Though Bryce and Aaron Dessner grew up in Ohio, over the past decade the twin brothers have become synonymous with Brooklyn, NY’s high-art indie rock scene. As the guitarists in the increasingly popular band The National, the brothers have played some of the country’s most prestigious rooms, including the revitalized Brooklyn Academy of Music and Radio City Music Hall. While working on the new National album in Brooklyn, the Dessners used their downtime to give back to their community by putting together a series of collaboration-heavy performances. Earlier this year the brothers hosted the Dark Was the Night event at Radio City Music Hall and this week the Dessners premiere a new song-cycle as part of B.A.M.’s Next Wave series. A collaboration with visual artist Matthew Ritchie, the multi-media piece is part song, part film and part visual art. It also somehow manages to tie in such divergent themes as Mayan mythology, baseball and the birth of mankind. Here Bryce Dessner explains how the project came about.
The Long Count isn’t exactly a play or a traditional concert. How would you describe the work?
You can kind of whittle it down to essentially a music and film collaboration. There’s a 70-minute composed piece of music with a stage set and all this stuff onstage, and we have a 12-person ensemble. We also have four singers: Kim and Kelley Deal, Matt Beringer from our band The National and Shara Worden who sings with My Brightest Diamond. So it is a big collaborative project. The artist Matthew Ritchie has created some visual elements. There’s this massive mirror floor in the shape of a baseball diamond that’s really cool, and then there’s some sculptural element on stage that we actually sit in. But the main visual element is this 70-minute film that he made in accompaniment to the songs. Mostly what people will be experiencing is music and film, so there is really no theater or opera. It is going to be more of a multi-media song cycle, I guess.
What inspired you to start work on the song cycle?
Well, the subject matter really came about after B.A.M. asked me to work on something for their Next Wave Festival. They host this festival every fall where they commission a new work and there is really nothing like it. When I met with them I was obviously best known for playing in a rock band and not the type of rock band that’s a “sit down” group either. We are always a little wary playing with the band in a really formal atmosphere, but at the same time I grew up playing classical music, so I also live in that world. When they asked me to do something I wanted to figure out a way to create something unique because you can’t sit 3,000 people down for 70 minutes and just make them listen to us play an instrumental piece in this huge opera house. I guess the challenge was figuring out a way to tell some kind of a story, which was something they were specific about when they asked us to create this piece. Primarily the stuff I’ve done outside of the band has been instrumental, so it was definitely a challenge.
When did your brother get involved with the project?
I always wanted to make it a collaboration with my brother. He primarily just plays with The National, and he has less of a background doing all the classical stuff. The National is working on a record, and we did the Dark Was the Night show at Radio City Music Hall last spring and we both thought, “Do we really need to be doing this right now?” It was a huge undertaking to pull off something like this, in a way, much, much bigger than making an album. If you’re making a 40-minute rock record there is a format for the project. But, with The Long Count, it was so wide open and undefined. You have to be as detailed as making an album but it is just that much bigger in terms of the size. So the narrative stuff came up really as a vehicle for the collaboration in terms of like allowing my brother and I and the artists to find the story we were gonna focus on.
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.
When did you first perform at B.A.M.?
The first time we played at B.A.M. was with the National. We played a couple of nights in the Opera House about two years ago after Boxer came out. I’ve played there a few times since with my other band Clogs and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. It is a really, really great, rare institution. Basically people just invite you in and say, “Hey, I want to support you creatively and pay for it.” It is kind of awesome.
It seems like in recent years they’ve been reaching out to the younger Brooklyn community.
Yeah, I think they have been successful with the Next Wave series and have commissioned so many important awesome things from these legendary people like Steve Reich. There are so many exciting things happening in New York and there is so much good live music that it is great that they are checking out all these new composers.
I heard that Justin Vernon from Bon Iver’s contribution to the Dark Was The Night project was originally supposed to be used for The Long Count. Is that true?
That was right when we first agreed to do this. My brother wrote that song , which was basically a demo at that point. It was this weird, repetitive rhythm and then a set of chords, and it has a constantly changing meter. So it is a really strange piece of music, and we had been talking to Justin about contributing something to the Dark Was the Night project. At the same time we were talking about the Mayan story. I think Aaron wrote that piece of music sort of as an exploration. It was sort of like, “Ok, what’s this music going to sound like? We’re going to do something that’s kind of like a pop song but much weirder,” so he wrote that new piece of music as an example. I think he essentially, on a whim, sent it to Justin. Justin like sent it back two weeks later having written this incredible song. It actually was a real affirming moment for us because it made us say, “We can do this and this is the kind of song that would work really well at B.A.M. for this kind of show.” The song felt like this big beating heart, so Justin called it “The Big Red Machine,” not knowing that we decided to call our performance piece The Big Red Machine after the Reds [laughter]. Ultimately, we weren’t allowed to use the name Big Red Machine for the show, and I think The Long Count is actually a great name. And then we decided to use Justin’s song for Dark Was the Night and moved onto other ideas for B.A.M. But that song was always in our minds and is part of the whole project.
It is interesting that you say it was part of this minimalistic project because when Justin sat in with the National at the Dark Was the Night show he played this long guitar solo. It was actually one of the National’s most classic rock moments.
Yeah, he’s really good at that. He did a big, kind of almost Crazy Horse-style guitar solo, and it was really fun. Stylistically I wouldn’t say that our new National album is heading in that direction, but there are a couple things that have more classic sounding qualities to them.
Speaking of the National, can you talk about your collaborations with Matt Berninger for this project? Was it a very different process than writing a song for the National?
He was, I think, a little suspect of the project at first. It is like what I said earlier about this kind of high art. Matt doesn’t spend the time thinking about doing that sort of thing. So we had to convince him, and I think part of convincing him was involving Kim and Kelley. He’s a big fan of Kim and Kelley Deal—that was really the music we grew up listening to and love and I think Matt has ended up being really excited about the show. He sings one song, and it is a substantial song called “Test.” Essentially my brother and I sat for days and channeled Matt. Usually Matt writes his own lyrics and his own melodies. We give him what we call sketches and then he spends months with them and reworks them. In this case it was more like I gave him a song with lyrics and with the melodies, and he changed the words and a few of the melodies. But it is still close to what we originally gave to him. It was actually kind of interesting to do it that way. The music had enough parts that I thought it was important to really plot out the melody. We’re pretty excited about it as far as it’s a good, cool moment in the show.
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The Long Count will run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from Oct 28—31. Please click here for more on the National’s upcoming studio project.
