The National tell us about new material and the magic of the mystery of their setlist | Glastonbury 2024
Matt Berninger and Scott Devendorf of The National spoke to NME backstage at Glastonbury 2024 before they smashed their closing Other Stage headline slot to tell us about living in the universe of sister albums 'The First Two Pages Of Frankenstein' and 'Laugh Track', being in "the gardening phase" of writing new material, and the magic of not knowing what's on the setlist.
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00:00You guys have really spoiled us these last couple of years with Laugh Track and Frankenstein.
00:10What's it been like living in the universe of those records?
00:12How's it affected the shows?
00:13I think it's been great.
00:14I mean, it's really, there's a lot of music, so it means a lot of new music for us to play.
00:18Not everything, but a lot of it.
00:19And we've really tried to mix up the setlist a lot and try and be more dynamic in that
00:23way just because it's interesting for everyone.
00:26I mean, our records, our songs always get better and better the more we play them live
00:31and that's happening to a lot of the songs on these last two records.
00:36But then we're also going way back and doing really old songs that we haven't done in years
00:41and those are even getting better than they ever were before.
00:45There's versions of Geese of Beverly Road and Runaway that we've been doing now that
00:50we're like, why did we take that out?
00:53So we're actually enjoying all of the songs we've written over the past 25 years a lot.
00:59The new ones and the old ones.
01:01So yeah, that's why I don't like to know what's going to be on the setlist because if I know
01:06that I won't, not knowing, every time it's like a new flavor gumball and I get to take
01:13that little red pill or whatever and go to that song in a new way every time.
01:17If I knew what all the songs were going to be, I think I wouldn't be able to let go as
01:20much and just enjoy it.
01:22And I think that's why I'm enjoying it so much.
01:25Is there anything else in the left track Frankenstein Universe to come, working on another record?
01:32We kind of purged, once we started writing again, I wrote to almost everything that was
01:39in the folders and made a song out of everything.
01:42And now the folders are filling up and I've been writing a lot but I think we're just
01:49going to take it nice and slow.
01:53The garden is full of seeds but we're just, you know, we don't know when it's going to
02:00start to bloom or anything like that but we're in a very creative, we're in a gardening phase.