Happy 10th Anniversary to The National’s fifth studio album High Violet, originally released May 10, 2010.
Moving away from New York City is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It’s been 10 years, but not a day goes by that I don’t miss it. Leaving was never part of the plan. After years of searching, I’d finally found the place that felt like home.
But, during the fall of my fourth year, my world flipped upside-down. My boyfriend was having an affair and their baby was on the way. I never felt so decimated. Face to the floor, I’d occasionally shuffle outside my Battery Park apartment. The Lower Manhattan winds, sultry all summer, now lashed through like ice.
Three months later, I made my choice. Too much of the city was entwined in that relationship, and all of my friends there were connected to him in some way. My support network was on the opposite coast, where I was born and raised, and so, I returned heartbroken from whence I came.
It was January 2010—the start of a new decade—and at 32, I was in free-fall, staring at the walls of my childhood bedroom still plastered with posters from my teenage years. I forgot how to sleep. In its place, unwelcome issues crept in—night shakes, skin issues, a bald spot. I figured I must have done something very wrong. I stopped eating meat to recalibrate my karma. I drifted from healing centers to hotel bars and back again. I’d take the train from Palo Alto to San Francisco and wander like a vagrant, ruing my losses, bewailing even the Cloisters where I’d never actually been—missing all the future memories I never got to make.
Somewhere amidst this atrocious fugue state sparked a heartening glimmer. My favorite New York band The National had finished their fifth album. Single “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and even a full-album stream appeared online weeks ahead of the release date. But, I resisted such casual introductions.
Five years had passed since The National’s third album Alligator (2005) turned me into a ravenous fan. And, it had been three years since its successor Boxer (2007) hoisted the indie quintet into ever-higher echelons of fame. When my preordered bundle of High Violet treasures finally landed, I was aflutter, but trepidatious.
My move to Manhattan coincided with the Brooklyn-based band’s ascension. Looking back, it seems a dream that I was lucky enough to see them light up the whole of the borough as many times as I did—South Street Seaport, Bowery Ballroom, Webster Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Late Show with David Letterman, Terminal 5, Carnegie Hall, Central Park, Columbia University, United Palace. Would my relationship with my beloved band change now that I was apart from my beloved city?
I needn’t have worried. While I was in the emotional throes of my bicoastal crisis, The National were meticulously crafting their grandest achievement to date in guitarist Aaron Dessner’s garage studio. After touring extensively throughout 2007 and 2008, the group eased back into songwriting in March 2009. With all five members pushing to meet their own exacting ears and standards, the process was characteristically iterative and argumentative, but generally harmonious. After the hostilities involved in fostering Boxer, they entered High Violet determined to avoid a repeat.
For The National, music kick-starts the songwriting process. Twin guitarists Aaron and Bryce pass sketches to the other set of brothers in the band, Bryan and Scott Devendorf, who build on the structure with drums and bass. At that point, singer and lyricist Matt Berninger writes to the music, jettisoning parts that don’t meld with his words or jive with the sound he has in mind. Together, the band deconstruct, scrap and reshape. They also work in numerous contributions from their expanding universe of talented friends, including Thomas Bartlett from Doveman, Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire, Justin Vernon from Bon Iver and longtime collaborators Peter Katis and Padma Newsome.
The result of this broad range of perspectives and perfectionist tendencies is a multidimensional record flooded with aural riches and complexity. Though tangibly different, Alligator and Boxer play like sister albums examining polar positions of the same nocturnal psyche—one bounding about the streets of NYC, the other relinquishing the fight. Even superficially, there’s continuity, with black-and-white photos and a single jolt of color gracing both covers.
But where Boxer radiates with its cool restraint, High Violet sprawls warmly into new, colorful territory. The stark black-and-white artwork, the focus for the latter part of the aughts, has blurred into a gray backdrop. Instead, The National offered a jumble of rainbow-hued scrawl to initiate the new decade—a bouquet of untested anxieties spilling into a more expansive world.
“Anxiety and worry are common mental states,” Berninger remarked to The Guardian. “I don't know many people who wake up in the morning filled with confidence and glee. But it's not a mid-life crisis because it never goes away.”
And certainly, the dueling impulses spotlighted in earlier records still shimmer across High Violet, but the questions are more existential, the doubts more profound and the consequences more cataclysmic. Now married with an infant daughter, and facing 40, Berninger explores how he might live up to these newfound familial responsibilities. He also investigates the pull of people in other places, including Ohio, where all five members of The National are originally from.
As much as Berninger was on the verge of a personal milestone, the band was on a certain precipice, too. The back-to-back successes of Alligator and Boxer had flung them centerstage in alternative rock circles. With the pressure on, The National delivered their third consecutive stunner—a tempestuous culmination highlighting everything they’d done so well before while leading us into a new chapter.
Album opener “Terrible Love” sets the tone impeccably, marching out from the insular quarters of Boxer to boldly confront the unknown challenges that lay ahead (“It's a terrible love and I'm walking with spiders / It's a terrible love and I'm walking in”). And, braving it requires all our stamina (“It takes an ocean not to break”). The line not only serves as a powerful visual, introducing the water-related imagery that permeates the album, but also offers a taste of the provocative wordplay to come.
Beyond just being a fantastic way to start this phenomenal album, the lyrics here, like so much of High Violet, also struck me personally (“And I can’t fall asleep / Without a little help / It takes a while to settle down / My shivered bones”). It was May and summer was imminent, but I remained empty and cold. I knew exactly what it felt like to shiver from the inside. And, while my sleep those days required more than “a little help,” the sentiment certainly resonated.
Sonically, “Terrible Love” treads new terrain, too. Aaron Dessner described the feeling they were going for to The Quietus, explaining, “Matt had a metaphor for how it should sound, ‘like loose wool or hot tar,’ like a woolly and weird textured thing! We didn’t want to make another elegant, stately meditative record like Boxer – that’s very beautiful and a lot of it’s very… polished.”
My devastated self was perfectly content to nuzzle up to “Sorrow,” the next track on High Violet. The chorus contains the line “Don't leave my hyper heart alone on the water,” which spoke to not just my sense of abandonment, but how I always feel to a degree. I’m often told I’m too sensitive, which I’m actually quite okay with, but sometimes my hyper heart produces uncontrollable waves of feelings—and that alone can be alienating.
Even though I consistently listened to High Violet for many months after it fell into my waiting hands, I don’t consider it a breakup album. It’s far too abstract, cleverly inserting just the right level of quotidian detail to keep things relatable. And while it’s easy to get attached to lines that I see myself in, I’m equally obsessed with the ones I don’t.
“Little Faith” and “Conversation 16” are among my favorite songs on High Violet, precisely because of the dark, surreal imagery they conjure into existence. “Little Faith” flirts with dangerous impulses to push away tedium, ultimately winding its way into lines like “The storm will suck the pretty girls into the sky.”
“Conversation 16” is a peek at a strained relationship where the narrator is pretending things are working despite the troubles the couple is having, with him ultimately admitting, “I was afraid / I’d eat your brains / Cos I’m evil.” I’m pretty sure the song isn’t about zombies, but I know what it’s like to be in hurtful arguments that gnaw at the mind. Plus, it’s liberating as hell to sing along with.
One of the reasons High Violet really consoled me is because, while rooted in New York, it recognizes the influence of other places, not just Fitzgerald-inspired soirees like the woozy fantasy of “Lemonworld,” but in a poignant way that paralleled my own struggles.
Lyrically, “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” is the album’s most simple, but offers a sweet acknowledgement, if not tribute, to The National’s home state. Ohio will always be in their blood, even if they no longer live there. “I never thought about love when I thought about home” could mean it’s too painful to think about the family and friends who still live there. Or perhaps he just takes that love for granted. For me, the bigger question is, does the narrator even know where home is anymore?
High Violet ends incandescently, with a song encouraging forgiveness, “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks.” The first few lines reminded me of my arrival in New York City (“Leave your home / Change your name / Live alone / Eat your cake”). I didn’t change my name, but I reveled in the freedom the move afforded me. I didn’t try to be anyone I wasn’t, but New York helped me find out who I am. Most of us fall prey to a “terrible love” at some point, but our hearts should remain open. You can’t fault yourself for falling in love. At least, that’s what I take from “All the very best of us / String ourselves up for love.”
Looking back on the last 10 years, a lot has happened and a lot has stayed the same. I still grapple with the idea of home. Is it San Francisco, NYC or somewhere I’ve yet to go? For now, I define it as the place I feel most myself, which these days simply means surrounding myself in the music I love.
LISTEN: