It’s been a long, strange trip from the New York City-art scene that nurtured The National during their infancy to their new, expansive tribute to the Grateful Dead, but it’s also been a natural evolution. Long before they were indie-darlings, four members of The National—twin guitarists Aaron and Bryce Dessner and the rhythm section of Scott and Bryan Devendorf—learned to play their instruments to the Dead’s music and the quintet have survived the blog-bubble to emerge as unassuming heirs to the Dead’s storied songbook and harbingers of interfaith indie-jam cool. After a lifetime of listening to bootlegs, four years of recording and a few encounters with Bob Weir himself, the Dessners called on an eclectic mix of contributors to create Day of the Day, a 59-song tribute to the Grateful Dead and their storied songbook. (The National singer Matt Berninger appears with the rest of his bandmates on a few full-band tracks as well as a live cut that draws in Weir himself.) The members of The National are featured on the cover of the April_May issue of Relix (which is available here ) where they discuss Day of the Dead’s evolution and the album’s deep ties to the band’s own genesis. In these additional interviews, the twins dig deeper into their recording process and discuss how The National emerged at the forefront of the glimmering, Grateful Dead world.
You mentioned that you had recorded around seventy tracks and I see over here it’s fifty-nine tracks. Were there other tracks that you guys had started the work on that you never finished or tracks that were ideas that were never put together?
Aaron Dessner: There are more tracks than what you have. There are some we didn’t finish essentially and at some point we had to call it, probably because it became an endeavor and we could keep going forever.
Bryce Dessner: There were other things in the works that we just couldn’t finish. Almost a third of the artists we would’ve loved to be on it, but we just couldn’t. We just needed to finish it. Obviously there are a handful of really important songs that aren’t on it, but we felt like you can’t just sort of touch the surface, so we wanted to go deep. Once we felt like we’d gotten it deep, it just became about making the best record we could and at a certain point we just had to call it and draw the line.
As for it being released on a vinyl as well as a stream, is it still going to be released as a complete set or are you thinking of breaking off various sections of it for different releases?
Aaron: I think the idea is that the vinyl will be one complete package with ten or eleven vinyl. The vinyl sequence, the digital sequence and the CD sequence are all a different medium, so with the vinyl we thought even more about it like a setlist. Then the digital sequence is actually in three volumes as lighting, thunder and sunshine. I don’t know if it will actually be called that on iTunes, but we’re going to organize them in our brains that way.
Could you talk about some of the tracks in specifics that utilized the house band you put together for this and also some of the players that were involved?
Aaron: There were two churches, one near Woodstock and the other in Hudson, New York. They’re Dreamland, which is a 19th century church in West Hurley, which is a little southeast of Woodstock. It’s an amazing, pretty special studio where I made The Lone Bellows record and the Frightened Rabbit record, so I’ve gotten used to working there. There was sort of a house band, which was Bryan and Scott from The National and myself, Josh Kaufman, Sam Cohen and Walt Martin from The Walkmen playing the keys. So we were actually set up like a band playing live in the church recording almost no overdubbing. So I would I say almost half, if not more than half of the songs were recorded that way. Then there’s another batch of songs recorded with Chris Bear and Daniel Rossen from Grizzly Bear, Scott from The National on bass, I was playing guitar and Josh Kaufman was also playing guitar. So that was sort of a smaller version of the house band. Then there were also a bunch of tracks done in the garage, my studio in Brooklyn, like “Ripple,” The Walkmen track, “Althea” and “Til the Morning Comes.” It’s such a big record there’s kind of a story to each one.
Were the Mumford and Sons contributions recorded while they were recording at your house in Brooklyn?
Aaron: No, I actually did “Friend of the Devil” with them in Manhattan in March last year, two days after my son was born. We really had to figure out when we could all be there so we did that in two days in this studio in Manhattan, but it was after their record had already been recorded. Another track was actually with one of the members of Mumford and Sons, which we did part of in the garage and they did part of it in the UK.
I know when we talked a few months ago you also mentioned there were some parallel sessions going on in Wisconsin with Justin Vernon and his crew of musicians. Were there other tracks that he recorded at his studio or was that the only one that made it on the record?
Aaron: Well that one was kind of the focus. “Brown Eyed Woman” was going be done there but it actually ended up being recorded, I believe, in Nashville, so there was a similar crew of people on it, although not Justin.
How did you and Justin first cross paths and become so close? Was it through the Red Hot project you did a few years ago? Was that the first time you guys worked together?
Aaron: We invited him. We kind of got into his first record early, and then obviously he started blowing up, but before that even happened we had invited him to a be part of it. He had sent us “Brackett WI,” that amazing track, and he did it pretty quickly so I just sent him the music for “Big Red Machine,” which was just a microphone on my floor with me playing this out of tune piano in my living room. A couple months later, I got an email and it was a fully written song. Bryce and I were born the year the Cincinnati Reds beat the Yankees in 1976 in the World Series and that was kind of the height of the Big Red Machine. But he interpreted that to mean heart, so the metaphor in the song is actually a beating heart. He came the next year to Bryce’s festival in Cincinnati and just played with us and a bunch of other musicians, almost a spontaneous set, but it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been a part of or seen. He invited a lot of the same musicians out to Eaux Claires and they became a part of the record. We spent a lot of time together and we have a lot of friends in common and started this festival. Maybe Midwestern roots or something meant that we had a lot in common.
I believe that all the ones that are proper National tracks are actually traditional songs that The Grateful Dead arranged and made their own but were actually not Grateful Dead originals. Was that a coincidence or did you purposefully try to choose some songs that weren’t written by Garcia, Hunter, Weir, Lesh and company?
Aaron: I think in every case singers try to figure out what works for them. We knew we wanted to do “Morning Dew.” Garcia is such a brilliant folklorist. That was always one of my favorite parts of him as a musician and The Grateful Dead, the way that they played a lot of the stuff. You know like “Jack-A-Roe,” “Peggy-O,” the “Shady Grove” stuff that Garcia did and all the different aspects to him as a musician. Part of this was about trying to shine a light on what was important to us about The Grateful Dead. Part of that is this exposure to folk songs and other traditional songs.
As you’ve been writing new music for this project for The National, have you found that The Dead’s music has influenced you in new ways as a songwriter? Or has it always been so much a part of your ethos that it’s hard to tell if this project in particular has changed the ways you approach writing for The National?
Aaron: I would definitely say there is some influence in The National, but not so much in terms of being able to pick out. There are tropes and things that are interesting to see, habits that reappear, that kind of thing, but I don’t think they really influence us in the way that we would actually take things and repurpose them in The National. I do think the experimentation and the ambition they had in terms of pushing themselves with no rules, I think it gets the wheels turning in your mind, to forget a little bit about being concise for a second. At this point, I don’t think The National needs to write anything like we’ve already written.
At the same time that it’s a survey of all the style that The Dead touched, in a lot of ways it’s also a survey of the alternative movement moving from, some of these out-there ‘60s composers all the way through a lot of your peers and then some younger bands who are kind of just now making their mark.
Bryce: Well the other thing I would say about that is that one side of the music on this record is at a time when so much other music was immediately being heavily commercialized and the labels were starting to have so much power and marketing. The Dead did have this kind of independent streak where they were just doing things how they wanted to do it, and very often, in kind of non-commercial ways. Obviously, they did incredibly well, but they also, musically, were so committed to their own vision. But I think that spirit, which is in a way kind of punk spirit, is part of what makes them so important and influential to artists in our generation and younger. A certain sticking to your guns and seeing your creative vision through.
I think the way that The Dead have toured and the way that they presented their music is really the enduring legacy, even more than the improvisation.
Aaron: It’s more apparent than ever that The Dead kind of invented the touring rock band and that live legendary performance. The file sharing, the bootlegs, all that stuff is incredibly relevant to where we are today.
Was there a time in the last few years when you kind of felt yourself drift away from the music or were there other sounds that were more interesting to you as you advanced as a guitarist and started writing your own music?
Aaron: We formed The National in 1999, and I think when it really got serious a couple years into it, The Grateful Dead was probably not one of the big influences on the actual music we were writing. The music we were writing was a project of the chemistry between the people in the band, what Matt was interested in, Bryan, Scott, Bryce, and the way we were playing at that time. That had much to do with The Smiths and The Pixies and Tom Waits as it did with kind of the earliest music we took really seriously, which was The Grateful Dead and playing jazz, studying classical music. I think The Dead has retained the passion and the real love for that music that I, Bryce, Scott and Bryan have. I’d say probably 90% of the time the music that we listen to backstage is The Grateful Dead. There’s so much there, listening to live recordings it was always fascinating.
Especially, because that was some of the first music that both you as musicians learned, but also that brought some of you guys together as you mentioned.
Aaron: For sure, I could say the same thing about Neil Young or Dylan, a lot of the music we all listen to, because it was a band, it had a chemistry and a style between them when they’re actually playing.
For the track that’s listed as “Garcia Counterpoint,” which goes into “Terrapin Station Suite,” clocking in at over 60 minutes with some great orchestration, can you talk, one, about the recording of that and some of the compositional work that you did for the intro, and two, about how that connects to the original version of “Terrapin Suite?”
Brian: “Terrapin” was actually recorded in a slightly different, sort of merging of two bands where it was really The National with Grizzly Bear, specifically Daniel Rossen and Chris Bear. Similarly to us, they share this real love of the Dead’s music and have a deep knowledge of it. Part of the ambition of the project, in terms of really getting deeper into it, was we felt like doing “Terrapin” in the classic kind of way for the Dead. The orchestral suite that they composed was the most ambitious in terms of composition, but I don’t think they ever played it all the way through, maybe a couple times. What we did, essentially, is learn the band sections and then we transcribed the original takes and all the orchestration. And then I took that and I recomposed it, so you’ll hear little echoes of it.
“Garcia Counterpoint,” which essentially I composed using live fragments from Jerry. So I’m playing notes that he played live, and then was using them in different ways and layering them as texture.
What’s the track that’s called “Nightfall Of Diamonds?” Can you talk about that track and some of the people involved in that?
Bryce: “Nightfall Of Diamonds,” that’s Cass McCombs and the house band. Essentially, it’s a companion piece to the “Dark Star” song.
*It reminds me almost of the “Circles Around The Sun,” which was Neil Casal’s separate music he did for the Fare Thee Well Dead shows, and it reminded me a little bit of it where you reference all of these classic Dead themes while making new music and music that continues in that catalogue and that canon. *
Bryce: There had been a whole restlessness and creative expansiveness where it was always shifting and we thought it was very interesting that the music was continuing to evolve and is still evolving. We wanted to work in that sense, and in that way, there was a big satirical message at the centerpiece of the record. We’re really happy with how it turned out and the way it sounds.
What was the mindset in recording, or including two tracks that were live recordings, and also having Bob Weir appear on both of those?
Bryce: There are two live recordings with very little overdubs. There are maybe a few touches, but we did want to embrace that spirit of the Dead, obviously the greatest live band ever. They also kind of paved the way for all of our peers, touring bands and the idea of the touring band. It’s really the Dead who created that, so we wanted to embrace that energy and obviously it was a mission to have that virtuosity to do the kind of shows that they did. When we did the original record we weren’t sure about including, for instance, “I Know Your Rider.” What we did with Bob was a real highlight of our career. But then, once the record was finished, it felt like, “Oh, this really does fit as a punctuation to the whole thing.” And I think it’s an area of, for instance, in our music, it’s something that we are constantly trying to get closer to. That’s part of the idea that lot of the recordings that fans of the Dead really love are live.
In terms of people who are on the album who maybe weren’t as familiar with The Dead or weren’t Deadheads, was there anyone in particular you could point to that you guys were friends with, that became part of the project because they just wanted to be involved even if they didn’t know the Dead’s music specifically, but maybe walked away with a different appreciation for it?
Bryce: I think I mentioned Terry Riley, he had never heard The Dead and he was very involved in the psychedelic blues, very influenced by some of those same things, I would say – jazz and Indian music, and he was a very monumental, important American musician. Essential to that movement is The Dead’s music. His son, Gyan Riley, is a real guitar virtuoso, so I would say that was a pretty interesting conversation. As far as other artists, it was the opposite for the most part. We thought we were asking surprising, long-shot people who might not necessarily know The Dead, but actually they were huge Deadheads, like Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tango or Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth. Typically, the myth is that the punks hated the hippies or something like that, but actually, it was very much untrue.
Can you talk a little bit about the decision to include Béla Fleck on the album and your relationship with his music and how you feel that he guests in the piece?
Bryce: We grew up listening to him and going to hear him play in various solo or various things. I think Béla would be one of the great American bluegrass virtuosos and his playing was really inspiring. I guess in my own way playing classical music, I was interested in that kind of virtuosity. We did get to hang out with Béla Fleck a few years ago and in Nashville we came to see him perform there at the Grand Old Opry, and we came out another time when Béla Fleck was actually running a banjo concerto and we talked about orchestration and writing for orchestra and I think we kind of hit it off at that point. It was a natural fit.
In terms of your own work, do you see any parallels between what you learn from The Dead and working on this project and, say, something like a ballet performance or some of the more recent music you’ve done? Can you talk specifically about how it influenced you as a composer?
Bryce: There are so many elements. When we were kids, we would listen to The Dead and listen to Jerry play guitar, and part of it was the mystery in the notes and trying to understand how he was weaving these yarns and telling the story with an instrument. In a way, the way Jerry played guitar has a lot more in common with a great violinist or something, just in terms of tone and texture and sound and color. What he did through improvisation was in a way like Coltrane or something. I think it’s just a level as a guitarist where you have this sixth sense of something influencing where he was taking the notes, and that’s what that song on the record is. So it’s a layering of the textures. That’s directly also inspired by Steve Rice, an American composer who is mentor of mine. “Garcia Counterpoint” is a kind of a direct tribute to both that piece of music and Jerry’s live guitar playing.
Could you talk about the experience of one of your pieces being presented before one of Trey Anastasio’s classical pieces out at The Hollywood Bowl?
Bryce: I was surprised. Trey is incredibly nice and has obviously played with us a couple of times with The National, and our drummer, Brian, played on his solo record and he’s just an incredible musician and guitarist. He’s very supportive of the more underground kind of classical world, and he has an interest in that. I think Trey was so deeply involved on the Fare Thee Well tour that we didn’t end up getting him on the record, but obviously his spirit is there.
I was wondering about Richard Reed Perry, of Arcade Fire, his knowledge of The Dead going into this project, and if he was someone who was one of those obvious picks for it or if he was someone who, through your friendship, got involved?
Bryce: Richard, he was an unbelievably knowledgeable musician. It’s incredible, and interestingly enough, his father was an important English folk musician, so he grew up really independent in the traditional theme of these English, kind of sea-shanty songs that shares in a way that kind of background with The Dead of songs that are on the record, like “Jack A Roe” or “Peggy O.” He also such a huge fan of the band. Richard shares some of my interest in composition and whatnot. He’s played on every National record since Boxer, and he’s just one of our closest friends, and kind of involved in everything we do.
It must’ve been amazing to have Garth Hudson, who has kind of a connection to the original Dead period and also a connection to upstate New York, where I know you and your brother spend a lot of time.
Bryce: Yes, there was a through line in a way. I think having Garth and also connecting the band and The Dead is just an interesting connection for sure.
