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.”