Matt Berninger webchat: your questions answered on Morrissey, Taylor Swift and infinite creativity

These questions were great! So happy to answer whatever. Hope you like the record. I'm super into it! I've been playing it on repeat. When you ask what records I've been listening to non-stop, I took a long break from listening to Serpentine Prison because I was doing so much talking about it, but just in the past week I've got back into it. So I hope it connects. And thank you.

It was really fun and exciting to hear Cardigan, for example. I had that sketch from Aaron and I was in the middle of writing all these songs for Cyrano de Bergerac, and at the same time, I Am Easy to Find, we had written so much stuff there. There was a lot of music that Aaron was making that I wasn't doing anything with yet, and he asked if he could use some of those sketches for something else, and I was kind of relieved because I had run out of steam on writing. So when I heard Cardigan I recognised the sketch immediately, but what Taylor did with that, I could never do it. It made me really hear how good she is, and I've been a big fan of hers for a long time, but hearing how differently she approaches things and what she did melodically was so fascinating. I'd heard a lot of this music and I never would have written that. What she did with what Aaron as doing was very different than what I would have done. I think it's the same when Aaron hears me with Booker, like, wow, there's so many potential new ways of doing this. When Sufjan Stevens came into the mix of the National, I remember it was like, whoa! He opened up a whole new branch, a whole new wing of the house, of where we could go with the band. He told us, you could go this way and we didn't know we could do something like that. All along the way, I think the smartest thing the National has done, the reason it's still a healthy, creative band, is because we've gone out and learned and brought so many people back to it. And gone off and had all these new experiences. Aaron's work with Justin (Vernon) and Bryce's work with Innaritu, and our work bringing Mike Mills in, Gail Ann Dorsey - all those things have always brought more colours to our palette, new tools we bring back to the barn. So yeah, it was really exciting and enlightening and fun to see how much we can all grow and discover.

I'm really glad somebody asked me. I brought up Morrissey and the Smiths so many times to journalists over the past few years because I'm interested to talk about that, and so often it never makes it into the interview because it's just such tricky territory, right? Because Morrissey was one of the voices, writers, performers that made me - maybe more than almost any, at this phase in my life when I was 15, 16, 17. When you just feel like a misfit. But I was a misfit with a lot of confidence. I had a lot of chips on my shoulders, small chips. And then to hear this other person from a place that I'd never heard of, didn't know anything about Manchester, didn't know anything about England, really, and then here was this band and this singer singing about all these emotional, hugely dramatic grievances - the Boy With the Thorn in His Side, Please Please Please let me get what I want, these raw pleas to the universe to be understood. And so funny. Morrissey, the thing that's hardest to square now, is how a person with such empathy for himself and for the misfits and those around him, writing so beautifully about that, now seeming to have very little empathy for other perspectives. It's a hard thing. I listen to the Smiths a lot still, and I listen to Morrissey a lot, and then I do pay attention to the things that he says and it's heartbreaking. I feel like fear and the anxiety of the world has maybe kinda overtaken him a little bit, and I guess it makes me try to keep my mind open and keep listening to everyone. At some point, the older you get, you can close your brain off. I feel like Morrissey became very frustrated because he wanted the world to be a very specific way. When festivals have to change their rules because he's there, I understand that when he's making sure the entire festival is vegan because he believes in that. But I think at a certain point you can't control everything, you get bitter and angry and that's happened to a lot of people. The world is chaotic and out of control and people retreat to a very small corner when they feel they cannot control the world, and I feel he's retreated to a very small corner that doesn't have the empathy that he used to have. I think about it a lot. I wish I had a better answer. But the Smiths still provides me a lot of comfort and inspiration and empathy. I still listen to the Boy With the Thorn in His Side and feel less alone in the world. The Smiths really helped me out of some emotional, dark tangles and they still do. Morrissey's body of work, so much of it provides me really healthy, positive answers, still. I won't give up that. I won't put those records in a box and bury 'em. I want my daughter to listen to the Smiths. I don't want her to pay attention to what Morrissey says now. She listens to them now in fact, she loves them. Frankly Mr Shankly - how can you not love that song? Girlfriend in a Coma, it's great.

That's a funny one to pick! I was like, can I get away with this?! That song, I was singing about castrati and that role in the Catholic church and how they literally did castrate boys for them to be able to sing better to god. That was a real thing! It's sort of harrowing. "Anonymous castrati" is such a tongue-twister. The silliness of the sound of a word in a song - the words can mean something very not silly. Words for me are these amazing Legos and you put them next to each other in different ways and sparks incredibly fresh ideas. Two different words glued together can create something brand new. There was a long time where I was like, god, everything's been written, how do you write new songs? Every combination of a love song has been written. There was a moment, you add two words together, add a third word and it's exponentially different, then a fourth word - it's like lottery numbers. You can say anything brand new and fresh forever. We'll never run out of ways to express ourselves. Sometimes you have to invent new words to do it. It's infinite, it's so infinite. You flip around the order of something or take one verse from one song and stick it into a different song and you've got a whole new song that's even better than those two other songs and you don't know why. It's like paint, it's infinite, the shades and the way you can put it together. The more you dive into your craft of what you do, you realise you never exhaust the possibilities, you just discover more paint, more tools, more endless opportunities to tell the truth, and new ways to tell the truth. That's been exciting. I think I've been writing more and more and faster because I realise there's just so much I can do now. By taking all the layers apart, you realise you can make anything out of those words. Switch one little thing and it turns a song totally on its head or upside down and the meaning gets thrown in a whole new direction by just adding one little thing sometimes. That's so liberating when you realise you'll never run out of ways to do this. The name Rylan, for example, I made it up - and it turns out people have been named that, but I just made up that name. The same with Vanderlyle. And now I have neighbours that live near me, there's a baby a block away named Rylan, some National fan! I see the baby every week and the parents are big National fans, it's really fun, that stuff's incredible. You can invent places, environments - Lemonworld is an entirely invented place, it's a fantasy. I often think of Lemonworld - I recently posted the Garden of Earthly Delights, which is one of my favourite paintings, it's funny and debaucherous, a garden of hedonism and carnal desires, and I've alway thought of Lemonworld as a funny, goofier version of that garden - people sticking flowers in each other's butts. When you invent a place, a garden, a room, a hallway and you put yourself or a character on that roof, next to that creek, on the edge of that town, suddenly you have half the story there in the environment. I start by imagining myself some place that I'd like to be. In a house out in the desert. In a car in Rome. And sometimes these are places I've been and moments I've had, and sometimes they're places I imagine being. You put someone else in that spot, or you're alone, and it starts to happen. A scene and an idea starts to come together. Conversations and details of that hallway or rooftop start to trickle in. You just get started. Put your head and soul in a place and see what happens. That's really exciting. I let the songs sorta write themselves. And I don't sit down and say, time to write a song. I wait til my brain is imagining, I'm daydreaming - let's start getting these fragments down. Sometimes when you're in that songwriting mode, it's very much like daydreaming. I guess that's the closest way I can describe when I'm writing - you're in this half-away, daydreamy zone. Part fantasy, part confessional, it's drama. You put yourself in a dramatic, intense, emotional corner and try to write your way out of that corner. You're always in these emotional corners! And sometimes you don't realise it til the day is over or you wake up the next day. So you start to just play-act the situation that you're in and see if you can get out of it.

The process actually! The process was new, meaning it kinda came together fast. All the people I brought in were friends from the past 25 years, from my first band, all my bands, from my favourite bands like the Walkmen, and my favourite musicians like Gail Ann Dorsey and Andrew Bird. I was able to bring in people I've only met in the last year or so like Harrison Whitford, and members of my first band, Nancy. Everyone got to come together in Venice. We recorded in a studio that's a bike ride from my house. Bringing everyone into the studio with Booker T Jones was such a dream come true. To have Scott and Mike and I working on songs with Booker T Jones 25 years after we started Nancy in college was just - we were all pinching ourselves the whole time. That part of it was really amazing, but then the recording process in the studio was 14 days, we were doing two songs a day including overdubs and we were going so fast. It was sort of chaos but just a really pleasant, warm, fun, goofy chaos. Booker provided this sort of divining rod for the emotional water we were looking for in the songs, and also just a focus. I needed everybody who was coming out to really zero in on someone other than me, meaning that in the studio is, I'm a nervous wreck, in and out of emotional territory, the stress of pulling it all together sometimes is - I'm not the best at doing that. I knew I needed someone else for everyone to focus on, someone else to be the planet with the most gravity, and Booker had the most gravity. We all revolved around him in the studio and that was, I think, what was made it work so well. Cos I had all these songs from different people and all of them have a very different DNA, it's like kids from different partners, marriages, all these orphans. And so somehow I had to have all these songs, including these covers. I wanted them to feel of the same family and Booker and Sean O'Brien, the engineer, made that happen. Those two guys were the sun we all revolved around, and that was good, that allowed me to just be a weird, orbiting singer and performer around that instead of trying being the centre. I was more of a support role in a lot of ways while we were recording. Booker had to be the centre to get it done on time. I put it all on my credit card, we only had these two and a half weeks or so, I was flying everybody in. Everybody showed up early, stayed late, focused, had a blast. And that was what was unique, the speed and focus.