Matt Berninger: “All that’s left when you’re gone are your ideas”

Let’s start at the end for this one. As we’re wrapping up our interview with Matt Berninger and saying our goodbyes to depart this basement bunker in his favourite fancy West London hotel, The National frontman signs and hands over the piece of paper he’s been scribbling on throughout our chat. A maid would have thrown away this doodle-covered piece of hotel stationery, but its sketches, patterns, numbers and faces actually work as a map for us to retrace our conversation. Berninger, himself a former graphic designer, thinks in a very visual way.

READ MORE: The National live at Glastonbury 2024: every song is played like it could be the last

He tells us of his new life where every day he wakes up and makes stuff. Whether spending six years building a house he never got to live in or songwriting, working on scripts, designing chairs and sculptures, gardening, painting, a project we don’t quite understand about “rearranging Ikea furniture into a clown”, it’s all part of the same living act of creation. Rather than take pen to paper, a lot of the lyrics for his second solo album ‘Get Sunk’ were written on baseballs. Why, you may ask?

“For me, writing on the baseballs is making me a better writer just by physically slowing the writing process down,” he tells us. “My brain sits on a word just a hair longer when I have to write it on a baseball. My brain considers the word and goes, ‘No, this is a better word. Don’t go left, go backwards’. When you’re writing on a baseball, you have a minute to avoid the cliché.

Matt Berninger, 2025. Photo credit: Chantal Anderson

“It’s like writing a novel with one finger. Maybe that’s the way Hemingway wrote and why his sentences are so good? Because he just fucking thought about every word.”

It all adds up to the very visceral and painted world of ‘Get Sunk’ –  one that goes back to Berninger’s midwestern childhood of Stand By Me adventures and misdeeds while running down train tracks. “I want these characters to be having sex, getting high, falling in love, getting crushed, dying and being reborn,” he tells us of this album that’s “full of ghosts, death, ash and water, birth, kids and frogs”.

He continues: “It’s a good Saturday record. There are songs about bike rides and songs about swimming, popsicles, fruit drinks, drugs and alcohol. It’s definitely a fun, druggy summer in the ‘80s.”

Fresh from launching the album at a beautiful show at the capital’s fittingly heavenly Union Chapel (check out exclusive footage of that below), Berninger sits down with NME to tell us about leaving LA to beat writer’s block and depression, following up solo debut ‘Serpentine Prison’, and what he wants to leave behind when he’s gone.

NME: Hello Matt. You’ve spoken a lot about writer’s block, but now we’re here with a new solo album quickly off the back of two back-to-back National albums. How did ‘Get Sunk’ start out?

Matt Berninger: “The seeds of four of the songs started five years ago: ‘Inland Ocean’, ‘Junk’, ‘Little By Little’, and ‘Times Of Difficulty’. Then, counting making ‘First Two Pages Of Frankenstein’ and ‘Laugh Track’ with The National – which feel like one big long thing to me – and touring for two and a half years, everything else went into the freezer.

“As The National were first touring and I was coming out of that long writer’s block, I really started going back and writing a bunch of new stuff. I moved to Connecticut a year and a half ago. While The National were on the road for the last four years, I was just going over to Sean’s [O’Brien, producer and long-time collaborator] and saying, ‘Let’s write a song’. We’d talk and listen to music for an hour [to] everything: Silver Jews, Tom Petty, Beastie Boys, Billie Eilish, whatever we were liking – then we’d make a song. That was really refreshing.”

What was different when you came back to this material?

“So much happened with me since those seeds were planted five years ago to now when I’m really watering that whole garden of stuff. There was a lot of reflection. I wrote the phrase ‘Get Sunk’ and most of ‘Times Of Difficulty’ in 2020 before I went through my depression – when I realised that I knew it was coming.

“I was calling the batch ‘Get Sunk’ before the pandemic. I didn’t at the time realise how sunk and difficult it was going to get for me, personally. This record was called ‘It’s Saturday’ for the last two years of putting it together. I almost didn’t want to listen to the songs or anything I’d done before that depression because they were foreshadowing it. The lyrics were prescient. But then again, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m always writing about this shit anyway. I didn’t send myself into the hole in writing this stuff’.”

Last time we spoke, you used that Nick Cave quote about ‘needing to keep the flame alive’ with writing. It sounds like you’ve been pouring gasoline on it. 

“Yes. It’s been four years since the dark months where it felt like there was no flame and I didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t want to listen to music anymore, much less fucking make any. That was scary. Then it came back. I’ve been writing a lot these past four years. The National have generated a huge batch of possible new things. There isn’t any rush for that, but I’ve been in a real juicy and creative couple of years. I’m glad I had that break and that ‘Get Sunk’ took five years because I was able to go back and change so much and make it better.”

Why did you leave LA for Connecticut? 

“I just burned out on it. In a funny way, Carin [Besser, wife and collaborator] and I like to replant ourselves in a whole different soil every decade. It’s real healthy to readjust to the whole environment.”

Now you can just wake up and let inspiration take control?

“I do! Or I go for a long bike ride, but that’s me making stuff too. Or lying on the couch while writing on a baseball, or watching TV. I’ll pause a movie 10 times and write something down. I’ve kind of dissolved all the barriers between working and just being, or making art, songs, sculptures or designing. Taking a walk, to me, is the same thing as going to the studio because I’ll stop and text myself 20 things.”

Matt Berninger, 2025. Photo credit: Chantal Anderson

You must have a lot of work to process?

“I have boxes of notebooks and you open every page and they look kinda like the baseballs – these goofy little planets of scribbles, different colours, lyrics all over the place. I’ve got Kurt Cobain’s notebooks and he was drawing jets and demons and people barfing and cigarette packets, then these incredible lyrics that are going to the centre of his soul – next to a joke or a dick n’ balls.”

How many classic songs do you think were written next to a cock and balls?

“My notebooks are filled with them! But then a notebook just sits on a shelf or in a plastic bin in storage, but the baseballs are all over the house. When I need some lyrics, I’m like, ‘I know there’s something good on that ball’.”

If ‘Get Sunk’ has a message, what would it be? 

“It’s just saying, ‘Everything’s going to be OK, fuck it all, you’ve only got a short time to live on this little tiny speck of dust in all the emptiness and all that will be left is your ideas. Your face will be gone, your bones will be gone, your Jeep will be gone, your Grammy will be gone, everything will be gone’.

“All that will be left are the ideas that you left – and that can be the kindness with which you raised your kids, the kind words you said to a total stranger, that minute you decided not to give someone the finger, that fight you decided not to have. Were you kind? Were you brave? I’m a bad memory for a lot of people, of course I will be. I hope I’m mostly a good memory.”

‘Get Sunk’ is out now with Matt Berninger touring throughout the summer. Visit here for tickets and more information. 

The post Matt Berninger: “All that’s left when you’re gone are your ideas” appeared first on NME.