How did you select these particular singers?

We brought in singers we could really collaborate with, and we actually wrote songs with Kim and Kelley Deal. It wasn’t just us giving them something to sing—they generated their own lyrics and they worked on their own melodies, and we went back and forth with them for months on music. We actually spent a few months with them in Ohio, which was really cool.

The thread that ties the entire piece together really seems to be collaboration.

Yeah, there are collaborations on other levels too. All the instrumentalists in the group are people we handpicked or people that we’ve worked with over the years. So the percussionist is phenomenal, probably the best young professional percussionist in the world. He just can do anything. There’s actually this crazy, sort of pinnacle in one of the most intense pieces—this 7- minute song that Shara Worden sings, and it’s all based around this insane polyrhythm stuff on the drum where he’s actually playing, at the same time, kick drums, snare, woodblock and a set of these Chinese cymbals and the glockenspiel all at the same time. But in a sense it is this weird, layered contemporary music. So the music is really a collaboration between my brother and I and the ensemble. It didn’t feel right for me to be a really traditional composer and say, “This is going to be my little operetta” and my own personality. It ended up being much more interesting to make this big collaborative experience.

Can to you explain the piece’s storyline to our readers?

We based it on this Mayan myth, but it is not really a linear story in the way we think of a modern story. It is really, in many ways, about the creation of the universe and the creation of time itself—focusing on a series weird events, descriptions and these different characters play different roles. The whole thing is about twins, actually. There is a little bit of a hook where people say, “Oh it’s the twin show.” It essentially tells the story of these twins who are playing a ball game, and they are playing so loud that they wake up the lords of the underworld. They are basically called down to hell and go through this series of horrific tasks. It’s like they are killed and reborn several times and there’s even a quasi-virgin character. Plus, there’s another set of twins who were killed. One of their heads is sent back as a calabash fruit which impregnates a young woman.

We don’t normally have such ambitious, lofty, epic qualities in our songs, so this is really something new for us. It was helpful to work with Matthew who adopts all these great stories. He’s a great writer too, so he actually adapted the myth and basically gave us a small book which was his version of the story, and we used that along with some other ideas to write the songs.

My brother and I grew up kind of worshiping the Cincinnati Reds, and the story of the Big Red Machine. We were born in ’76, the second year the Reds won the World Series, and we were living in Cincinnati that whole time. The whole mythological kind of characters in our life were these baseball players like Pete Rose, and there’s a commonality of the ball game with the Mayan story. We were talking about actually naming the show The Big Red Machine for a while.

You mentioned that your brother doesn’t share your classical background. Did you have similar musical interests growing up?

We always had bands, rock bands. We had a band in high school, a band in college and then The National started after college. That’s always been the way that we’ve worked together. My brother is a really great writer, and he wrote a lot of those heavier National songs. So his interest is primarily more in rock music or pop songs. I have a masters degree in classical guitar and composition, actually. So I have a very heavy conservatory background, and we differ in that way even though we’re twins. It is actually part of what the story itself is about with Kim and Kelley too. We both have these obsessive music relationships with our twins, and we have many shared experiences.

We’re in many ways kind of the same person, but actually our histories are really different and we bring very different things to the music, which was interesting. I think normally what happens in The National is I bring in the left-field stuff—whether that be weird rhythms or weird harmonies or strange chords or whatever—and my brother usually re-interprets that into some kind of like song that comes out really sober. And this show is almost that equation being inversed a little bit. With this project Aaron brought in a kind of raw energy—riffs and other things that are so compelling that you can listen to them over and over again, which is what I think of in good rock music. Then I blew them into like bigger songs with big arrangements and more abstract music around it. It was pretty exciting for us to have worked in a different way together. We basically have been doing that since such an early age—even if I was studying more classically, and he was more self taught. We have an interesting symbiotic relationship musically. It’s kind of weird to say, but it is one of those things that happens when you have been around someone for so long. I used to sit in my room and actually learn a Bach fugue, and my brother could just sit behind me and pick it up by ear.

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