Matt Berninger: On the Other Side of Collapse

Trying to untangle the timeline of Matt Berninger’s songwriting is a fool’s errand. The origins of his material are never linear, and the overlap is, at times, confounding. But rarely is the quality ever sacrificed in the process (See: “Bonnet of Pins,” the best song he’s written in nearly ten years). Where his second solo album, Get Sunk, begins and ends would take an anthropologist to fully uncover, but Berninger is happy to fill in some of the gaps. “Some of it goes back to five years ago, before the pandemic and before I had a long period of writer’s block and depression,” he says. When First Two Pages of Frankenstein, the National’s first of two 2023 LPs (along with Laugh Track), was released, the headlines quickly pulled from Berninger’s admissions of severe writer’s block. But his toils weren’t just some case of the yips. “I sent all these ships out to sea, and, all of a sudden, I saw them all sink without even getting out of the harbor,” he says. “It sent me into an anxiety spiral, and the anxiety kept me awake at night.”

Not only did the house he’d spent six years building need to be sold, but his solo debut, Serpentine Prison, came out during COVID-19 lockdown and was untourable. Once Berninger realized he couldn’t solve the pause he was put on, depression set in. But the part that really fried him was the insomnia. “Not being able to sleep after four or five nights in a row, your brain literally does not work anymore,” he says. “It’s not like I couldn’t come up with an idea. I couldn’t open my laptop. I couldn’t turn on the television. It’s not creative block, it’s life block.” Berninger refers to that period as being “bedroom-ridden,” curbed slowly by medication and a return to Long Pond Studio in the Hudson Valley. He opened the laptop, sat in front of a microphone, opened his mouth, and watched the writing accelerate—all while the “darkness” lingered nearby. “You can’t just wake up one day and find yourself in it. It sneaks up slowly, but now I can tell when it’s sneaking up. It means I need to get some sleep and put everything down for a week.”

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In a post-lockdown effort to put the National back into the world again, Berninger shelved albums he was working on with his EL-VY partner Brent Knopf and his “Crumble” collaborator Rosanne Cash. What he, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and Bryan and Scott Devendorf came up with—First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track—represent, as he puts it, “me piecing together whatever I had from before I fell off the bike” and his fear of what he’d written before his “total collapse.” “I almost was embarrassed by whatever my state of mind was before the depressive episode,” Berninger elaborates. “I didn’t even want to look at it.” And yet he turned towards what plagued him, conjuring the soul-awakening, “Tropic Morning News”—the National’s coming out party in the 2020s, and a moment of Berninger “saying all the painful parts out loud.”

He was nervous about putting out a solo record five years ago. Serpentine Prison—a collection of songs co-written with Knopf, the Walkmen’s Walter Martin, Devendorf, Hayden Desser, Harrison Whitford, Sean O’Brien (who Berninger says has “the most beautiful ears for sound I’ve ever met”), Matt Sheehy, and his longtime writing partner and Nancy bandmate, Mike Brewer—was initially conceived to be a covers project in the vein of Willie Nelson’s Stardust, an album that Berninger says has a “visceral, childhood effect” on him, before it became a Booker T. Jones-produced, totally original effort put together at Earthstar Creation Center with a host of friends. Going into Get Sunk, Berninger and O’Brien cooked up about 25 songs without knowing what kind of record they were going to make. “It was like, ‘Okay, I want to write 10 songs that I fucking love, and I don’t care what it sounds like. I don’t care if it sounds like the National,’” he remembers. “I mean, I can’t not sound like the National.” Right he is. Berninger, who composes all of the National’s lyrics and melodies, is fashionably glued to his own style of murmuring majesties and moody ennui. Musically, the National is always pushing its material in a million subtle but strange directions, even when it’s at its most predictable. From a songwriter’s perspective, Berninger hopes his travels are just as uncanny.

FOR GET SUNK, BERNINGER WASN’T searching for anything other than what made him laugh, get angry, or remember parts of his “dramatic imagination and fantasy of my future and past.” “I wanted to live in it and soak in all the ugly, silly stuff,” he says. “I wanted to get drunk on it.” Calling upon his “spiderweb of old friends” to finalize the tracklist, Berninger wrote six songs with O’Brien, two with Brewer, one with the Walkmen’s Paul Maroon, and another with Martin. To best describe the songwriting purpose behind Get Sunk, he recalls his time collaborating with filmmaker Mike Mills on 2019’s I Am Easy to Find, where he and his wife Carin Besser would write lyrics for the protagonist of a black-and-white short film: “Once you’ve jumped off a bridge with another artist in a creative adventure, not knowing what it’s going to end up with, you get addicted to it.”

He formed a band with Ronboy (Julia Laws), Garret Lang, and Sterling Laws, putting together muscular tracks with a far smaller ensemble than the deep pocket of session players that featured on First Two Pages of Frankenstein. There was no dogma present, allowing Berninger to “achieve more with less.” He brought Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy in to play guitar on “Breaking Into Acting” and sing on “Times of Difficulty,” an extension of his long-held penchant for collaborating with pals—the same thing he’s done on recent National albums with Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vernon, Phoebe Bridgers, and Taylor Swift. “We liked each other’s stuff, or hung out backstage and opened shows for each other,” Berninger declares. “Since the day we opened for the Walkmen, I’ve worshiped them. It’s not managers calling managers on this stuff.”

Berninger tells me that everything he’s learned in music has come from collaboration, ever since he started a band called Nancy with Scott Devendorf, Mike Brewer, Jeff Salem, and Casey Reas at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning in 1991. “Making music and recording it on 8-tracks and mini-discs, or putting a mic in a party, inviting a bunch of girls over, and you play and you get them to sing along—I can’t describe what that’s like,” he says, before trying to articulate it anyways: “It’s finding a band of pirates, and, suddenly, you’re like, ‘Let’s go be pirates again tonight.’ So you go to the practice space, or you throw a party, or you go into a studio and you spend a lot of money.” Nancy never put an album out, but Berninger has worked with Devendorf and Brewer ever since. “Mike and Scott are why I’m in a band, because I can’t play any instruments but I’m great with melody and I’m great with words and I have the guts to stand out there without a guitar in my hand.” During a recent performance at Webster Hall, Brewer joined Berninger onstage for a performance of “Little by Little.” He pauses in appreciation. “That was a dream for us.”

But eventually, Nancy split up. Devendorf invited his brother Bryan over, because Reas had left his drum kit at Berninger’s apartment. Bryan then called up Aaron Dessner. Together, they cooked up a self-titled album under their new name, the National. Sometime during the making of Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers, Aaron’s brother Bryce got involved. “When you start making music and you start connecting a spiderweb, the most fun insects get stuck to it,” Berninger says. “It pulls people in. The National was born in my bedroom in Brooklyn, in a loft in Gowanus Canal, just because I had space to do it. I was the only person who had space to set up drums in my bedroom. I was mostly doing art and design and painting. It was messing around, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, pressing buttons with friends.” And “pressing buttons with friends” has put Berninger in quite a few busy rooms over the years. In 2011, he featured on Booker T. Jones’ The Road From Memphis LP, working in close proximity to Lou Reed and Questlove, and singing on two songs with the late Sharon Jones of the Dap-Kings. In 2020, Berninger shared a duet with Taylor Swift on the Evermore track “Coney Island.”

After the National finished First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track and took the music out on tour, Berninger found himself working on his solo material in hotel rooms. “Once I started writing again, I was so afraid for it to go away,” he admits. “I’d just keep throwing gasoline on it, and it’s working for me. I was writing on the road every chance I got, and I was writing all over everything—whiteboards, baseballs—just to make the process more fun.” His new songs didn’t have an overarching focus, so he went back to the first iteration of Get Sunk—12 mastered songs he recorded with O’Brien, Lang, and Ronboy at knobworld in Echo Park four years ago, before “losing his mind”—and pulled out four that he liked, including “Inland Ocean.” “I was like, ‘This really feels like it’s still connected to what I’m trying to do and where I’m trying to go with this record,’” Berninger says. “That one came back out of nowhere and gave me a blurry, holistic thread through this record. I played to it, and I wrote to it, and I changed some lyrics of some of the newer songs. It takes a long time until your image reveals itself out of the fog, and I’m just glad I took the time to find it.” Quickly, Get Sunk came into focus.

Pulling from some of his favorite books, like The Great Gatsby, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and The Sun Also Rises, Berninger wrote a radio-ready story of “romance, sex, drugs, and violence” called “Bonnet of Pins,” what is (for my money) the strongest song he’s finished since the Sleep Well Beast deep-cut “I’ll Still Destroy You” in 2017. “In a funny way, it might be the best—Most successful? I don’t know—song I’ve ever written, because it’s working and people are reacting to it,” he says. “And I wanted them to react exactly the way they’re reacting. We designed that arrow to go over the wall, and it did.”

And “Bonnet of Pins” may have fit well on a project like Trouble Will Find Me, thanks to Ronboy’s background vocals that aren’t unlike those of Kate Stables on “Rylan,” or Annie Clark, Sharon Van Etten, and Nona Marie Invie’s three-part harmony on “Graceless.” But Berninger isn’t all that interested in intentionally blurring the line between him and the National for the sake of offering some radical dichotomy between the two projects. “Am I trying to prove something? Yeah. What am I trying to prove? I have no fucking idea,” he admits, chuckling. “Even though we fought like dogs during the whole process [of making Boxer], even way before we finished, I knew it was going to be great. I think Get Sunk is the best thing I’ve done since Boxer.”

MAKING GET SUNK TAUGHT BERNINGER that, sometimes, more is not more. “I love sprawling records,” he says. “Double Nickels on the Dime is a masterpiece, and it goes 1,000 directions. It’s just a million different ideas, and I love that. But once you’ve done that a couple times, you’re like, ‘Okay, let’s really curate the ideas this time.’ It takes a lot of digging to start to find anything interesting after a while, especially after you’ve made 12 records.” This time, he curated the ideas and gave himself time to strike the right balance: He and Dale Doyle, a friend from the same design program at University of Cincinnati all those years ago, collaborated together on the album’s cover (which, he admits, was not an intentional nod to Depeche Mode’s Violator though he didn’t recognize the similarities until recently: “I can’t believe I didn’t even think of that”), coming up with a blue, X-ray-style image of a leaf; Get Sunk is a mobile of trenchant, nocturnal rock drama held together by threads of Indiana summers (“Frozen Oranges”), pull-apart romance (“Junk”), slishy vocabulary (“Nowhere Special”), coexistence (“Times of Difficulty”), and cresting water (“Little by Little”) all spinning around and catching onto each other.

A lot of the Nancy songs, Berninger tells me, were about New York, but they were all make-believe. At that point, he was stoked on Pavement, Guided by Voices, Sonic Youth, and Silver Jews. He’d done internships in the city for six months, in 1993, several years before he eventually moved to Brooklyn. “Even back in Cincinnati, I was fantasizing about Los Angeles and New York. But then I moved to New York and it was 15 years of endless inspiration,” he says. Towards the end of his Big Apple residency, Berninger began writing about California (where Carin grew up) instead, falling deeply in love with Venice—though he argues that the connective tissue of his lyricism in 1995 remains unchanged in 2025. “It’s all the same collage to me, all the same network of thoughts. The music sounds different, the packaging is different, sometimes the musicians I’m working with are different, but I’m not really doing anything that different than I was in college. When I approach writing an idea down, or putting it to a strip of music in GarageBand, I just mumble and search and see what sticks. It’s a real wandering, gooey process.”

After completing First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track, he, Carin, and their daughter Isla moved east to Connecticut. I ask him if Get Sunk is meant to be his “leaving LA” album, consciously or not. He says that you can hear that more on the last two National albums, namely the song “Turn Off the House,” a “full body gentle shutdown” story about Berninger having to transfer the electricity of his dream home to a different owner. “My love affair with LA certainly ended in flames,” he admits. “I just started feeling like it wasn’t the best soil for a teenager. It was great soil for a little kid, so we left when my daughter was 14. I needed some winter, I needed some quiet. And so did she.” Berninger says he suffered from “the LA-ness of everything” during his final year living there, but that now, when he returns, he loves it again just as much.

“We loved leaving Brooklyn, even though I loved Brooklyn, after 15 years,” Berninger further reflects. “It was so exciting to say goodbye to New York City. Now I’m an hour away from the city and I love New York more than I ever did. It’s been a really healthy thing, creatively and from a soul level. That pioneering thing—going off to a new place—is so healthy for anyone as an individual, but it’s really healthy for a family. No matter what kind of environment you live in, it’ll become a bubble and you’ll start to not see all the other angles. Then, all of a sudden, you see different colored birds—you hear different sounds everywhere. The sounds of creeks are different in Connecticut than in LA.”

Berninger once said that the National’s early stuff, like Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers and the Cherry Tree EP, were records where he and his bandmates were figuring out what kind of band not to be. I ask him if that sort of exercise translates into an album like Get Sunk, or if having nearly three decades of material already in his pocket helps him start closer to the proverbial finish line. “Repeating yourself, it’s both good and bad,” he responds. “You don’t want to overthink it, because when you’re trying too hard to not repeat yourself, it feels effortful. It’s always trying to trick yourself not to think too much about any of that shit—and that’s hard, trying not to care. No matter what kind of artist you are—novelist, painter, synchronized dancer, swimmer—because it’s so subjective, it will be, if you’re lucky to get any attention on it at all, dissected on purely subjective terms. And that’s why art is so fascinating.”

“It’s different from sports. You know who won the game, and you can have a favorite team. You know if they won the World Series or not,” he continues. “With art, there’s no such thing. But you’re going to be judged. Awards will be given or not given—all of that shit is so fucking part of the industry. If you don’t get any attention on your record, nobody’s gonna know about it. So, you have to do interviews, and you have to hope for good reviews, and that can really put a weird torque on the making of the art. But then it can also be motivating. I think artists should read their good reviews over and over, but read their bad reviews and prove them wrong. Everybody’s smarter than you think, and you’re dumber than you think, usually. I know that and am trying not to care about it. I’m just trying to make songs that I love.” But Berninger has found himself pondering his own legacy as the “sad dad, middle-aged rock star” more than what critics might have to say about Get Sunk. Most people know him as the guy fronting the National or traipsing through crowds while singing “Terrible Love,” even if they can’t quite place his name. “It fits some of the time,” he concedes. “Doing different projects isn’t necessarily an attempt to broaden that identity. I just think artistic monogamy is a huge mistake.”

For a record written primarily on colorfully painted baseballs, Get Sunk asks big, home-run questions. One of its final gestures includes Berninger singing, “If we’re not dying, then what are we?” He wrote “Bloodbuzz Ohio” about an identity crisis, when he was disconnected from Ohio but not yet fully identifying with New York City, but everything he makes is about leaving someplace or someone. The characters in his songs may obscure the distance between fiction and fact, but their movements always return to a balance of escaping and coping. How do we exist inside of the very system we wish to derail? “We’re always trying to figure out, ‘We’re all so similar, why don’t we get along more?’ Everyone’s so infinitely different,” Berninger wagers. “We all put packages on ourselves, we create characters for ourselves and ideas of identities. All the infinite things that make up an identity, sometimes we just label one or two things on ourselves and that’s us.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

COVER STORY | Matt Berninger: On the Other Side of Collapse

The National frontman spoke with Paste about life after writer’s block, leaving Los Angeles for Connecticut, and the "spiderweb" of collaborators found on his new solo record, Get Sunk.