Twice over the course of the last week I had the opportunity to witness one of my favorite bands, the National, as they transitioned from small clubs to big stages. The group had the unenviable show-opening, 7pm “crack-of-dawn” slot on the REM tour (Modest Mouse was sandwiched in between). Watching the band handily upscale and triumph (at both shows the audience was rapturous by the end of their set) got me thinking about my own personal history with the band, and the evolution of the indie paradigm over the last few years.
A quick warning at the outset: this entry is full of personal anecdotes. If you don’t like that kind of thins — and, man, I can’t blame you if you don’t — you may want to skip.
I’ve been charting the progress of the National for seven years now. A few weeks after their first album came out, I wrote a longish profile feature on them for Atlanta Creative Loafing. It was the first long piece the band had written about them, and they seemed as unsure about how to answer as I was over what to ask. They had all just relocated from Ohio to New York, and all of them were slogging through day jobs while waiting for the band to take off. When I called Matt Berninger, it was during some down time during his day working for a web design company. We talked a little too much about the idea of self-loathing (which perhaps says more about me at the time than it does about the band), and about the idea of having to deal with a day job in order to do the thing you love (I was working as a guidance counselor while trying to make inroads as a freelance rock critic). Mostly, though, we talked about Matt’s lyrics. “With these songs, there’s a lot I got out of my system,” he told me. “The songwriters that have the most impact on me are the ones that expose a lot of personal things in interesting ways, in honest ways. That might be indulgent, but I’d rather take that chance and walk that line than to be too safe or too saccharine.” A few weeks later I saw them play for about 7 people at a bar in Philadelphia.
The next time I talked to them was in 2003. They’d just released Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, which I became convinced was the record that was going to catapult them into indie stardom (I was wrong about this, as I often am about these things). We met at Fish Bar in NYC for trivia night as part of an elaborate concept for a MAGNET piece I was writing on them (I learned that night that trying to interview a band while also playing competitive bar trivia is colossally stupid). We got drunker and increasingly confident of our wild answers (Bryan Devendorf helpfully provided the name of the inventor of the miniskirt — a question that had clearly stumped the people around us). At one point, there was a lengthy discussion about whether or not calling a friend to have them Google an answer consituted cheating (the verdict: it did). They talked about their struggles with songwriting. There was one song in particular they just couldn’t seem to nail. They’d worked it and re-worked it, tried it slow, tried it fast, but Matt said it looked like it was almost certainly headed for the scrap heap. It was a weird, obstinate little number the band was calling “Abel.” Near the end of the night, all of us far drunker than we should be, I expressed disbelief that labels weren’t pounding the band’s door down. They all shot each other uneasy looks, and Bryce leaned over and conspiratorally confessed: “Don’t put this in your article, because it’s not 100% official yet, but we just signed to Beggars.” Because the owners of Fish Bar are not exactly prompt, I ended up stumbling out before the trivia prizes were awarded. When I emerged from the subway 45 minutes later, I had a phone message from Bryce: team National had taken top prize at Fish Bar trivia.
A few weeks after that I saw them play a bar in Brooklyn for an audience of 12. Although Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers was still brand new, they played almost nothing from it, concentrating instead on songs that would eventually turn up on Alligator, including a particularly fiery version of “Lit Up.” When the record was finally released in 2005 I thought, “Surely, this will be the one that breaks them.” And, initially, I was wrong again. Alligator got an OK review in Pitchfork, but very little happened after that. When I interviewed Matt a few months after its release, it was clear the dead-ending was starting to get to him. “We’ve been doing this for five years,” he said, “and in those five years we’ve seen so many younger, cooler-looking dudes pop up and become superstars. You look at some of those bands and you think, ‘God, they put a lot of effort into the way they look.” And then he quickly, humbly added, “I mean, I put a lot of effort in, too. The difference is that I get nowhere with it.” I saw the band 5 or 6 times that year, and the audience never seemed to crack 100. That same year, the band decided to take a little-known NY band called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on tour with them. About a week into that tour, Pitchfork lauded the Clap Your Hands record. The audiences for the shows doubled in size, but the crowd thinned considerably the instant CYHSY wrapped up. In a documentary about the band shot during that time period, there’s a scene of Bryce in a van, listening as two radio DJs play a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song, and talk about the double-bill that night. The DJs spent five or six solid minutes fawning over CYH as this generation’s next great band, causing Bryce to wonder out loud, “Let’s see what they say about us.” The answer, when it came, was devastating: they said nothing.
It went on like this for a while, and from a great distance I found myself becoming depressed on the band’s behalf. It was a personal irritant: this band was writing songs that resonated deeply with me, songs about trying to act young even though you know you’re getting old, songs about romantic blunders and the tyranny of day-to-day obligation. Their albums were deliberate slow-burners — they weren’t fleeting crushes, they were lifelong romances. I was bothered that no one, it seemed, wanted to put in the work anymore — no one wanted to spend time letting a record seep into their pores. I couldn’t figure out what it was that was keeping so many people from falling in love with this band.
Then, and it’s hard to say when or how, something changed. That song they’d been slaving over, “Abel,” started catching on, and soon the shows got fuller and fuller. When Boxer was released in 2007, the week of shows at New York’s Bowery Ballroom sold out in minutes. Seeing them that night was a revelation: a room full of people belting out every word, feeling and understanding every word. I had goosebumps for 90 minutes solid. A few weeks later I talked to Matt again, and he was candid about the difficulties the band faced in getting Boxer from concept to execution.
I got to witness that same slow falling-in-love happen at both Jones Beach and Madison Square Garden this past week, albeit over a much shorter timespan. The group was augmented by two horn players and longtime compatriot Padma Newsome on violin. The reception at first was tentative, but as the set progressed, the band’s grip around the audience tightened. They were astonishing: their songs, so small and personal on record, were easily expanded to fill those large rooms. They were sweeping and potent and passionate, most of them building to feverish crescendos, huge mad whirling dervishes of sound. By the end of their set on both nights, the audience was rapturous — hooting and cheering and clapping in ways they absolutely were not at the end of Modest Mouse’s set an hour later. Pairing the National with REM made perfect sense: they were two bands that relied on cockeyed songwriting and hyper-literate lyrics, two bands that required a measure of patience to fully appreciate. REM established the model that the National followed: a slow, steady build, finding fans slowly over the course of several albums instead of all-at-once, out of the gate. Seeing the band onstage at Madison Square Garden, the biggest venue in the city where they live, crappy day jobs a distant memory, I felt so happy for them.
Which got me thinking in general about the increasingly stunted career arc for indie bands in the ’00s. The National are the rare exception: it seems these days that the audience’s attention is focused on a band’s first record and, often, nothing after that. It seems almost ridiculous now to think that audiences were showing up to that tour in 2005 for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, so greatly has that band’s stature shrunk. I’m beginning to wonder if sticking by an artist for the length of their career is an idea that’s growing out of fashion. Does anyone want a ’second record’ anymore? Are audiences willing to stick by bands for the five years it took the National to fully blossom? Or for the decade it took REM to do the same? Is the future one where bands make one hot record and vanish completely? Is it antiquated, old-fashioned and lame to hope we get a few “career artists” out of this promising crop of indie bands?
I don’t know what the answer is, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. It panned out for the National, but will other young bands be given that same chance?
