![]() Sitting at home with no gigs or studio sessions to play, they couldn’t help but wonder if they could remain creative and excited after 23 years in the business. The group, together since 1999, had suffered through 11 years and four albums of good reviews and mediocre sales, followed by 12 years of success-four albums on the Billboard charts and headlining shows in arenas and sheds.īut they had to cancel a 39-city tour in 2020 as the plague spread. The pandemic seemed to be winding down, and it was time to work on a new album. ![]() That’s a hyperbolic description of the National’s high hopes and uncertain fears as they regathered in the spring of 2022. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death.” “I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited,” the adventurer says, “and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. An English explorer is sailing north into the frigid latitudes of the Arctic Ocean, hoping that the North Pole will be an oasis warmed by a sun that never sets, a place to discover the source of magnetism. But the machinery of getting the music out there is very different, and sometimes I get whiplash moving from one world to the other.”įirst Two Pages of Frankenstein takes its title from the opening scene of Mary Shelley’s 1816 novel. “Most musicians are really open-minded they like to perform with musicians from a world that’s not their own. “I often feel like the kid in the playground going back and forth between two gangs to get them to play together,” Dessner explained. Both groups have scheduled live tours for this year. At the same time, Dessner’s new classical ensemble, the Dream House Quartet, released its debut recording, The Dream House Quartet EP. But they survived and reemerged with this year’s studio album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, their ninth and one of their best. I say a four-minute song is great, but what if you have 30 minutes and all these textures and colors to work with, what would you say then?”ĭuring the pandemic, the National confronted a crisis of whether they could go on. I tell National fans that this is music I really love, and they respect that. “Look at Schubert and Mahler they were great songwriters. “The song form is the most essential kind of music,” he told me in 2021. ![]() In both cases he’s trying to generate compact modules of music that he can develop and elaborate in gradual, nuanced ways. But going back and forth has been surprisingly easy, he says. He’s not only the guitarist, keyboardist and songwriter for the National, one of the world’s most successful rock bands he’s also a composer and guitarist with a rapidly rising profile in the contemporary-classical world.
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