Skip to main content
MusicRadar MusicRadar The No.1 website for musicians
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
  • Drums Week 25
  • Synths
  • Guitars
  • Guitar Pedals
  • Guitar Amps
  • Keyboards & Pianos
  • Controllers
  • Artist news
  • Drums
  • Software & Apps
  • More
    • Recording
    • DJ Gear
    • Acoustic Guitars
    • Bass Guitars
    • Tech
    • Tutorials
    • Reviews
    • Buying Guides
    • About Us
More
  • Santana on Beck
  • Friday, I'm in Love
  • Knopfler's 4-note secret
  • 95k+ free music samples
Don't miss these
Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno
Recording “A strange new land with a human living and feeling its way through its mysterious spaces”: Welcome to Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe’s new album
Josh Homme
Bands “Playing in front of people who are stripped down to the bones…” Josh Homme talks Alive In The Catacombs
Taylor Swift and Max Martin
Artists Taylor Swift on how she threw down the creative gauntlet to Max Martin for new album The Life Of A Showgirl
Jack Antonoff attends the 62nd Annual GRAMMY Awards at STAPLES Center on January 26, 2020
Recording “He kind of approaches records like a plumber…”: Bartees Strange on super producer Jack Antonoff
Saint Etienne on studio technology and recording International
Artists “We never became so famous that we hated each other”: Saint Etienne on longevity and their final album
brian eno
Artists “Due to digital, music now has a terrible sort of housewifely tidiness”: Brian Eno on sonic perfectionism, Bowie and his new collaborative double album
Lifeguard's Kai Slater, Isaac Lowenstein and Asher Case
Artists Lifeguard on abstract noise and pop hooks – and the creative epiphanies behind their stellar debut
David Byrne in a red suit and shirt on a blue background
Recording “One of the executives said, ‘David, you are your own Yoko Ono’”: David Byrne on alienating his audience
Haim
Bands Haim push back again against people who question their songwriting, production skills and musicianship
NOBLESVILLE, INDIANA - SEPTEMBER 23: Speacial guest Bob Dylan performs in concert during Farm Aid at Ruoff Home Mortgage Music Center on September 23, 2023 in Noblesville, Indiana. (Photo by Gary Miller/Getty Images)
Artists "This visit was truly special”: Bob Dylan spent two days recording in Albany last week
Bono black and white in glasses
Artists “Our band is...three musicians. And a salesman”: Bono suggests next U2 album will have a looser feel
Brent Smith of Shinedown performs during the US rockers' Dance, Kid, Dance Tour 2025.
Artists Shinedown’s Brent Smith on finding inspiration in a hurricane and why you don’t need to be play guitar to write a great song
Bruce Springsteen in Concert, 1984
Recording “Not necessarily the record I had planned”: Springsteen explains why he “wasn’t happy” with Born In The USA
Fred Armisen
Artists Fred Armisen says that the late Steve Albini was “instrumental” in the creation of his new album
Joe Armon-Jones
Artists Ezra Collective’s Joe Armon-Jones on the imagined musical apocalypse that inspired All The Quiet
  1. Artists
  2. Singles And Albums

Aaron Dessner on The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast, their studio and selected songs' personal origins

News
By Matt Parker published 8 September 2017

“This music, maybe it’s the last National album”

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Introduction

Introduction

By now we think we know what a National song sounds like. The frenetic drums, the softly honed pianos and fuzzy, line-drawn guitars, all framed in Matt Berninger’s throat-catching vignettes of domestic calamity. Now the band’s seventh studio effort Sleep Well Beast, four years in production, has seen them purposefully twist their template: incorporating synths, guitar solos and spacious arrangements - even building their own studio - in order to widen that definition.

We joke that our songs are like ugly ducklings. They take a little while to fall in love with

“People call our albums ‘growers’,” says the group’s quietly-spoken guitarist and producer Aaron Dessner. “I don’t know if I’d totally agree with that, but there is something in the way we arrange our songs, we don’t go for the obvious hooks. We joke that our songs are like ugly ducklings. They take a little while to fall in love with, but eventually they become these awkward anthems.”

The irony, of course, for a band that so ably specialise in defeat, is that time has ultimately proven The National victors - and we suspect it will again on Sleep Well Beast. MusicRadar spoke to Aaron about the band’s desire for progress, the deeply personal core of selected songs and how a new studio in the Hudson Valley saved some friendships.

Page 1 of 5
Page 1 of 5
Four years

Four years

You took four years to make this record and experimented heavily. There’s clearly an element of very conscious change occurring. Why now?

“Well, we’d made four - what I consider to be great - records in a row in Alligator, Boxer, High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me. Each one felt like a distillation of the past, like it was becoming more focussed and more graceful. With Trouble Will Find Me it felt like we had arrived somewhere that was a more beautiful, more relaxed place, articulated in a baroque sound. Then we just wanted to throw it all to the wind and be more reckless. 

Nobody’s delusional or in love with our own shadow, so we’re all thinking, ‘We’ve got to push this forward now

“Bryce and I talked a lot about pushing each other musically and allowing more space and improvisation. [For instance] we always played guitar solos live and we always played them as kids, but on the record, it felt like it would be too indulgent. On this one, there was just more room for that. 

“Nobody wanted to make the same album again, so it had to be something new or greater than we’d done before. Otherwise I don’t know that we would make another album. We’ve been lucky to keep progressing, but nobody’s delusional or in love with our own shadow, so we’re all thinking, ‘We’ve got to push this forward now. How can we do it?’”

Let’s talk about your new studio, Long Pond. What worked for you about other rooms that you wanted to channel there?

“I think of it basically as a combination of the garage studio that we used to have in Brooklyn and a church. I like the dimensions of a church just because of what it does with the room sound, but also in allowing certain frequencies to escape up into the rafters.

At Long Pond you feel like you’re on vacation and that really takes a lot of the tension and anxiety out of the process

“We designed it to be open plan, mainly to allow it to be a collaborative space, so it would have the fidelity of a great mixing room, but also work as a tracking room and it would have a large isolation booth that was big enough for Brian [Devendorf] to play drums in. Then the whole building has a conduit running through it so you can plug in anywhere in the building, with an amp or a video monitor - there’s over a hundred lines in the building. 

“Jeff Hedback did the acoustical design and Erlend Neumann was the architect. We also used the same acoustical cedar batten that my brother in law Ole Sondresen designed for our studio in Brooklyn, but again just on a large scale.

“The other thing is the nature. The studio’s called Long Pond because this beautiful spring-fed pond wraps around it and there’s a lot of glass and you’re looking out of it to the Berkshire Mountains. You feel like you’re on vacation and that really takes a lot of the tension and anxiety out of the process and that proved to be great for the band - we were rebuilding friendships.”

Page 2 of 5
Page 2 of 5
A space to call home

A space to call home

Some people believe tension very much benefits a recording…

“Yeah and I think that there’s a natural tension in certain songs. You hear it in Turtleneck or the Day I Day, which was recorded live in the room. But in my garage, it didn’t help us. The actual live room was like 250 square-feet and at some point, where we were as a band, it stopped being a space where we could comfortably be creative… 

I’m not shy about it: we’ve earned it, we’ve earned the right to have our own space

“Also, we’ve been a band for almost 20 years, we must have played thousands of shows, so I’m not shy about it: we’ve earned it, we’ve earned the right to have our own space. We’ve raised millions of dollars for charities etc. I don’t feel bad about having a comfortable place to work, but it’s not like it’s super fancy, either. It’s still on a scale that I think is reasonable.”

This album was made over a long period, but in fairly intensive bursts. Did that make the atmosphere more challenging? 

This music, maybe it’s the last National album, I don’t think it will be, but it’s important to put everything you have into something

“Yeah, the band would come for three weeks at a time and that was a good amount and sometimes at the end you would get cabin fever. We would do was these large group sessions where everybody’s playing all of the time and you’d have many takes and then I would have to go back and comb through everything and find the needle in the haystack. So having a year extra [was useful]. 

“I never felt pressure to finish it. That also comes with where we are as a band. If we know it’s even slightly better as a record because we took extra time, then it’s worth it, because you only get one chance. This music, maybe it’s the last National album, I don’t think it will be, but it’s important to put everything you have into something. If this was the last album, I’d be proud of it, because we didn’t make a shitty album, you know?”

Page 3 of 5
Page 3 of 5
Solos and synths

Solos and synths

What new discoveries did you make? Either in terms of the production process, or tools of the trade?

“I definitely went very deep with the OP-1 from Teenage Engineering, just as far as using the sampler and the synth engine and the drum machines and stuff. It’s a very mixable, transparent kind of sound and it really works, at least how we were using it. So you hear it a lot in the vocal samples and the drum textures. 

We didn’t layer things in the same way... we wanted to be able to hear if something was on and for it to have an impact

“Then Brian was using different drum machines, but using them with various pedals, through amplifiers, playing along at the same time and recording that as a sound. So I guess on the whole there was a lot more ‘production’.

“In addition to that, we didn’t layer things in the same way. That’s partly because we were working in this amazing studio space with these beautiful ATC SCM45 monitors and you could really hear what was there, so I wouldn’t keep adding. Sometimes in the past I would create this really dense fog of texture that I would enjoy, but this time we wanted to be able to hear if something was on and for it to have an impact and be able to tell what it was. It ranges in everything from very organic to very synthetic, but the experimentation is soulful. There’s a heart to it.”

There are a lot of guitars in disguise on the album. What’s your favourite ?

“The guitar solo in the middle of Sleep Well Beast is just this old, late-60s Telecaster played direct into a late-50s Fender Champ. The guitar is just tuned to the notes of the sort of canon of the piano - it’s basically D major, but these intervals circle each other - and it’s really just me freaking out to it. I thought I would just try it, but then you can just feel when it’s magic. 

If we were going to use a guitar, we went for something that was razor-y, like The System… or direct and pointillistic, like Born To Beg

“There’s quite a lot of direct guitar, too. In general, if we were going to use a guitar, we tried to be not using a lot of distortion or the woolly sound of the past. We went for something that was more either razor-y, like The System… or more direct and pointillistic, like Born To Beg.”

Speaking of The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness, obviously, we’re contractually bound to mention the guitar solo. Why did that one pass the test?

“I can’t even remember when I played it, to be honest. I know that it was my 1963 Jazzmaster into that same Fender Champ from the late-50s and again, just direct in and the amp turned all the way up and I was on the brightest pickup. I probably just forgot myself enough to get into that mood and just play in a way that had a kind of lyrical phrasing to it. I often think about Jerry Garcia - a lot of times he’s hovering around the same note a lot more than you think. That was maybe what I was trying to do - to not cram a million notes into there and just to give the song some sense of catharsis. It was Bryce who heard it and was like, ‘That’s got to stay.’”

Page 4 of 5
Page 4 of 5
Lullabies and goodbyes

Lullabies and goodbyes

The National are a band that have made a success of channelling vulnerability into cathartic songwriting. Mostly though, as the lyricist, we hear about Matt’s vulnerabilities. Where do you think we hear yours?

I’m embarrassed by certain things being overly emotional, but the songs that Matt gravitates to have a very direct quality

“Well, it’s hard for a National song to exist if it doesn’t feel like it has a purpose and meaning before there are lyrics, because Matt doesn’t write the lyrics until the very end. A lot of times I’m embarrassed by certain things being overly simple or overly poignant or overly emotional, but the songs that Matt gravitates to are the ones that have a very direct emotional quality to them. 

“They are very personal. Like Carin At The Liquor Store, that music I wrote and I played for my mother-in-law in the hospice before she died and then I played it at her funeral - and she knew I was going to. And then it became a National song. Or like About Today. That was a song I used to play for my ex-wife when she was feeling down - and then it became a National song. 

“Or I Need My Girl is literally the song that, six years ago, I would play when I put my baby daughter Ingrid to sleep. I just wrote it for her as this little circular thing, but then Matt heard it and was like, ‘I want to write something to that’. So a lot of the music is intensely personal to me.”

In Mistaken For Strangers you say that “The most stressful part is before you have an idea. Once you have an idea, the making of the thing is really fun.” Was this record fun?

There’s moments when Matt and I have tension... We're trying to marry our music to his lyrical musings - and they don’t always end in the same place

“Yeah, it was fun. All these different experiences - whether it was the band camping out in upstate New York, or doing all these different crazy sessions in the Funkhaus in Berlin, the old East German radio building, or mixing with Peter Katis and drinking whiskey around the fire late at night - it was fun to make. There’s moments when Matt and I have tension, just because we’re trying to marry our music that’s gone down these deep rabbit holes to his lyrical musings that have gone down deep rabbit holes - and they don’t always end in the same place. There can be tension while you’re sorting that out, but it was really just a few things. So this was fun to make and there was no shortage of ideas this time.”

If you had to boil the experience down to one image that will stay with you, what would it be?

“I think it would be when Matt and I re-recorded Carin At The Liquor Store and Born To Beg maybe in November/December 2016. By then he had written the words and we were just playing them in the studio with the headphones on and you could just feel that at that point they were songs. It just felt like, ‘This album, it exists’. Everyone was feeding into that. Everything started to come together then.”

Page 5 of 5
Page 5 of 5
Matt Parker
Matt Parker

Matt is a freelance journalist who has spent the last decade interviewing musicians for the likes of Total Guitar, Guitarist, Guitar World, MusicRadar, NME.com, DJ Mag and Electronic Sound. In 2020, he launched CreativeMoney.co.uk, which aims to share the ideas that make creative lifestyles more sustainable. He plays guitar, but should not be allowed near your delay pedals.

Read more
Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno
“A strange new land with a human living and feeling its way through its mysterious spaces”: Welcome to Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe’s new album
Josh Homme
“Playing in front of people who are stripped down to the bones…” Josh Homme talks Alive In The Catacombs
Taylor Swift and Max Martin
Taylor Swift on how she threw down the creative gauntlet to Max Martin for new album The Life Of A Showgirl
Jack Antonoff attends the 62nd Annual GRAMMY Awards at STAPLES Center on January 26, 2020
“He kind of approaches records like a plumber…”: Bartees Strange on super producer Jack Antonoff
Saint Etienne on studio technology and recording International
“We never became so famous that we hated each other”: Saint Etienne on longevity and their final album
brian eno
“Due to digital, music now has a terrible sort of housewifely tidiness”: Brian Eno on sonic perfectionism, Bowie and his new collaborative double album
Latest in Singles And Albums
Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit performs onstage during Leeds Festival at Bramham Park on August 24, 2025 in Leeds, Englan
"Please don't put it on the internet": Limp Bizkit tease new song with the help of a young social media drummer
Biran May and friends
"It's a classic... one of the best rock songs ever”: Which 2013 track could Brian May be talking about?
Damon Albarn in 2001
“A crazy amount of falsetto… definitely related to the drugs I was taking”: Damon Albarn let slips secret about debut Gorillaz album
Paul Mccartney Smoking A Cigarette At London In England On June 19Th 1967
“We decided that our audiences would come along with us”: Paul McCartney on how the avant garde influenced the Beatles
Singer and mastermind Brian Wilson of the rock and roll band "The Beach Boys" directs from the control room while recording the album "Pet Sounds" in 1966 in Los Angeles, California
“One of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it”
Raye and Amy Winehouse
Raye on her decision to work with Amy Winehouse producer Mark Ronson, and those inevitable comparisons
Latest in News
warm audio
Warm Audio promises studio-quality sound without the price tag with three new vintage-inspired condenser mics
David Bowie On Set of Jump They Say Music Video
“London presented so much that he found fascinating": David Bowie’s lost theatrical project set in 18th-century London
Deals of the week
MusicRadar deals of the week: With a whopping $600 off a Gibson Les Paul, $500 off a stunning Guild Starfire and $400 off the modern Strandberg Boden Metal NX 6, it's all about guitars this week
Kelly Hansen and Bruce Watson of Foreigner
“We know what love is”: Foreigner make formal offer to play at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding
Gibson Custom SJ-200 Monarch #100: this stunning one-of-one jumbo is replete with all kinds of rococo flourishes, from the diamond and gold crown inlay on the headstock, to the 14k gold rope binding, Gibson calls it the "ultimate custom" acoustic and not without some justification.
Gibson gives the “King of the Flat-Tops” a whole new meaning with the $99,999 SJ-200 Monarch #100
Sam Fender performs onstage during day two of the Syd For Solen Festival at Valbyparken on August 08, 2025 in Copenhagen, Denmar
"It has created a real and lasting impact": Sam Fender’s arena tour raises over £100,000 for UK grassroots music

MusicRadar is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Advertise with us
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait...