Matt Berninger with The National performing at Leeds’ First Direct Arena. December 2019. (Scott Smith for Live4ever)
The National‘s Matt Berninger will release his debut solo album later this year.
Serpentine Prison is out on October 2nd, produced by the legendary Booker T. Jones and featuring a vast list of collaborators which includes Matt Barrick, Andrew Bird, Mike Brewer, Hayden Desser, Gail Ann Dorsey and Brent Knopf.
Its title-track is streaming now, and goes back to December 2018 and the immediate aftermath of The National’s I Am Easy to Find sessions. “For a long time, I had been writing songs for movies and musicals and other projects where I needed to get inside someone else’s head and convey another person’s feelings,” Berninger explains. “I liked doing that, but I was ready to dig back into my own garbage and this was the first thing that came out.”
“The title is from a twisting sewer pipe that drains into the ocean near LAX. There’s a cage on the pipe to keep people from climbing out to sea. I worked on the song with Sean O’Brien and Harrison Whitford and recorded it about six months later with Booker T. Jones producing. It feels like an epilogue, so I named the record after it and put it last.”
