'There's a danger of falling in love with your own shadow': Bryce Dessner on The National's unexpected success

The National's guitarist on why the band are like a big family – one with telepathic twins and a taste for drinking tequila before gigs

Bryce Dessner (right) with bandmates (from left) Scott Devendorf, Bryan Devendorf, Aaron Dessner and Matt Berninger (Graham MacIndoe)

“As a band gets more successful, there’s a danger of falling in love with your own shadow,” admits guitarist Bryce Dessner. The band in question is The National, who are indeed enjoying delirious success.

In 2007, around the release of their breakthrough album Boxer, you could have got reasonably long odds on The National – a brilliant but unapologetically cerebral and arty indie-rock outfit – packing out stadiums and playing second billing on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage a decade on. But they do – and it’s very heartening.

“We never expected to play Shepherd’s Bush Empire or the O2 Arena or here,” maintains the softly spoken, 41-year-old Dessner when we meet in a backroom at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith. “I came from a classical background and I was teaching and earning a living out of music at a certain level, so it’s funny to make it as a rock star when we’re 40 or whatever. We’re surprised.”

We meet a few hours before another barnstorming National performance, which features a whopping 10 songs from their decidedly more experimental seventh album, Sleep Well Beast. “The last thing we want to do is repeat ourselves,” says Dessner, and it’s a notably bold record, peppered with frontman Matt Berninger’s typically elegant and sophisticated lyrics. Dessner admits, however, that this time around the words are “quite direct” and the sentiments are less oblique, such as on “Guilty Party”, where Berninger concedes he’s “feeling defeated”.

Many reviewers have described the 12-track album as particularly raw – a document of a falling marriage, in fact – and it’s difficult to disagree on hearing lyrics such as “So blame it on me, I really don’t care, it’s a foregone conclusion” on the sombre “Carin in the Liquor Store”, or “I know it’s not working, I’m no holiday” on the unnerving “I’ll Still Destroy You”. Nevertheless, Dessner contends that Berninger’s marriage – to US fiction writer Carin Besser – is “definitely not falling apart”, before adding “I’m sure Matt’s talked about this [subject] elsewhere, and I don’t want to speak for him and get in trouble.”

The quintet, which comprises Bryce, his twin brother and fellow multi-instrumentalist Aaron, singer Berninger, gifted drummer Bryan Devendorf and his bassist brother Scott, all hail from Cincinnati. In the late 1990s they uprooted to Brooklyn, and for the “first time in 18 years” they all now live apart, with Berninger in LA, Aaron in upstate New York and Bryce in Paris. Consequently, they weren’t in a great hurry to make the new record – it took four years – with band members ”busy with other things”. Berninger set up indie-rock act EL VY and even sang for the infamous “Red Wedding” Game of Thrones episode, while Dessner scored Oscar-winner The Revenant.

As a result of these side-projects, the siblings and friends returned reinvigorated. This meant that the way they made the new record was dramatically different, with the brothers Dessner spending some of the time recording material in places such as a 1950s communist propaganda building, Funkhaus, in east Berlin. They also collaborated with the likes of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), members of Grateful Dead and Sufjan Stevens.

“We made four albums from Alligator [their 2005 masterpiece, featuring “Mr November” and “Karen”] to Trouble Will Find Me, which all had sort of the same process, but Sleep Well Beast was definitely a departure for us,” admits the measured and polite Dessner (it’s not difficult to see he’d make an excellent teacher). ”Matt, like all of us, needed to shift his creative perspective,” he adds. ”He has a creative relationship with his wife and he’s a workaholic, a really hard worker. So we all got to collaborate for a while and it has done Matt some good, because he feels very refreshed by it and one of the reasons we collaborate with other musicians is so that Matt can get out of his own head.”

“We all contribute to The National and it’s like a familiar family,” Dessner continues. “Matt is dad, Brian’s like the dark horse uncle, Scott’s the long-suffering mum and Aaron and I are the bratty twins.”

Dessner confides that he and his twin have a very “non-verbal” relationship in which they work together on a “telepathic” level musically – nothing like Berninger’s tricky relationship with his own brother, Tom, which is comically and touchingly portrayed in the latter’s music documentary Mistaken for Strangers. It’s a daringly honest film that would topple some bands, but not The National, who have always seemed grounded.

The National onstage at the O2 Apollo Manchester (Andrew Benge/Redferns)

The constant (and somewhat tiresome) comparisons to Radiohead being one example: an amused Dessner pooh-poohs the notion.

“If you make rock music with guitars in it, the Radiohead comparison is inevitable,” he maintains. “We actually consciously stayed clear of it, and have buckets of songs that we’ve discarded saying, ‘urgh, it’s too Radiohead’.”

There are other English bands that come to mind in relation to The National: the likes of New Order (whom they adore), The Wedding Present and The Smiths, whom Berninger is a huge fan of. Like those acts, The National fashion grand, soaring guitarscapes with moving, slightly unknowable words (”I’m going through an awkward phrase, I’m secretly in love with everyone I grew up with”, on 2013’s “Demons” being one of their finest). It’s what makes the five Ohioans different from the majority of US rock acts.

That and the fact they don’t mind admitting that they get a little tipsy before their gigs (”some of us drink tequila”) and they’re very open about their liberal, left-of-centre politics. In fact, Berninger has added part of an unsettling Karl Rove speech (including the quote “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”) for the new track “Walk It Back”, using it to argue that the vehement Republican was a “ominous precursor”, and that the American Right have been cultivating the likes of Donald Trump and their “own reality” for many years.

“Someone like George W Bush was quaint compared to Trump, who is a catastrophe for the whole world and our country,” says Dessner. “The hopeful thing to think is that we were all asleep and this insanity is a very good wake-up call. Barack Obama [who famously used the National’s anthemic “Fake Empire” for the 2008 Democratic National Convention] lulled us into this beautiful slumber, he was a very good steward of the world and we respected him as a human being.

“But now it’s frightening and Trump is threatening freedom of speech, women’s health, basic civil liberties and rights. It’s something that we took for granted that politicians on the left and right would respect basic norms, but now actually they don’t.”

Before returning to his bandmates, the thoughtful Dessner has one more thing to say about the theme of the new album: “It’s about identity, we’re all simultaneously the best and worst versions of ourselves.” The National create pained, sometimes overwrought, uncomfortable material about fear (of relationships, themselves), mortality and demons – but this complex band are also most indubitably on the side of the angels.

The National continue their UK tour tonight and tomorrow at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith, London; their album Sleep Well Beast is out now