To be honest, it’s been hard for me to write about music, for there are so many subtle feelings continuously emerging while I listen to one song, and every time the feelings change, too. It’s floating and dynamic. For me, music is more like an emotional thing I can naturally feel, you don’t have to do anything, but just immerse in it. I’ve said some words in my recent diary: now music, or to experience hundreds of other people’s life stories, in my meaning is to experience the emotions of others, to understand what life can become, and to see what else it means “to live”. Yeah, I’m still exploring the relationship between music and myself.
The original motivation for me to open this account was I just want to record the things I won’t edit with any, like creating a little universe of my world without having to say any words to others, this is the most comfortable way for me to listen to music. But if there’s someone who could have a similar sense to me about some song, I’d feel joyful to know that we had this connection.
And The National’s music means like these to me. I got to know them like five years ago but just knew their song “Fake Empire” for an American drama series. Later, like in 2018, I heard their song “The System Only Dreams in Dark” in another drama series again. It was quite a rocky one but I liked it. So I directed to the album Sleep Well Beast (2017) which has it and got to become a fan of the band, but I was still only limited to that single album. And recently (from last October), I started to listen to more of their albums: I Am Easy to Find (2019), and Trouble Will Find me (2013). These two became my favorites of them too. For the first one, I even went to watch the same-named short film they wrote the album for (directed by Mike Mills, starring Alicia Vikander), and it turned out to be a worthy film to watch.
I haven’t dug deep enough into the band, but I know one of the band members Aaron Dessner (have to mention here, he’s a genuine music genius but the most modest musician I’ve ever known) was having depression for a long time, in an interview he said doing music helped a lot to heal his mental illness. When you listen to The National, there’s always some kind of melancholy inside the song, but it’s beautifully written and expressed (thanks to the charming voice and lyricism of Matt Berninger). I wrote some words about listening to the band this January: “Listening to The National always has a sense of pulling away (detaching, you could say). Pessimism, depression, cyclothymia… These songs may really make you depressed in the next second, but then the emotions just seem far away, the originally magnified emotions will be pulled far away. It will catch you at some point, make you feel the air is so light on the skin and breathing is so fine right now. Or it’s you who catch yourself, let you embrace all the chaos and uneasiness that happen to you at this moment”. “The aloneness itself is real, and sometimes could be painful, but The National is like a good friend to tell you you could be comfortable with it, and they decorate it a bit to you”. Sometimes I wonder whether there’s an old soul inside of me to like this kind of music, haha 👻 And I love their rhythm-positive/gentle/relieving song (“Rylan”, “You Had Your Soul with You”, “Dark Side of the Gym”, and “Empire Line” are great examples). In all, you can call them an “elegant alternative rock band”, I guess.
Can’t believe I wrote this much about The National, I was just wanting to share their 2011 album “High Violet”. But I know there’s much more to write deeply about them.