Future wife, I want you to love whatever you love, but I’m gonna need you to love The National. You’ll have to understand my head cinema’s train stops.
Listening to The National always takes my head to the same place. Everything is in black and white, the dress is always formal, it’s dark suits, the plots of unwritten Fitzgerald novels, dried flowers, slow dances, quiet libraries. No one speaks because the stances in which they prop their bodies up say everything and never enough simultaneously. It’s the dance floors you imagine your grandparents met on, based solely on the old, frayed edge photographs you found framed in their home after their passing. It’s dusty dirt roads to everywhere anyone’s every traveled, nothing is paved, nothing stays clean. It’s the few seconds of silence after the death of a relationship, in which both parties understand what’s happened, yet neither’s told their feet it’s time to leave yet.
I also picked up some vinyl today. A couple records I’ve wanted for awhile finally made it to the record store, Hospice and High Violet.
Let’s listen to this while bike riding through a grey, rainy day. The leaves will stick to the asphalt like back window car decals. It’s hoodie weather. We’ll pedal down the middle of the street in a quiet neighborhood. Cars will go around us, the drivers won’t honk or scowl, they’ll nod. They’ll be like tourists in a foreign art gallery, a little confused and unsure, but willing to accept that the thing before them is beautiful. I’ll fix speakers to my handlebars and stay close. We’ll sing along without singing at all.
This song takes me there.
Please make an album together, call yourselves “Beard Bro Thundersmash” (I don’t know what the thundersmash part means, but it sounds mighty. If Zeus had an all God band, that’s what he’d name it.) Seriously, can you all make a record together? Call yourselves whatever you’d like.
You’re all friends with Sufjan too, right? Invite him as well.
Is it still too soon for me to deem High Violet a classic? Flawless record.
If there are hidden bookshelves inside you, atop the curves of your ribs, heavy with dust filled, leather bound novels, and there is a quiet man who climbs these stacks and thumbs through each one with care and curiosity, this is exactly what listening to The National feels like.
You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you
You know I dreamed about you
I missed you for
for twenty-nine years
Lyrically, this is the most perfect Halloween song not written for Halloween.
If I were a millionaire, I’d have a room in my mansion specifically for listening to The National in the dark, in a suit, on a leather chair, surrounded by book cases, where I look pensively out of the room’s only window, breaking occasionally to pull plastic flowers out of the vase next to the chair, sniff them, then throw them on the ground and softly mutter under my breath, “lies, all of it, everyone.”
Listening to The National feels like reading a leather bound book in an abandoned library after hours. A Fitzgerald novel or a book of Hemmingway’s short stories.
Despite haven’t not heard it in weeks, this song was stuck in my head while I laid in bed a couple nights ago. Great record.
