Matt Berninger’s favourite Neil Young song
Before The National released their debut album in 2001, frontman Matt Berninger spent a solid two years trying to write a batch of songs in a very different vein from his work with his previous indie garage band, Nancy.
Caught up a bit in the late ‘90s wave of heady alt-country music, represented by the likes of Wilco, Bonnie Prince Billy, Magnolia Electric Co. and more, Berninger found himself ultimately drinking from the well of the godfather of the genre, Neil Young, and he wasn’t lazy about his Neil phase either.
While he was perfectly well-versed in classic ‘70s albums like After the Goldrush, Harvest, and Tonight’s the Night, he also remained fully invested in what Young was doing creatively at the turn of the new century, in particular, becoming mildly obsessed with the sometimes overlooked 2000 album Silver & Gold, the 25th studio release of Young’s career.
Silver & Gold is one of the veteran’s later period ‘Nashville records’ in the tradition of Harvest and Harvest Moon, and as Berninger has observed himself, it has a similar vibe in some respects to Bob Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind, in that it captures the vulnerable/grizzled musings of a great troubadour on the cusp of old age (late 50s).
Had we known that both Neil and Bob would still be making music in the 2020s, those records might have packed less of a punch. It’s also a bit of a mind blower to consider that Matt Berninger is now 54 himself, roughly the same age Young was when he recorded Silver & Gold. Yikes.
“When The National got together, the chemistry was already a weird mixture of people’s tastes and record collections,” Berninger told Stereogum in 2025, “Places like Neil Young were where we all overlapped.”
Referring to Young as a “place” might have been a mere slip of the tongue, but it seems fitting, as the man is a landscape unto himself, and in the case of Silver & Gold, Berninger recognised the sound of an artist who seemed “exhausted from a whole phase of his life”, but in a captivating way. One track on the album stood out to him and remains his favourite Neil Young song, a deep cut that became a big source of inspiration for the sound of The National during their earlier alt-country iteration.
“On ‘Without Rings’, he’s singing in a lower register,” the frontman said, referring to the closing track on Silver & Gold, “It’s just him and guitar, it’s almost like a demo… When you hear it, you can tell he was spent and lonely. It’s a poem about somebody he’s not sure he’ll ever reconnect with. There’s not really a chorus, just one change right in the middle. It’s fragments of thoughts, just scraps of feelings with weird metaphors. You can tell it was almost stream-of-consciousness, or not fussed over.”
The bridge of the song particularly stuck in Berninger’s mind: “Pictures in mind / Rows of poppy fields / Harmony entwined / Changing gear that grinds / Pictures in my mind”.
“The whole song is just packed with these incredible lines,” Berninger told Stereogum, before admitting he has been inspired by it, going into great detail about the register and tonality of Young’s voice while delivering “pictures in my mind”, noting, “where he goes up briefly in the middle, and it sounds like he’s gotten really emotional and then settles back down”. He further pinpointed how he took the idea and incorporated it into ‘New Order T-Shirt’ from The National’s 2023 album First Two Pages of Frankenstein, claiming it’s a “rip-off” he indulges in often.
