The first song on your album „Alligator“ has this following line: „Didn’t anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room?“ How do you do it yourself?
I think it’s just to kind of disappear in a crowd or escape. You know, it’s loosely interpreted…just to get away, to escape.
Is that part of your music as well: the escape, trying to get away from it all?
There’s a lot of social anxiety, I think, in a lot of the songs. And, sort of, a lot of the characters find themselves stuck either in a mental space or a real place where they just want to disappear. Nothing that melodramatic, you know. It’s just sort of normal human anxieties, i guess. That creeps into a lot of the songs. Mostly, I think, because I have those social anxieties. So yeah, that’s a theme on this record.
I read a quote about The National: „music was their way of letting off steam from those good jobs“. What jobs did you have?
We all moved to New York about ten years ago and all had careers before we started the band. I was a creative director at a big design company and Scott was also a designer. Erin was working in a business development company and Brian was working in publishing. So we all had sort of established careers before we started just getting together on the weekends and after work just for fun. We were all friends from back in Cincinnati and so the band started as just a hobby, just doing something outside our professional lives. We didn’t have that big of ambitions to turn into a touring band. So things just sort of slowly developed for us. It was always just sort of something for us to find joy and forget about our jobs for a while.
Would it be wrong to assume that that was kind of an escape as well, from society and from the jobs?
For all of us, I think, for anybody, for any music fans putting on you headphones or turning up your stereo is a way of putting your head into a world that is different than your own and you might be able to relate to. It’s like when you see a movie just to walk into some other reality for a little while. Making music is the same thing. And the joy you get from listening to music is very similar to when you’re making it.
Now you kind of started your second career, I guess, doing music and being very successful at it. Your new album is getting great critiques, you’re nominated for a Plug Award. Is this sort of success more rewarding to you than success in your jobs, or say “normal” careers was?
It’s more emotionally rewarding for sure. It’s not as financially rewarding, but yeah, absolutely…when we finally did leave those jobs we didn’t have any second thoughts about it. We knew that we would be poor, you know. I mean, I’m 34, we’re not like 19 years old. We were nervous about walking away from careers. But we knew this is making us much happier and we can always go back to some kind of real day jobs. We knew we had to chase this now; you don’t get many opportunities to do this. So we felt really lucky that things have gone well for us. We’re having a great time.
Was it really a unanimous decision of all the 5 guys in the band to walk away from those jobs? Did you have to convince other guys or was it the decision of all members of the band to go and do this thing and pull it through together?
Well, we all left the job at different times. When we started touring a lot we would take all of our vacation time from our jobs and then started taking extra time off to leave for a few weeks. We actually tried to hold on to these jobs as long as possible. We stretched our vacation time very thing and all. So eventually the jobs were like: “listen are you here or are you there? Are you gonna do the band or…?” Because we had positions...it wasn’t like we were just going in and out of freelance things. We had to be there and really do those jobs well. Eventually I’ll get fired for never being there, which we knew was going to happen anyway. And we just kept pushing it as far as we could and so…I mean…one by one we all lost our jobs. But we knew we were going into that direction. So it wasn’t dramatic, it was a big relief to just walk away.
How did you deal with the change from normal day job life to a rock’n’roll life with touring and dealing with bands, roadies, different cities every night, you know, the whole thing?
The way I always feel is like I’m cheating the world in a way. I think we all come from pretty conservative work ethic, Middle American values: getting a good job and starting family, you know. So there’s always a little bit of guilt. You feel like you’re a child by pursuing a rock band in you mid-thirties. But it’s an amazing feeling to not have to go in and sit at your desk and report to a boss. We feel we’re getting away we something that we shouldn’t and somebody’s gonna catch us some day.
But it’s a huge weight off of our shoulders as far as that goes. Then again, the touring…it’s really hard to be on the road for ten months of the year. This is the end of our tour, we have a few more weeks but it’s been since April that we’ve been touring about 80 percent of the time. So that’s a whole different level of work, which is sometimes physically much more difficult than our jobs were. And emotionally in a lot of ways stressful. But, you know, the point of doing it is so we can play our rock songs as opposed to working on some projects for a client. Yes, there’s no question whether is all worth it.
Do you ever catch yourself looking at it as a business more than a hobby? Of course, it’s your profession now, but do you ever look at it more as a director, which you’ve been before?
When touring…when you have ten shows in a row and for months at a time you do tend to adopt a little bit of a mental state of…we pretend we’re in the army where you’re just driving from one mission to the next and you’re all crammed in a van…without the fear of death; so it’s not as bad as the army. But you do have to have some sort of mental ways of surviving mentally. Because, you put five grown people, no matter who they are, and force them to be together for 30 or 40 days…That’s not easy. So, we don’t have a professional strategy necessarily. We just try to do this as long as we can without the rest of our lives falling apart and without us going crazy. It does get really hard on the road when you’re gone for so long. But all we do is think of sitting at our computers or having to go to a client presentation with a powerpoint presentation…there’s no comparison, you know. We quickly put it into perspective and feel very lucky.
As you said, putting five grown men into a touring van is pretty difficult. Is it even more difficult when four of those guys are two pairs of brothers? Is there more tension?
The fact that Brian and Scott are brothers and Erin and Bryce are brothers definitely is a positive thing for us. They understand each other both musically and temperamental wise. They’ve worked out a lot of problems when they were kids. I think it might be harder…well there’s actually seven people traveling, because Padma Newsome who plays viola and keyboards and stuff is with us too. The brother thing has definitely been some sort of backbone of comfort and it’s helped our survival. They’ve also been playing music together since they were kids. So there’s also a musical sort of synergy, which is maybe unique. But it’s hard to say. You know, you meat a lot of bands and we also go through periods where we’re at each other’s throats and it’s not always brotherly love all the time. But we managed to be gentlemen as much as possible.
On your website americanmary.com there are pictures of The National playing soccer against Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Is The National a team, is there a group spirit? I mean left your jobs together, is there this pressure to go on together as well?
Yeah, there’s very much this feeling of comradery that comes with going through something, pursuing something very illusive together and especially driving around the country and around the world. You have to adopt a little bit of a spirit between you just to survive.
In the US was a lot of press about that tour, and a lot of this was because CYHSY were getting an amazing amount of publicity and they were playing their opening for us and we have always been sort of in the shadows and never quite at that level of media attention that they were getting. So there were these websites and blogs talking about it as being a battle of these two bands, you know, us who have been around a little longer and sort of old school and then putting CYHSY in the camp of being a buzz band…it was silly to us. We really like each other’s music, we’ve known each other for a little while…so we asked them to do the tour with us before they became famous really. So when they did become famous they didn’t have any second thoughts about changing the tour or anything. And so we just had a great time and it was just fun to read all this, the blogs about the whole battle thing. We decided to just kind of make fun of it. We’re supposed to have a re-match with them pretty soon, I think, back in New York. There is like friendly competition between our bands, but all in good spirits.
I think all bands have a sense of, whatever it is, this blood brothers or sisters sort of thing, when you’re trying to be a band. A few bands get very popular. But 98 to 99 percent of all bands that work their asses off and make records and tour around the world no one has ever heard of. So you have to adopt this delusional sense of pursuing this dream and it’s hard, you have be really supportive of each other and lean on each other when you need to. Because the touring part is not glamorous; especially when you’re not popular.
But some bands can survive that and keep making records forever and both CYHSY and us have a similar way of thinking: we just do it for fun and don’t pay attention to the press.
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