Watch The National’s frontman Matt Berninger open up about depression with David Letterman
Matt Berninger, the frontman of The National, has opened up about the mental health struggles that influenced the Ohio group’s new album, Laugh Track.
In a half-hour video posted on The National’s official YouTube channel, Berninger sits down for a candid discussion with veteran interviewer and talk show host David Letterman. In it, he opens up about his battle with depression and reveals that the lockdown and ensuing period led to the new record.
Notably, The National surprised everyone with their tenth album, Laugh Track, in September, which followed April’s critically acclaimed First Two Pages of Frankenstein. The group announced their latest studio effort during a hometown show in Cincinnati, and it arrived just three days later.
Berninger tells Letterman that the friction between maintaining a public persona and a quiet private life became a struggle for him. “I wasn’t writing at all, but [the band] kept sending music,” he said. “I don’t think they realised quite how debilitated I was. I didn’t really tell them how bad I was.”
He continued: “I’ve known that it’s a part of me, and that it comes and goes, and I know that it’s a healthy thing to make something out of it.”
The frontman then detailed the struggle of “having to kind of turn on a personality for an intense few hours” on stage, “and then turn it off, and then try to get some sleep and then the next day, turn it on, turn it off.”
Letterman also expressed empathy for the frontman, noting the challenge of continuing with his famous late-night show could sometimes feel like “holy hell.”
In a three-and-a-half star review of Laugh Track in September, Far Out wrote: “If First Two Pages of Frankenstein symbolised the gradual rebuilding within The National, Laugh Track emerges as the vibrant and exploratory manifestation of that renewed faith, presenting a bold statement of purpose.”
Watch the interview below.
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