Tutto si è mosso molto in fretta, prima qualche teaser, poi subito l’annuncio di un nuovo album, un singolo e un tour.
Adesso, finalmente, i National si sbottonano un po’ e parlano per la prima volta con Pitchfork di cosa aspettarsi dal nuovo album Sleep Well Beast. I quattro anni che separano Trouble Will Find Me dall’imminente nuova uscita marcano il gap più lungo di sempre tra un disco e l’altro della band americana, ma non è stato un tempo morto quello trascorso dai membri della band, con Matt Berninger alle prese con il progetto EL VY, e i gemelli Aaron e Bryce Dessner con le mani in pasta pressoché ovunque.
L’intervista vede come protagonisti Aaron Dessner e Matt Berninger, produttore e co-produttore dell’album.
Subito Dessner accenna come questo disco abbia avuto uno gestazione tribolata e abbia portato la band verso situazioni nuove, con diverse sperimentazioni. Un senso di libertà pervade il nuovo lavoro, dall’uso di looper e drum machine, fino ai soli di chitarra, vera sorpresa non solo di The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness ma di tutto l’album.
Anche il titolo molto lungo rappresenta una nuova attitudine più rilassata.
Dessner precisa:
We recorded so much music: focusing in on what the album is, that gets more intense in the old way. But this time, we weren’t so interested in constructing a polished or elaborately tightly-knit kind of record. We allowed ourselves to have more sounds that are just hanging out there in the mist.
Andando avanti, Aaron puntualizza come tutto sia frutto di una maturazione personale e a livello di band, ormai vera e propria famiglia dove ognuno si sente libero di fare ciò che sente:
I was maybe a little bit self-conscious. We’ve always avoided gratuitous noodling. This time, we were creating more space for things to happen. The way it was set up, it was so easy for me to go out, have a beer, and just play a guitar solo and be like, “Wait, that’s kind of fun,” and just leave it on. In the past, we may have whittled those things down. There’s a lot more interplay between everybody this time. That was part of the idea, just encouraging everybody to do whatever they felt like doing, and preserving it.
Ciò che ha sempre contraddistinto la qualità dei dischi dei National è la cura delle lyrics e, come avevamo scoperto, questo album vede una profonda collaborazione tra Berninger e la moglie Carin Besser:
The lyrics are direct and kind of intimate. Not all of the songs—I think there are as many silly, dumb, goofy lyrics on this as there usually are. But the serious stuff gets even more serious than usual. There is a lot of conversational stuff between people. I also collaborated more with Carin from the very beginning on a lot of these songs. Writing lyrics with your wife does lead to talking about yourselves a lot. But this is not an autobiographical account of my personal marriage. It’s almost about the marriage of the band.
Più nel dettaglio Berninger analizza un brano nuovo:
There’s a lot of self-medicating. “I’ll Still Destroy You” is lovingly talking about how we change our states of mind, whether it’s weed or wine or whatever. It’s an ingredient in my life. Sometimes we overindulge ourselves. I’ve always been okay with that in a funny way. I sing about that stuff a lot, and the dangers of it.
Ciò che incuriosisce è senza dubbio il titolo del singolo apripista di Sleep Well Beast, The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness, e riguardo a questo titolo Berninger spiega cosa il “system” rappresenti per lui:
That one, for me, is a hibernation—the dark before the dawn sort of thing. That one’s less about relationships than it is more of the strange way our world and our idea of identity mutates—sometimes overnight, as we’ve seen recently. It’s an abstract portrait of a weird time we’re in.
Riguardo al timore che questo possa essere un album politico (tante le connessioni tra la vittoria di Trump, odiato dal quintetto e la parola beast e system), Berninger getta acqua sul fuoco:
Everybody knows we’re big liberals and I was a very outspoken Hillary supporter, and I still am. It’s impossible for us to separate the songs we’re writing from what’s going on in the world. In a sense, it probably is a political album. But it’s not a concept album or anything. There’s political content in almost every song we’ve ever written on some level. It colors everything. There was no intention that this was more political than before. In fact, after Trump won, some of the relief of finishing this record was to turn off all the politics for a while. There were some songs that had more of the political stuff that we just decided to wait on and put aside.
Il titolo del nuovo album invece deriva da una traccia presente nell’album, l’ultima per la precisione, e sembrerebbe riassumere a pieno l’intento dell’album, liricamente e musicalmente.
Berninger:
It’s the name of the last track on the album. It feels like we’re in this period where there’s a tendency to just want to hibernate when things get really fucking weird. It’s an escape to try to sleep through it, but the beast for me isn’t a negative thing: it’s the future. We’ve all got kids, and when I see all of our kids… They’ve got a challenge ahead of them, but I feel positive about the future. The beast is like, wait until the youth wakes up. It’s an abstract thing.
Dessner:
That song, “Sleep Well Beast,” is one that took the longest to make and was also the most fun. It’s impressionistic, and it goes many places. It’s also maybe the longest song that’s ever been on a National record, so it felt like a weird focus even though it’s not a single. Somehow it seemed to sum up a lot of the energy that was going around the band.
E niente, adesso chi resiste fino all’8 settembre?
Riascoltiamoci The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness:
