There is an art to a sad song — to writing something so devastatingly precise that it stops feeling like wallowing and starts feeling like company. For nearly three decades, Matt Berninger has been making it look easy. As the unmistakable voice behind The National, Berninger inimitably chronicles love, loss and the slow excavations of the self (with a poet's ear for the right strange detail). Now, ahead of his first solo Australian tour — a run of intimate shows that includes a rare evening at Vivid LIVE at the Sydney Opera House — we caught up with him to talk about his second solo record, Get Sunk. CP: This will be your first time touring Australia as a solo artist. What's different about playing solo versus playing with The National? MB: A lot of these shows are going to be a much more intimate situation. I love the National shows and I can't wait to get back to that, to do those songs and be with that gang. But doing these solo shows, I connect with the audience in a whole different way. I have more room — because I don't tell a lot of stories, it's not like An Evening with Matt Berninger (too much) — but I can engage. I can look people in the eye. When people say something, I can hear what they say. CP: You write all of the lyrics for The National. Is it different sitting down to write under just your own name? Do you feel more exposed? MB: No, in fact I don't. First of all, I never write songs alone, because I suck at piano and guitar, so I'm always collaborating. I'll be working on solo songs, National songs, EL VY songs all at the same time. I have a lot of whiteboards, but even the whiteboards sometimes will have songs from all the different bands on the same whiteboard. I don't put any barriers between those projects, mentally. What I'm writing about is always coming from — what's bubbling? What just bubbles up? I never sit down and go, okay, I'm gonna write a song about a relationship or a certain thing. I'm always just writing — writing down thoughts, phrases, strange word combinations, bits of vernacular I overhear. It's not a journal, it's just collections of — I mean, poetry. I'm trying to write poetry. That's what I try at the beginning. Then you start listening to songs, and you start to collage these things together, flesh them out, see if — is this a song about a person, a feeling, a moment? I don't know until it really gets close to being finished. You work on a thing until it starts to float. There's no science to it. It's just a lot of chaos, and chemistry, mixing stuff together until it starts to bubble and float. CP: With all of those projects intermingling, how did you know what was going to belong on 'Get Sunk'? Was there an overarching feeling for the record? MB: There usually is — there ends up being a blurry arc or arrangement of themes in each record, but I can't tell exactly what it's going to be until pretty much almost finished. With Get Sunk, there were a few songs I'd started a long time ago, before I went through a period where I got really depressed and didn't write for about a year. So some of those started before that, and they changed dramatically after. A lot of Get Sunk was about the perspective of having been in that sunken place. The last two National records were kind of climbing out of it — and this was written from a perspective very much on the other side. It never happened to me quite that bad before, that kind of long phase, eight months of pretty, pretty low, to a point where I couldn't really get out of bed in the worst part of it. So Get Sunk was my way to look at it all and package it in a way that felt like — what did I learn from that? Let's go forward, not denying it. It feels like a healing or on-the-other-side kind of a record, whereas the National ones — I was literally still struggling with it when we put those out. I was still deep in that depression. The first few shows for that record I was barely able to do. Get Sunk was me finally writing songs where I was breathing. My head was above the water again. Sometimes it's good to be underwater — sometimes you write really good songs underwater. But this one was different. It feels like a healthier mental excavation of all that. CP: I imagine it was confronting to look back at lyrics you'd written in that frame of mind — almost like seeing a version of yourself you didn't recognise. Is there something you took away from that experience? MB: What I learned about myself is that making stuff out of nothing makes me sleep better at night. And it doesn't even have to be good. I just have to make a little something. If I write one or two lines that I don't hate in a day, I feel that's a good day. So now I realise that just making ugly songs or bad songs or songs that just aren't going to go anywhere is still a really, really fruitful and healthy thing that I have to do. But I also learned not to put any pressure on myself, because I was so angry at myself for not being able to do it. Sometimes you can't ride a bike, and you can't get back on the bike because you have no feet — somebody took your feet. Sometimes you wake up with no feet and you're like, I just can't do anything today. I can't even get out of bed. Don't kill yourself trying to crawl around. Wait, chill out. Your feet will come back tomorrow. CP: You're such a connoisseur of writing a truly sad, melancholic song. What do you listen to when you're sad? MB: That's funny. I love that sad songs are always the songs that made me feel so good. Writers like Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave — those people who can really look under the rock of the human heart and find all the bugs and all the beauty and all the everything. When you're feeling that romantic misery or anxiety, it's really nice to hear somebody else who can capture that. Patti Smith too — she writes a different kind of song, beautiful and desperate. There's nothing more uplifting than a Leonard Cohen binge — like a bottle of wine and Leonard Cohen all night long. Or Roberta Flack. Or Otis Redding. These are people whose voices — the emotion is just right here, so beautiful yet so fragile. Those are the singers I connect with most when I'm sad, I guess. I also listen to a lot of punk and hip-hop when I'm sad, because sometimes sadness is like emotional constipation. Or it's just ... you need a snack. Sometimes depression is just chemicals. I get why my brother listens to a lot of heavy, heavy metal and black metal. It's cathartic. And it's really beautiful — these guys are playing instruments beautifully. They're nerds, you know what I'm saying? It sounds so meathead and rocking, and it's so expressive. There's a band Liturgy that I listen to a lot, and there's a song called 'God of Love' — it's beautiful yet just a wall of pain. Nothing sounds more real. It's such a relief to hear another human just letting it out, whether it's a growl or a scream. That's so healthy. I've written a lot of songs where I scream my head off, and doing too much of that I think can also be unhealthy — it can grind your brain into some beaten-up version of your own psyche. But you also just need to bloodlet, emotionally. Emotional truth is always what I'm most looking for in music. Sometimes I love pop music, stuff that's just fun, but there's got to be some emotional truth. I won't even know what a song is about, but just the sound of the voice — like, I believe them. I don't know what they're talking about, but I believe it. CP: Do you have a favourite song you've ever written? MB: There's a song, 'Green Gloves', that I really love — it's just so weird and beautiful. But also 'Gospel', which is the last song on Boxer — that one holds a very special place for me, because it does a lot of stuff I hadn't done before. It brings together a lot of imagery, a lot of violence, and then a lot of passion. I think those are my best collections of, like, just with the words. It's definitely not one of the hit songs or anything. When I'm finished with a record, I will listen to it for several months, every night, before it comes out but after it's mastered. I take a deep dive into my own record and really get into it — drink and smoke to it and dance to it. But then I don't often go back. I very rarely will sit down and listen to Boxer. We've been doing some of those songs live though, and 'Gospel' — I realised, yeah, that's when I knew I was becoming a better writer than I had been. That's also around the same time I met my wife, and I was really trying to impress her. I started stealing stuff from her — she raised the bar, and that was me trying to clear it. Matt Berninger plays Vivid LIVE at the Sydney Opera House on Thursday, 28 May. View his full Australian and New Zealand tour dates via Handsome Tours. Like what you see? Subscribe to the Concrete Playground Newsletter to get stories just like these straight to your inbox. Images: Supplied