The National’s Matt Berninger is discussing his public persona. “The general package of what Matt Berninger seems to be,” he says, “is ‘unhinged, professorial, borderline alcoholic sad dad.’” He smiles. “I don’t mind that package. But it doesn’t hit right in the centre in some ways.”
Berninger has been thinking more and more about identity, one of the themes that runs through his second solo album, Get Sunk, which he released in May. “I think we get too attached to our own identities,” he says. “I think people often, because being in the world is scary, feel like you need to know who you are and where your flag is, and to stand and defend your ground, your personality, your perspective. But then it becomes: ‘I’m this person because men are supposed to be like this.’ Men try to pretend that they are somehow not affected by the world. We’re as fragile as babies.”
For over 25 years, the 54-year-old’s main identity has been as frontman and lyricist for The National, the Brooklyn-formed band who by stealth have shown a different way to be hugely successful: their erudite, emotionally raw and increasingly experimental brooding indie rock – music that comes with the aforementioned sad dad label – caught wind, helped by Berninger’s luxurious baritone. It’s made them a Grammy-winning, festival-headlining band.
He says the problem with such success comes when the things people think about him “start to echo in your head”. And then you start playing up to it? “I guess that is part of the thing that gets unhealthy. The economies of scale mean I now have to entertain a fucking basketball arena,” he says with a knowing absurdity. “And to get yourself up to that level, for me, it takes some weed, takes a little tequila soda. I’ve learned to love it. Now I open my eyes and really see. But the turning on of a big person to then trying to turn that person off every night really, really does a scramble on you. There is a side effect to it which can get too much.”
Circumstances have led Berninger to consider identity. Get Sunk was written after emerging from a period of trying personal disruption: in 2020 he suffered a spell of debilitating depression; two years ago, he moved from Los Angeles after 10 years (he was in Brooklyn for 15 years prior) to rural Connecticut with his wife, Carin Besser, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, and their 16-year-old daughter. “I get uncomfortable after about 10 years in a place. It feels good to pull your roots up and plant yourself in some new soil.”
Both events in their own way forced a re-evaluation of who he was, and where he was at. “From 2010 to 2020, I was mentally static or something,” he says. “It was the same churn. I don’t think I was growing as much as I could have been in that decade.”
Berninger, who is playing shows in Glasgow, Manchester and London next week, is on video call from his home in Connecticut; behind him on his wall is a multi-coloured homemade sign that reads “this is the best night of my life”. He took it from a fan while crowdsurfing during one of The National’s gigs. “I can’t remember where. I’ve had that up in my house wherever I’ve been for 15 years.”
White-bearded and bespectacled, he’s in loquacious form: his liberal conversation veers from the ills of capitalism and the billionaire class (“I don’t put any labels on, but if I had to, the ideals of socialism would be the one, 100 per cent”) to religion (“I’m a good Catholic – I believe the things that Jesus said, just like the things that Patti Smith says, are true and beautiful”) and how, despite it all, he’s positive about America’s future. “The forces of fear are freaking out because the forces of bravery and kindness actually are winning.”
This is part of Berninger’s more positive post-depression attitude. “It’s not about not acknowledging the horror of everything that’s happening, with genocide in Gaza. I just have less fear now than I did. I found my bravery.”
He’s very honest about the details of his depression. It came on not long after the release of his first solo album, the ruminative Serpentine Prison. With six projects on the go, he’d reached a critical mass of burnout: when Covid came and some things (including touring) fell by the wayside, the financial hit meant he had to abort the dream family home in Venice he and Besser had spent six years working on.
“It was a really rough spell,” he says, and it certainly sounds it. Scared of sunlight, he couldn’t get out of bed; the insomnia was even worse. “That was the one aspect of it that did the biggest number on me. And that created all these anxieties that kept me from sleeping, and then the lack of sleep melted my brain.”
What do you learn about yourself when you come out the other side? “You learn how fragile you are, how quickly you can get overwhelmed and think that there’s no answer. And it’s a shame that you almost have to go through something like that to be able to empathise with other people. On this side of it, I have so much more empathy for everybody. People I know have not come out of depression, and were killed by it.” It wasn’t that dark for him? “No, no, no,” he says. “I don’t want to be melodramatic. But I know how a person can get there. People don’t talk about suicide enough. I think every single healthy person I know has suicidal ideation on some level.”
Berninger wrote The National’s last two albums, 2023’s twin releases First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track, feeling his way out of the depressive episode. “I was much more in the nitty gritty of that tough period.” By comparison, though some song ideas trace back to that time, Get Sunk is clear-headed. He talks about how much he’s loved this summer, spending time outdoors in the woods and the family barn, and Get Sunk eventually came together in that environment. He’d go for long walks and write and paint and read outside, noting down lyrics on baseballs for posterity and finessing songs he’d worked on with producer Sean O’Brien.
“I’ve been in a very different headspace,” he says. “I don’t like to even say [the album] has anything to do with depression. I mean, obviously it does, but it’s much more like a view with some perspective. I know I sound like an asshole, but it has more wisdom in it. The last two National records had a lot of desperate questions about being lost. And I think Get Sunk maybe doesn’t have any answers, but it has less fear of the questions.” He used the word wisdom there. “Yeah, I regret that,” he laughs. “I’m not sure it’s wisdom. I’m not sure I’ll make any better decisions than I did in my twenties or thirties. But it’s about learning to absorb the good.”
Musically, Get Sunk sees Berninger throw his curtains open, take a walk and breathe in the air. “I wanted it to feel warm, like a lot of it takes place outside in the sunshine, like a great fantasy or an unforgettable summer break. But with honest perspective, you know? I wanted to make a feel-good record.” His new-found idyll made him reminisce about his childhood in Ohio, and holidays on his Uncle Jack’s farm nearby: the imperfect, “abstract, blurry collage of images and moments” of his past – carefree play in the creeks and rivers and trees depicted on “Frozen Oranges” – form the album’s romanticised scenic backdrop.
It makes for a lighter and more expressive record, from lush choral opener “Inland Ocean” to the swaying, you-can-make-it-through closer “Times of Difficulty”. Though it’s all relative: there are still character studies about troubled relationships (“Breaking into Acting”), grief (the spirally rock of “Bonnet of Pins”) and the “everyday heartbreak” in “Little by Little”, about the “pellets of terrifying, scary” news we absorb context-free.
The album features guest vocals from Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Julia Laws (Ronboy), Berninger once more opening up his worldview to female voices. Since 2007’s Boxer, he’s written lyrics with his wife, Carin Besser, that often feel like eavesdropping on couples therapy; since 2019’s I Am Easy To Find, The National have regularly collaborated with artists such as Taylor Swift – who called The National her favourite band and worked with guitarist Aaron Dessner on her Folklore and Evermore albums – Phoebe Bridgers and Sharon van Etten. I ask if this was, again, to do with shifting identity. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “I couldn’t just be this guy in front. I guess we have made some strategic moves to do that, but not super consciously. It hasn’t been like: ‘plug in a celebrity’.”
What is it like for him to be in Swift’s orbit given her rarefied status? “Being in her orbit is like being in an orbit with anybody else. It really is. She’s just really nice, an incredible songwriter. But being in the orbit of the dialogue, which is what this is, right? That’s the odd part. But you know, she understands, I understand it. The fixation on her personal life and on her as this icon and the conspiracies – that’s the weird orbit that I don’t get. But the real orbit around her is pleasant, wonderful and normal.”
Berninger is about to tour the UK, his first proper solo shows with a full band. He says that while he’ll do some National songs and “isn’t coming out with some new persona”, the endeavour is its own entity. “I’m not trying to replicate that experience by any means. It’s a different team playing a different sport in some ways. I guess doing things solo outside of The National is just a way to break up the packaging. Because when you come to National shows, everybody’s wearing sad dad merch. And I’m not selling any sad dad merch.” He smiles. “I’m not just a sad dad.”
Matt Berninger tours the UK from 25-27 August (mattberninger.komi.io/)
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