The National’s Matt Berninger Says El Vy Album Is a Love Story Inspired By Mike Watt and D. Boon

Photo by Deirdre O’Callaghan

EL VY is the new project from the National‘s Matt Berninger and Menomena/Ramona Falls‘ Brent Knopf. Ahead of their debut record Return to the Moon (out October 30), Berninger recently spoke to NME about the project. In the interview, he reveals that the album is “almost like a musical” based on a romance between two characters, Didi and Michael, who were modelled on the Minutemen‘s Mike Watt and D. Boon.

“My daughter’s obsessed with Grease and plays the soundtrack constantly,” Berninger said. “I was thinking of the Minutemen a lot when writing the lyrics, and I think of Didi and Michael as like Danny and Sandy.”

Elsewhere, Berninger describes the record’s basis in his Cincinatti, Ohio upbringing:

My adolescence was rocky. It wasn’t because I got into drugs or anything – I was just a dark moody kid, romantically disgruntled and felt like a dork, and using The Smiths and The Cure to find kindred spirits. I was thinking about how I fell in love with music and my cousin Peter telling me how he’d seen The Ramones and The Smiths in [local nightclub] The Jockey Club – to me, Morrissey being in Cincinnati was like spotting a unicorn in your backyard.

Berninger also said the National have written 30 song sketches for a follow-up to Trouble Will Find Me, having embarked on a “camp out retreat” in New York. They’ll continue to write at similar retreat in Los Angeles.

Read the full interview at NME.

Watch the lyric video for “Return to the Moon (Political Song for Didi Bloome to Sing, With Crescendo)”:

Watch the National on Pitchfork.tv’s “Over/Under”:

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