Bryce Dessner on The National, Taylor Swift and His Classical Career

Bryce Dessner leads two lives. He’s not only the guitarist, keyboardist and songwriter for the National, one of the world’s most successful rock bands; he’s also a composer and guitarist with a rapidly rising profile in the contemporary-classical world. But going back and forth has been surprisingly easy, he says. In both cases he’s trying to generate compact modules of music that he can develop and elaborate in gradual, nuanced ways.

“The song form is the most essential kind of music,” he told me in 2021. “Look at Schubert and Mahler; they were great songwriters. I tell National fans that this is music I really love, and they respect that. I say a four-minute song is great, but what if you have 30 minutes and all these textures and colors to work with, what would you say then?”

During the pandemic, the National confronted a crisis of whether they could go on. But they survived and reemerged with this year’s studio album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, their ninth and one of their best. At the same time, Dessner’s new classical ensemble, the Dream House Quartet, released its debut recording, The Dream House Quartet EP. Both groups have scheduled live tours for this year.

“I often feel like the kid in the playground going back and forth between two gangs to get them to play together,” Dessner explained. “Most musicians are really open-minded; they like to perform with musicians from a world that’s not their own. But the machinery of getting the music out there is very different, and sometimes I get whiplash moving from one world to the other.”

First Two Pages of Frankenstein takes its title from the opening scene of Mary Shelley’s 1816 novel. An English explorer is sailing north into the frigid latitudes of the Arctic Ocean, hoping that the North Pole will be an oasis warmed by a sun that never sets, a place to discover the source of magnetism.

“I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited,” the adventurer says, “and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death.”

That’s a hyperbolic description of the National’s high hopes and uncertain fears as they regathered in the spring of 2022. The pandemic seemed to be winding down, and it was time to work on a new album. The group, together since 1999, had suffered through 11 years and four albums of good reviews and mediocre sales, followed by 12 years of success—four albums on the Billboard charts and headlining shows in arenas and sheds.

But they had to cancel a 39-city tour in 2020 as the plague spread. Sitting at home with no gigs or studio sessions to play, they couldn’t help but wonder if they could remain creative and excited after 23 years in the business.

“Like many people, the pandemic pulled the rug out from under us,” Bryce says over the phone from Chicago. “Some people’s home life suffered. As a band, we came to a place where we needed a shift. We were feeling sheer exhaustion from the number of records and tours, from that cycle that never stops, from the existential threat of what happens if it does stop. There’s a lot of aspects about that cycle that are unhealthy. You’re away from home a lot, and it’s hard to stay healthy on the road.”

Matt Berninger, the band’s lead singer and chief lyricist, released Serpentine Prison, a solo album of pre-pandemic songs, but found he couldn’t write any new lyrics for the music Bryce and his twin brother Aaron were sending him. Berninger could barely sing. His filmmaker brother Tom encouraged him to write about his feelings. According to The New Yorker, Matt responded, “What do you think I’ve been fucking doing for the past twenty years? All I’ve been writing about is depression.”

“I definitely thought it was ending,” Bryce said in the same New Yorker story. “It wasn’t about pushing Matt to finish this record so we could get back on tour and earn some money. I was actually surprised to find out how much I love him. I always have.”

A summer tour in 2020 got Berninger’s vocals working again. Then Bryce sent Matt a demo that caught the singer’s ear. Like many of the Dessner brothers’ musical ideas, this was a short phrase that seems to repeat but which is actually morphing gradually into other possibilities. The hypnotic appeal of the National’s music largely stems from this dynamic of repetition and variation, of the gradual build of tension in the recycling of motifs and the gradual release of tension in the alteration of those patterns. It’s this musical subtlety—this sense that every habit is evolving into something else—that makes the National more interesting than the hundreds of other angst-ridden rockers.

The demo that caught Matt’s ear was a repeating phrase of four ascending piano notes in the right hand, while the left hand kept recontextualizing the harmony with new chords. The singer responded with a couplet that captured the feeling of knowing everyone’s watching you, waiting for you to get back to normal. “Don’t make this any harder,” he sang on the song became the album opener, “Once Upon a Poolside.” “Everybody’s waiting.” Later in the song, however, as the music evolves, so does his attitude. “What was the worried thing you said to me?” he sings at the end. “I thought we could make it through anything.”

The National’s music always develops this way. For all the attention paid to Berninger’s lyrics, the songs begin with a musical idea by Bryce or Aaron. Matt adds the words, and the instrumentalists (Bryce, Aaron, bassist Scott Devendorf and his drumming brother Bryan) flesh out the arrangement.

But it all starts with the composers, and each twin brings a different, invaluable take on the band. Bryce was classically trained at the Yale School of Music and has released multiple film soundtracks as well as symphonic and chamber-music recordings. Aaron is the savvy pop producer/songwriter who has collaborated with Taylor Swift, Bon Iver, Mumford & Sons and Ed Sheeran.

“We call them sketches, songs without words,” Bryce explains. “My brother does lots of them, I do some; sometimes we do them together. Then we give them to Matt, and he riffs on them until he finds a melody and a phrase that he likes. It’s not dissimilar from the way R.E.M. or U2 operate, where there’s a vocalist and a band.

“For the first song on the record, for example, I wrote that simple piano piece, ‘Poolside,’ and Matt wrote the song from that. ‘Alien,’ which I also wrote, is a little more complex. They’re demos, fairly well produced; sometimes there’s a lead sheet. It can be a phone demo, or it can be a nearly completed song. Sometimes it can be too produced, which doesn’t allow Matt a way in.”

“Alien” evokes the feeling of being trapped inside the wrong mood like an alien on the wrong planet. That sensation comes not just from the lyrics (“Drop down from the clouds you’re in; drop down like an alien”) but also from the music. Bryce begins the tune with a nervous guitar phrase toggling between two notes, then adds a funereal keyboard figure in the bass register and a second agitated guitar riff. Matt sings in a hushed voice as if not to disturb the after-midnight vibe, and Bryce keeps adding little embellishments that suggest there are several ways out of this maze.

“Ice Machines” is a good example of Bryce’s melodic gift. It opens with a watery synth figure, the thick reverb resembling the heavy curtains in a darkened room. That is quickly contrasted by a lovely acoustic guitar phrase that suggests a spark of optimism in a setting of despair. The lyrics by Matt and his wife Carin Besser pick up on this, and the singer is soon cataloguing the things he doesn’t need: ice machines, speaker systems and forgiveness. Before long, though, he has to admit, “But I do.”

Bryce’s one composition on The Dream House Quartet EP is the recording’s longest track, “Haven.” It begins, as so many of the National’s songs do, with a short, intriguing guitar phrase that is repeated endlessly over an ever-shifting, ever-expanding soundscape. The effect is hypnotic, for the listener is pulled between the sameness of some elements and the constant addition and subtraction of other elements in juxtaposition, between the sense that life is always the same and the sense that life is never the same. Not unlike a National song.

Of course, there are no lyrics or vocals in this all-instrumental chamber piece, and the development goes much further, but the analogies are obvious. Bryce’s guitar is joined by the guitar of David Chalmin and the pianos of another set of siblings: Katia and Marielle Labeque.

These two French sisters are stars in the contemporary-classical world, and Bryce has worked with them before, most notably on the 2019 album El Chan, which included a piano concerto that the sisters had commissioned from Bryce, the seven-movement title piece and a version of “Haven” that was remixed for the new EP. That piece included Katia’s partner Chalmin on second guitar and inspired the formation of the Dream House Quartet. A full-length album is due this fall.

“As we got to know him,” Katia told me in 2021, “we were struck that he could write whatever he wanted. I’d never met anyone like him, because he can articulate his music in both the classical and rock worlds with the same facility, the same passion. He’s not afraid to show all his love for different musics; Bryce is an amalgam of them all.”

“The quartet grows out of a series of projects Katia and Marielle have been doing dealing with American minimalism,” Bryce says now. “It was called Minimalist Dream House when it was a trio with David before I got involved. Thom Yorke, a friend, has written some pieces for us. We toured in Europe, and David has become a good friend. He’s a terrific engineer who does most of my projects. We joke that Katia and Marielle are slumming with us; they’re so much more virtuosic. But it’s exciting for us, and audiences seem excited too.”

Bryce joined the National in Brooklyn in 1999 and the Labeque sisters in Paris in 2015, but the story really begins in Cincinnati. All five members of the National grew up in or near the Ohio city, and the two Dessner twins were inseparable from an early age.

“For a long time,” Bryce says, “we didn’t have individual identities; we were one. Only in high school did it begin to diverge. I got more interested in music, and [Aaron] got really good at sports. Early on in the National, we would get asked to produce things, and I told him, ‘Run with it.’ So he started producing and I spent more time composing. That helped us carve out separate identities.”

Bryce, Aaron and Bryan Devendorf were teenage pals making music, while Bryan’s older brother Scott met Matt in the University of Cincinnati’s graphic-design program. While Bryce was in grad school at Yale, the other four were jamming in Matt’s Brooklyn loft. By the time the nascent group played its first live gig, Aaron had pulled his brother into the line-up. But Bryce never gave up on his other career in classical music.

“As I grew up, the music I heard was the typical American experience,” he recalls. “My dad had jazz albums, and I was always listening to [Bob] Dylan and the [Grateful] Dead, and my sister had all the punk records. Music was in the air. When I heard John Fahey and Jerry Garcia make the guitar sound like a fiddle, I didn’t know how they did that. I wanted to figure it out, so I studied music. That led to classical music; I fell in love with Bach and started writing music. Notated music has been in my life since the beginning; it’s always been part of my DNA.”

He cites Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint,” the minimalist masterpiece featuring guitarist Pat Metheny, as a “life-changing” experience. Here was a way that noisy electric guitars could be used in precision-designed art music.

“In my early 20s,” Bryce recounts, “I met Steve Reich because he had heard I was a kid who played electric guitar well and could also read music. He invited me to play ‘Two by Five.’ He became an important person in my life who would listen to anything I was working on and would give me feedback. He was also aware of the band coming up and he was supportive of that.”

Bryce is not the only musician straddling the border between pop and classical music. Classical composer Terry Riley worked with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale; John Luther Adams was a rock’n’roll drummer before becoming a much-commissioned classical composer; San Fermin is led by Ellis Ludwig-Leone, a protégé of classical composer Nico Muhly; A 2014 album by the Copenhagen Philharmonic featured a long composition by Bryce (“St. Carolyn by the Sea) and another by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (“Suite from ‘There Will Be Blood’”).

Like Greenwood, Bryce has done a number of film scores, most notably with the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu on 2015’s The Revenant and 2022’s Bardo. It was his friendship with Iñárritu that inspired the Mexican-themed suite “El Chan.” Coming out this fall is She Came to Me, a movie directed by Rebecca Miller with Bryce writing piano music for Katia Labeque to play and arranging the closing credits theme song written and sung by Bruce Springsteen.

“Film scoring is collaborative,” Bryce muses, “so it’s more similar to the band. You have to check your ego and understand that the music is in service to something larger; it’s not the main thing. With a band you’re collaborating with four people, but on a film, you’re collaborating with a 100, who are all the best at what they do. But the architecture, the composing, is more similar to my orchestral work, because it’s notated music for many instruments.”

One of the most successful songs on First Two Pages of Frankenstein is “The Alcott,” a duet between Matt and Taylor Swift on a song co-written by Swift, Matt and Aaron. Over a stately piano figure and ominous synth chords, the lyrics describe two estranged lovers meeting in an expensive restaurant after a long hiatus. Matt sets the scene, but when he gets to the dialogue over the tablecloth, Swift adds a whispery harmony. Before long, the two voices diverge, and every baritone suggestion is immediately answered by a soprano counter-proposal as the couple tries to negotiate a reconciliation.

This is just the latest collaboration between Swift and the National. In the 2010s, the superstar started coming to the band’s shows and would hang around backstage often enough to become a friend. When the pandemic shut everything down in March of 2020, Swift sent Aaron a text out of the blue saying, “This is Taylor. Would you ever be up for collaborating remotely with me?”

“I was flattered and said, ‘Sure,’” Aaron told the New York Times later that year. “She said, ‘Just send anything, even the weirdest random sketch that you have,’ and I sent her a folder of stuff I’d been working on. And then a few hours later, she sent that song, ‘Cardigan.’” The track would become Swift’s sixth #1 pop single.

That led to Aaron co-writing and/or producing nine of the 16 tracks on Swift’s Folklore album that year. He brought in Bryce to orchestrate eight of those tracks. The National’s Bryan Devendorf programmed the drums on one track.

Swift’s follow-up album, Evermore, found Aaron producing 16 of the 17 tracks on the deluxe version with help from Bryce, Matt, Bryan and Scott from the National. Swift repaid the favor by singing a duet with Justin Vernon on Aaron’s side project, the Big Red Machine. That track, “Renegade,” appeared on the 2021 album, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last, with help from Bryce on multiple tracks.

Folklore and Evermore bent the trajectory of Swift’s career in a significant way. She relied less on autobiography and more on engaging the outside world in all its paradoxes. That sparked an appreciation of a timespan longer than her own lifespan and an interest in the deepest roots and furthest branches of American music—translated into sound by the folk-rock and art-rock touches lent by the Dessner brothers. Both her songwriting and performances deepened as a result.

“I think she’s one of the great American songwriters,” Bryce says. “I don’t see her as anything other than that. There’s such incredible skill and range in the songs she’s done. When you see her in action, the way these songs come about, how quickly and fully they are realized, you appreciate she’s a virtuoso in her way.”

Bryce’s string charts for Swift are just one more example of how the pop and classical sides of his music reinforce one another. The pop side emphasizes the importance of compact melodic/rhythmic phrases that are easy and pleasurable to grasp. The classical side stresses the development of those short phrases into ever-evolving variations. The combination of the two makes him one of the most interesting figures in modern music.

“As a teenager,” Bryce points out, “I was studying classical flute and classical guitar and playing in punk bands with my brother. We were immediately writing songs, hanging out with guys in local bands, while I was going to conservatory and studying Bach at the conservatory. I just did what interested me. If you’re an artist and get too caught up in that crossfire in genres and between genres, it will limit you.”

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Listen to The National’s Daytrotter session from 2007 below.