| The National – Baby, We'll Be Fine Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| This song reminds me a lot of Springsteen's "Atlantic City" for some reason. I could easily imagine the narrator of this song saying "last night I met this guy and I'm gonna do a little favor for him." It's all about the insecurity and desperate hope when you can feel things slipping away beyond your control. | |
| The National – Afraid of Everyone Lyrics | 15 years ago |
|
AVC: One of the most memorable songs on High Violet is “Afraid Of Everyone,” which you wrote about being a new father. Did you have any trepidation about writing about such a potentially trite subject? MB: I had a lot of trepidation. Once you do have a child you want to talk about every detail of it. And it is really boring to all your friends and it should be. I was really worried about even going there at all. One of my favorite bands, who I won’t mention, named a record after the singer’s first-born child, named the single after them, and the kid was on the cover. It was just such a drag. So yeah, I was kind of worried. It was just such a big part of my life in the past two years. My daughter is almost 16 months old now. It was a major part of what was going on in my head, so it was going to get itself in there somewhere as much as I tried not to. But I think I was able to do it without being too annoying. http://www.avclub.com/articles/matt-berninger-of-the-national,41019/ Seems to reinforce the idea that it's about the fear that goes along with being a new father. |
|
| The National – Squalor Victoria Lyrics | 15 years ago |
|
Just saw them in concert last night, and this song was the highlight of the show for me. I've been thinking a lot about the meaning, and I'm still not sure I have a coherent theory. I'm not sure I buy either the bad-employee getting fired angle (seems a bit banal) or the Bush/war theory (too overtly political). I've always thought it was about someone trapped in a "successful" white-collar job looking for an opportunity for something more (kind of in the vein of "Mistaken for Strangers"). I think the first line lays out his current reality (professional in a white shirt . . .); the "raise our glasses to the heavens line" is the pressure to celebrate mediocrity (a filthy triumph); the "out of my league" line is an acknowledgment that he want ssomething different (i.e. he wants to start doing something "magical" and go out among the fools); the "3:30 . . . zoning out" line talks about how he can't focus on his "real" life even when the stakes are high (or maybe it's a realization that the opportunity to do something different is passing him by while he's too zoned out to grasp it); and the last line is his depressing realization that he's unhappy with a middlebrow lifestyle and fear that it might be too late to do something else. I'm not quite sure how to fit in the line about going down among the saints, but a google search indicates that the phrase is sometimes used in Mormon texts referring to people coming to Salt Lake City in the 1880s as going down among the saints of Zion. Not sure that's what Matt was thinking of, and even if it was, not really sure what it's a metaphor for or how it relates to any of the interpretations on here. Anyway, my general interpretation seems to fit in with how the band spend a lot of time on day jobs while playing in clubs at night trying to make it as a rock band, but there's certainly nothing authoritative about my interpretation. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.