Zen Musings

oneweekoneband:

I don’t know when I first encountered The National, but it must have been sometime during my sophomore year of high school, that is, sometime in late 2005, maybe six months after the release of Alligator. It must have been then, because I don’t really remember the band as part of the “soundtrack my life,” or whatever dumb metaphor I was using to justify my attachment to my iPod and trademark over-ear headphones, until after I had gotten over the I-would-strike-the-sun-if-it-insulted-me arrogance of being a freshman (and this applies to being a college freshman as well, but we’ll get to that later). 

Whenever they showed up though, I do remember which track was my first time. It was “Mr. November.” For a long time, years, there were two listings for it on my computer, and one of them I kept giving to people accidentally and they kept not being able to open it because I had bought it from iTunes; this is how I know that it was my first. Listening to it now, that “Mr. November” was the track that drew my into The National makes a great deal of sense; I think I must have liked Matt Berninger’s baritone sneer (I’m the new blue blood/I’m the great white hope/I won’t fuck us over/I’m Mr. November), but from there it wasn’t that difficult to become invested in the crescendoes, the tight rhythm, and the fact that the sneer was occasionally masked by a sort of energetic wistfulness (I wish that I believed in fate/I wish I didn’t sleep so late/I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders) that reveals that what I had thought as caustic was actually an earnest sort of plea, free from the irony that I thought was synonymous with “cool.”  

Later, the song would take on all kinds of anthemic proportions, for me and for everybody else who was paying attention. Then, though, late in 2005, it was just a song that I heard somewhere, and then listened to dozens of times, and then forced me to go out and find the rest of the album that it belonged to. 

Seven years later, here we are.