drunk, he shuffled into the band’s studio (situated in Aaron’s backyard), where he amused himself writing musical fragments that he then sent over to vocalist Matt Berninger. Recalls Matt of Aaron, “He’d be so tired while he was playing his guitar and working on ideas that he wouldn’t intellectualize anything. In the past, he and Aaron’s twin brother, Bryce would be reluctant to send me things that weren’t in their opinion musically interesting—which I respected, but often those would be hard for me to connect to emotionally. This time around, they sent me sketch after sketch that immediately got me on a visceral level.”
In truth, the band, which includes bassist Scott Devendorf and his brother Bryan on drums, hadn’t planned on recording new music for at least another year or two. The HIGH VIOLET tour represented a quantum leap in The National’s trajectory; the venues got bigger and bigger, and the band felt the pressure to deliver the shows to larger crowds. Matt says, “We enjoyed it, but it was never easy. We always reminded ourselves that all of this is really fragile—that if we don’t deliver in, say, some festival show in Europe somewhere, we could start to slide.” Nor was returning to the studio likely to be cathartic, given the fact that The National’s last two recording sessions have been emotional high-wire acts in which the perfectionism of the five members—particularly Aaron and Matt—sometimes made for a tense time all around.
That didn’t happen this time. The post-HIGH VIOLET sound Matt was seeking, says Aaron, “was more airy, less uptight and anxious. He sent me a lot of Cat Stevens, Neil Young, Dylan and David Bowie. And Bryce and I wanted a more relaxed and open sound too. We’d been getting deeper into the world of composed music in the last few years and developing more of an interest in classic songwriting.” The Dessner twins’ pursuits dovetailed with that of Matt, who says, “I went through a big Roy Orbison phase. I listened to a lot of him. His song structures are innovative, unconventional, yet somehow still effortless.” The Devendorf brothers then supplied their insistent, intricate backbeats, and what emerged was a series of distinctly timeless musical narratives.
This isn’t to suggest that the songs The National wrote and recorded last winter at Clubhouse studios in Rhinebeck, New York qualify as simple. In addition to the self-lacerating impressionistic scattershots that are Matt’s lyrical stock in trade, they feature time signatures, mixed meter and melody frameworks more challenging than anything the band has previously attempted. Still, TROUBLE WILL FIND ME possesses a directness, a coherency and—dare it be said about such an unpredictable band—an approachability that suggests The National has at long last located its emotional target.
It’s strange that a band like this would be feeling insecure. Few groups have sustained such credibility—with audiences as well as critics—as authors of a sound that is simultaneously original, witty, moving and unforgettable. After the success of their fourth record, BOXER, The National sealed their artistic reputation in 2010 with the widely acclaimed HIGH VIOLET and spent the next two years delivering sellout performances around the world. Along the way, Aaron and Bryce continued their individual side projects (Aaron producing records for such bands as Sharon Van Etten and Local Natives, Bryce composing for Kronos Quartet and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, among others) while the band as a whole devoted work to Tibet House, Red Hot and other charities. During the 2012 campaign cycle, The National performed at several get-out-the-vote concerts in Ohio and warmed up an Iowa rally for President Obama. Adding a new creative wrinkle, Matt’s younger brother Tom Berninger filmed “Mistaken for Strangers”—a hilarious and affecting documentary of Tom’s less-than-successful stint as the band’s assistant tour manager during the HIGH VIOLET tour—which will open the Tribeca Film Festival in New York this April.
But, Matt confesses, “I feel like for the past ten years we’d been chasing something, wanting to prove something. Early on we were labeled as alt-country, sleepy miserablists, and that stung, especially because it was partly true. So for a long time, we were motivated in our songwriting to prove that wrong. We had a lot of chips on our shoulders. And this chase was about trying to disprove our own insecurities. After touring HIGH VIOLET, I think we felt like we’d finally gotten there. Now we could relax—not in terms of our own expectations, but we didn’t have to prove our identity any longer.”
From beginning to end, TROUBLE WILL FIND ME possesses the effortless and unself-conscious groove of a downstream swimmer. It’s at times lush and at others austere, suffused with insomniacal preoccupations that skirt despair without succumbing to it. There are alluring melodies, and the murderously deft undercurrent supplied by the Devendorfs. There are songs that seem (for Matt anyway) overtly sentimental—among them, the Simon & Garfunkel-esque “Fireproof,” “I Need My Girl” (with Matt’s unforgettable if throwaway reference to a party “full of punks and cannonballers”) and “I Should Live In Salt” (which Aaron composed as a send-up to the Kinks and which Matt wrote about his brother). While a recognition of mortality looms in these numbers, they’re buoyed by a kind of emotional resoluteness—“We’ll all arrive in heaven alive”—that will surprise devotees of Matt’s customary wry fatalism. Then there are the songs that Aaron describes as “songs you could dance to—more fun, or at least The National’s version of fun.” These include “Demons”—a mordant romp in 7/4, proof that bleakness can actually be rousing—and the haunting “Humiliation,” in which the insistent locomotion of Bryan’s snarebeat is offset by Matt’s semi-detached gallows rumination: “If I die this instant/taken from a distance/they will probably list it down among other things around town.”
Finally there are songs—like “Pink Rabbits” and the lilting “Slipped” (the latter termed by Aaron “the kind of song we’ve always wanted to write”)—that aspire to be classics, with Orbison-like melodic geometry. In these songs, as well as in “Heavenfaced,” Matt emerges from his self-described “comfort zone of chant-rock” and glides into a sonorous high register of unexpected gorgeousness. The results are simultaneously breakthrough and oddly familiar, the culmination of an artistic journey that has led The National both to a new crest and, somehow, back to their beginnings—when, says Aaron, “our ideas would immediately click with each other. It’s free-wheeling again. The songs on one level are our most complex, and on another they’re our most simple and human. It just feels like we’ve embraced the chemistry we have.”
Trouble Will Find Me
Most people attribute the National’s escalating popularity to their reliability: They write songs about existential dread and the real pressures that result when others are depending on you to have your shit together. And while that steadiness is certainly important, it gives short shrift to how the Brooklyn-via-Cincinnati band’s career fulfills a fantasy. Though their self-titled 2001 debut is all but written out of their history, every National album since has been more ambitious, accomplished, and successful than the one that came before it. They are strivers, and their place in the indie rock world suggests that life can be a series of upward promotions and self-improvement. But hard work is often a cover for repressed frustration, as was clear on 2010’s High Violet, an album whose wrought arrangements and violent lyrics underscored every story about what a tremendous pain in the ass it was to make. The question they ask on Trouble Will Find Me is both relatable and fantastical: When do we get a break from shooting up the ladder?
The National may find it impossible ever to relax, but they have learned to stop struggling on Trouble Will Find Me, their leanest and most aerodynamic record yet. Most descriptors of the National’s musicianship-- the exacting performances, Matt Berninger’s oaken baritone, the allegiances with the equally finicky St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens-- can double as evidence for self-serving arguments about how they’re “boring.” The only term that’s dogged the National more than that one is “grower,” a slightly backhanded remark implying that enjoying them requires an inordinate investment, or that it’s more cerebral than physical. While the National never lacked confidence or craft, Trouble is an easily accessible and self-assured work, largely because it focuses on the visceral power of Berninger’s vocals and Bryan Devendorf’s inventive drumming. It's a sign of trust that they can convey all of their ornate and rich melancholy without every sad note being underlined by a bassoon.
It’s been eight years since Berninger screamed on record, and now that act appears to have served as some kind of exfoliant. (He also quit smoking in 2011.) His vocals are deeper and richer than ever, as well as more tuneful and elegant. The National's dirty secret is that for all of the Dessner brothers’ orchestral ambitions, these songs are simple things: Instantly memorable melodies and minimal chord progressions become familiar after one listen, and then there’s a pivot, usually undetectable the first time around, that takes the National towards one of their proprietary grand finales. The greatness lies in when the listener connects the two and realizes they're part of the same song.
“Graceless” perfects the kind of fist-pumping victory lap featured on “Abel” or “Bloodbuzz Ohio”, and subsequent spins reveal how expertly the build is structured. Ditto for “Sea of Love”, which incrementally wells up to a cathartic call and response that extends a hand to a slipping friend with both empathy (“tell me how to reach you”) and dark humor (“what did Harvard teach you?”). There are plenty of great little moments as well; the fractious time signatures of “I Should Live In Salt” and “Demons” pushing against Berninger’s burly vocals, a tiny, chromatic guitar figure setting “Humiliation” on a new trajectory, “I Need My Girl” expressing its nervy claustrophobia through frilly filigrees. You never lose sight of Trouble Will Find Me being the result of a meticulous process conducted by professionals, though like surgeons, chefs, or interior decorators, they trust themselves to know when to put the tools down.
That’s mostly true of Berninger’s lyrics as well. Trouble Will Find Me doesn't contain his sharpest writing-- in particular, “Fireproof” and “Slipped” cross over to being a bit pro forma-- but in ditching the obtuse metaphors and playing with and against type, it’s his funniest. “I am secretly in love with everyone I grew up with,” he gravely intones on “Demons”, hinting at the dominant theme of how the self-image and relationships formed during his younger, angsty years figure in to his present reality. He brings the stakes down to a tangible level, where he’s invited to nice dinners, punk parties, and meet-and-greets, only to wind up calling his wife, feeling like his presence there is all somehow a giant mistake. “When I walk into a room, I do not light it up... FUCK,” Berninger stresses in an exasperated tone as a minor chord inversion takes away the mock scare quotes during the final chorus of “Demons”, revealing the deep-set despair at the source of all this self-deprecation.
As usual, he’s not alone on Trouble Will Find Me. Within this elemental music, compulsions towards substances, sex, and depression are likened to swamps, oceans, and agricultural decay-- natural events tentatively contained by human will. The characters are medicated, missing, and incapable of justifying their hangovers, let alone glorifying them. On Alligator, Berninger’s sociopathic tendencies felt defiant, and some may miss that; during “All The Wine”, he drank from bottomless goblets, claiming “God is on my side.” Conversely, the narrators of Trouble Will Find Me are creatures of habit attending to dull aches; a perfunctory anti-romance is consecrated with “Tylenol and beer”, and by the next song, Berninger mutters, “God loves everybody, don’t remind me.” Where he once fancied himself a cold-blooded heat-seeker and a “birthday candle in a circle of black girls,” the isolation he now feels renders him as unique as “a white girl in a crowd of white girls in a park.”
Considering the National can no longer be compared to anyone besides themselves, it’s fitting Trouble Will Find Me is their most self-referential album. Sometimes, they’re alluding to their image as the definitive yuppie band: Berninger calls himself “a 45 percenter,” “a television version of a person with a broken heart.” They’re also putting their own work up against the canon because they’re big enough to do it: Let It Be and Nevermind serve as paragons of stability on “Don’t Swallow the Cap”, Elliott Smith’s despondent “Needle in the Hay” contrasts with the pokerfaced “Fireproof”. Bona Drag plays during the luxurious piano mope of “Pink Rabbits”, LA Woman and Guns N' Roses are given malaprop name-checks on “Humiliation”.
Of all the references, the most powerful serves as the final line on Trouble Will Find Me: “they can all just kiss off into the air.” On a song which bemoans the futility of living in the past, here’s a band often mocked for aging with their music quoting a band often mocked for music that’s stuck in a permanent state of teenhood. It could be the funniest or the most heartbreaking moment on a record full of instances of both, a reminder that when Berninger sings “I was trying not to crack up” on the previous song, there’s two ways of reading it. On a similar topic, Ezra Koenig recently opined, “wisdom’s a gift but you’d trade it for youth,” and “Hard to Find” is a similar thought taken from a different angle. People stay down with their demons wishing for that trade to be a realistic possibility, and in the clearest terms his medium-sized American heart can muster, Berninger expresses his means of finding serenity when trouble tries to find him-- “there's a lot that I've not forgotten/but I let go of other things." As a culmination and refinement of everything the National have done over the past decade, Trouble Will Find Me couldn’t be granted a more fitting mission statement.
Contact The National
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Soundcloud | YouTube | iTunes
Contact Pitchfork
Website | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Spotify
Sources : The National Photo | Listen To Trouble Will Find Me | The National Biography | Trouble Will Find Me Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon | Best Buy (Digipak CD) | Walmart
0 comments: