The National

The Brooklyn-via-Cincinnati band that cut 2007's best album, Boxer, hasn't tossed out the dry cleaner's phone number just yet. If Bruce Springsteen is The Boss, consider National frontman Matt Berninger The Chairman (of the Bored). Ladies and gentlemen, meet the white-collar E Street Band.

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Oh you wouldn’t want an angel watching over you
Surprise, surprise, they wouldn’t want to watch
Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the
unmagnificent lives of adults
— “Mistaken For Strangers”

On a blissfully mild, leaf-sprinkled New York City afternoon, the five members of The National settle in around a vacant picnic table situated near the west edge of Central Park. Matt Berninger, The National’s frontman and lyricist, recalls spending his lunch breaks in this part of the park while interning at a nearby graphic-design firm during the mid ’90s. Hailing from the suburbs of Cincinnati and not quite inured to Manhattan’s dogged pace, he’d wander beneath the park’s leafy canopy each afternoon to momentarily purge his mind of the workday flood.

In one sense, that kind of stress populated a different lifetime.

Matt quit his day job at design house Icon Nicholson in 2005 to sing and write songs full-time. His band is home for a couple weeks before starting the European leg of its fall tour. But the 36-year-old looks tapped. His short, sandy-blond hair is tousled—and not stylishly so. The facial growth lining his angular jaw appears to be a few days old, and his gaze is warm but heavy-lidded.

The band recently played four evening concerts in the span of five days, delivering its beguiling mix of chamber pop, atmospheric folk and vaguely menacing post-punk to 3,000-plus people at Manhattan mega-venue Terminal 5’s sold-out opening, a private Rhapsody party at The Highline Ballroom, and a two-night stand at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Today the musicians came straight to their Paste interview from XM’s New York studios, where they’d recorded several songs for future broadcast.

A week ago, Matt and his longtime girlfriend Carin—an editor at The New Yorker whom he met at a Brooklyn bar (“She was with a friend and I just walked up to her. Only time I’ve ever done that. I was always pretty shy, went to an all-boys high school and didn’t even kiss a girl until college.”)—found time to visit City Hall and tie the knot. They’re entertaining out-of-town family and hosting a reception in a couple days to celebrate the occasion.

National guitarist Aaron Dessner recently lost his passport and is hunched over the picnic table filling out a replacement-request form, which his twin brother Bryce (who also plays guitar in The National) is helping him decipher. The band’s other siblings, drummer Bryan Devendorf and guitarist/bassist Scott Devendorf, discuss plans to visit Gibson showroom across town to return a loaner Firebird guitar.

This is what your band’s down time looks like when you release the most gorgeous, affecting record of the year. When mounting blog attention, an endorsement of your live show from celebrity fan Benicio Del Toro in Esquire’s October ’07 cover story (“‘They were great, they were great, they were great,’ [Del Toro] chants”), ambitious touring (including a stint opening for indie titans the Arcade Fire), a Letterman appearance and sparkling word-of-mouth finally catch up with you. Success has a funny way of robbing people of the time they might otherwise spend savoring it. Still, from The National, all you get in this situation is a “sleep when we’re dead” nonchalance.

“We’re just really happy that people are finally paying attention to us,” Matt says. “I know that’s not the rock ’n roll thing to say, but there were so many years that nobody asked us any questions about our records that we’re happy to answer them now. We’ll be touring non-stop through the end of the year, ending up in Moscow. I haven’t been there, so it’ll be exciting. It’s gonna be kind of a busy year.”

The National’s abbreviated to-do list:

(1) Understate, (2) Over-deliver.