How ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’ almost broke The National: “There was a battle”
In the interest of music, how do artists know when the amount of sticky shit they’ve thrown at a wall is enough? In the pursuit of perfection, creativity is an endless concept, and so there is always room for one more guitar track or perhaps another drum fill, and for intensely detailed creatives like The National, how do you prevent that from driving you mad?
Well the role of a producer proves to be undeniably crucial in this instance, enlisted to crystallise the myriad ideas any given band would throw at them. And despite The National’s own individual musicians having a keen ear for production nuance, the same was required for them. But not necessarily to reign in ideas but instead mediate the creative squabbles between the band.
Their seminal track ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’ hit all the usual National notes, an industrial yet ethereal melody, led forward by Matt Berninger’s baritone vocals. But in the depths of their hard drive, exists a version that included horns in the bridge, to pack an extra emotional punch like their track ‘Fake Empire’.
“We had to do away with a horn fanfare that’s no longer there, but if you listen to the live version you’ll hear this ‘ba-ba-ba!’ section, which was cool,” Aaron Dressner explained to The Quietus. He continued, explaining how the creative decision sparked a divide within the camp.
“It was too similar, and so Matt and I wanted to get rid of it, but others, especially Peter Katis [the band’s long-term producer] and to some extent our drummer really loved it, so there was a battle being fought right then! […] There were other songs that we pulled back, but that was the main one. Eventually we took it out.”
Dressner’s right-hand man in the trenches of creative war believed that at this point, the band needed to lean back into the sentiment of less is more, and allow the song to be refined, not saturated.
Berninger explained, “There were a lot of things about that song that suddenly weren’t working at that point. The version we had then was not going to be on the record. It was over-muscled-up and kind of annoying, and it was too long. We’d been trying to figure it out and solve it for a long time, and sometimes I was like, y’know what, this can’t be saved… We all had every intention of trying to save it, but you never know what can happen.”
In a recorded context, we’ll never actually know whether or not the song would have been better with the inclusion of a horn section. Given their use of it in ‘Fake Empire’, I think we can safely speculate that it would have been a stellar inclusion indeed. But in terms of ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’, the finished version devoid of the horn fanfare remains one of the band’s most beloved songs and goes a long way to cement their signature sound, and so maybe, it was the right decision.
