A few months after the National released Alligator the band played a small college venue to 30 people, a number that included venue staff and the opening band. I know this because I was there, and I counted. At that point, the Ohio-transplants had garnered critical acclaim in their adopted hometown of New York, and were regularly packing small venues around the city--but in a college town their draw was still in the dozens.
After the show, the band sat around chatting with those who’d shown up and I took more of lead singer/lyricist Matt Berninger’s time chatting than I had any right to—he was kind, talkative and probably a little drunk. By the end of the night, one of the National’s guitarists (either Dessner twin, Aaron or Bryce) sat at the venue’s dressing-room piano and plunked out what would become the intro to "Fake Empire", the band’s breakout hit. I heard it faintly through the walls. "That’s kinda pretty," I half-thought to myself, forgetting about it 30 seconds later.
The next time the band came around in 2007, Dessner mentioned writing the piano line at the venue, telling the story to a capacity crowd. Six years later, I reviewed the National’s Barclays Center debut. The songs of Trouble Will Find Me, the group's sixth album, filled the sports pavillion nicely. Packing most of Barclays’ 19,000 seats that night was their rock-star turn.
The National’s trajectory over the last decade-plus mirrors Brooklyn itself: transplantation, sudden growth, rapid gentrification. As a sense of place, Brooklyn plays an essential part in the National’s story, namely Alligator’s. It’s in the album’s inebriated blood, the home and hearth of its interior landscape. To let Alligator tell it, the National’s Brooklyn is an almost bucolic escape from the city, where all the wine is for them.
In the harsh light of 2015, the National might seem fuddy-duddy in a Brooklyn that moves forward so ruthlessly. It’s a Brooklyn that, for most artists, is post-Williamsburg and has seen lots of venues/art-friendly spaces close, including 285 Kent, Galapagos, and Northsix. "A white-hot real estate market is burning through the affordable cultural habitat," said Robert Elmes, Galapagos’ executive director, in the New York Times. "And it’s no longer a crisis, it’s a conclusion."
Add that to the innovation panic of the music industry’s last 15 years and it calls into question the way the National and its peers retooled existing models of How to Make It for independent bands. Ones who start small, gain steam with critics/blogs and snag a deal with a low-key major/large indie label (for the National it was Beggars Group, namely4AD). Perhaps most importantly: constant touring and gradual expansion of its circuit. Fill the breaks between album/touring cycles with solo projects, maybe an extra-musical pursuit or two for some pocket money and de rigeur film/TV/advertising licenses. By no means did the National invent, or even innovate drastically upon the '00s model for rising bands, but they sure worked it to success.
Whether or not future artists will be able to follow the National’s kind of career path is questionable. Regardless, Brooklyn’s irrepressible creative pull will certain remain. Within Alligator, Brooklyn-then was the metaphor at the heart of the album: the duality of its fragile interior world matched by its dark exterior one, the grace and grit of city life writ large. "I’ve got $500 in twenties and I’ve got a ton of great ideas," Berninger moans on "City Middle", as he goes cavorting to do God knows what. "My bodyguard shows her revolver to anyone who asks," he croons menacingly on "Lit Up". "And yeah she comes to attention when you come up to me too fast."
He sets a scene of grace on "The Geese of Beverly Road". "We'll take ourselves out in the street," he sings. "And wear the blood in our cheeks like red roses/ We'll go from car to sleeping car and whisper in their sleeping ears/ ‘We were here, we were here.’" If "Beverly Road” sounds picturesque, it’s because it is. It's a throughway that passes through historic Ditmas Park, where the band wrote and recorded much of Alligator.
"It's a beautiful neighborhood that feels more like Savannah, Georgia than Brooklyn," Berninger told Neumu. "The houses are all free-standing with nice yards and wrap-around porches. I was sitting outside one night watching a bunch of kids running up and down Beverly setting off car alarms. The song is theirs." (The whole band established itself in Ditmas Park permanently in 2003.)
The message within Alligator is like this: Don’t ever leave New York, even if it drives you nuts. "I wouldn't go out alone into America," Berninger sings on "Karen". He would know. He and most of the National grew up in Ohio. On "City Middle", Berninger is drawn to the city like a moth to a flame.
Karen, take me to the nearest famous city middle
Where they hang the lights
Where it's random, and it's common versus common
La di la
When Berninger finds a moment of clarity about city life in his lyrics, it rivals that of his contemporaries (LCD Soundsystem, Interpol), even predecessors (Mark Eitzel, Leonard Cohen). "How can anybody know how they got to be this way?" Berninger sings on Alligator’s "Daughters of the Soho Riots". "You must have known I'd do this someday." These lyrics use Manhattan’s SoHo as metaphor, just as the National’s other songs use Brooklyn. It’s the city as romance and neurosis—loving something even and maybe especially if it makes you insane. Berninger narrates the scattered, scared, sexy, anxious and, especially, inebriated thoughts of urban life as if it were an abstract novel. "I pull off your jeans and you spill Jack and Coke in my collar," he sings sadly on Alligator’s stream-of-consciousness "Baby, We’ll Be Fine".
On "The Geese of Beverly Road", Alligator’s most blissful refrain, Berninger sings, "We’re the heirs to the glimmering world." Brooklyn is their glimmering world—all the front yards, sleeping cars, black city streets, secret meetings, basements and city middles. Ten years on, Alligator tells us that some things, especially the glimmering ones, are worth fighting for.