The National at The State Theater in Ithaca

The National opened their world tour at the State Theater in Ithaca Thursday night. I was not sure what to expect. I saw their last show when they closed out their High Violet tour in New York and by then they had worked the set into perfection. As I sat down for Thursday's show I could practically still hear Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks as it closed that last tour--it was sublime.

The setlist for this first show of the new tour included 10 of the songs they played at that last show in New York in December, 2011. But it also had 10 songs from their new release Trouble Will Find Me. The mix of old and new worked well. I love how aggressively The National include new songs in their shows. The new disc is not even out yet, but they are confident enough about the material to have it comprise half the show. It did not disappoint.

They began with the new Don't Swallow the Cap, (which would have fit right into High Violet), then went into Bloodbuzz, Ohio and another new one called Sea of Love. The three songs together got the show off to an intense start, driven relentlessly by the amazing drumming of Bryan Devendorf. The venue did not lend itself to people to being up and able to move to the music, so the energy in the crowd felt a bit restrained, but the audience certainly responded enthusiastically to the new songs right away.

Matt Berninger did not include much banter from the stage between songs, but he seemed relaxed and in good spirits. He joked a few times with audience members who shouted out requests. At one point he gestured out at three specific places and said in his barritone, "No. No. And No." He went on to explain that The National are not the sort of band to accept requests--they plan their setlist carefully and stick to it. He was not being an asshole, just explaining that calling out requests was pointless.

For someone who talks about being uncomfortable in the role of frontman, Berninger seemed totally at ease on the stage. Maybe it's just the wine, but I don't think so. He, and the rest of the band, seem like people who have put in their 10,000 hours and now just kick ass at what they do. And what they do is write complex music with deceptively simple, repetitive lyrics that are more like supercharged poems and then deliver these songs live with stellar musicianship and Matt Berninger's wine-soaked baritone.

Speaking of The Voice, there are a few songs on the list that are delivered in a higher range and really stand out for the vulnerability the change introduces--Pink Rabbits and parts of Demons, specifically. These songs make Berninger seem less The Observer (that he usually strikes me as) and more as a participant in the emotions he is singing about. Somehow his baritone makes him seem like he is commenting on his own thoughts and feeling from a distance. The higher voice makes things feel more immediate for me as a listener and I like how it changed things up a bit during the concert.

Highlights of the show for me were Bloodbuzz, Ohio, a haunting Daughters of the SoHo Riots, the new I Need My Girl, and all three encore songs--I Should Live in Salt, Mr. November, and Terrible Love. This was a great start to the new tour. Dwight Eisenhower once said "Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before." These new songs and this show by The National made me feel the same thing about them as a band: they are a band who is it the height of its powers as both song writers and performers. They are more The National now than they have ever been before.


THE NATIONAL SETLIST


STATE THEATER - ITHACA, NY - MARCH 16, 2013
Don't Swallow the Cap*
Bloodbuzz Ohio
Sea of Love*
Afraid of Everyone
Conversation 16
Demons*
Heavenfaced*
This is the Last Time*
Mistaken for Strangers
Daughters of the Soho Riots
Apartment Story
Pink Rabbits*
Humiliation*
I Need My Girl*
England
Graceless*
About Today
Fake Empire
Encore:
I Should Live In Salt*
Mr. November
Terrible Love


* From Trouble Will Find Me

Life is No Longer Elsewhere

I was driving with my daughter Isabel a few years back when she said very earnestly from the back seat, “I know everybody probably thinks this when they are young, but I KNOW I am going to be famous some day.” I had to laugh at the accuracy of her statement—at least the first part of it. In fact, it seems that for most men I know part of the “work” of their thirties is making peace with their failure to become famous. Along with fame, I also think that everybody of a certain age, income, and education believes s/he will someday have a job and a stable relationship and a place to call home—will, in fact, have what we call a life.

I am 46 years old and to the casual outside observer, I have a life. I have been married to the same person for almost 16 years, I have a happy, healthy 12 year-old daughter, I have taught at a school I love for eight years, I own a house, I am not suffering from crushing debt, debilitating depression or chronic pain. I have friends. I have hobbies. I have two dogs that love me. Surely these things are sufficient to qualify as a life. Yet, for me life still feels like it is elsewhere.

Years ago I went on a Milan Kundera tear and read every novel I could find by the Czech novelist. I started with The Unbearable Lightness of Being and immediately moved into everything else he had published. In a few weeks I came out the other side of this immersion convinced that Milan Kundera is a brilliant writer. Twenty-five years later he is still on my list of top five modern novelists, along with Phillip Roth, Graham Swift, Vladimir Nabakov, and Haruki Murakami.

To be fully honest, I consumed his novels so voraciously that their plots and main characters bled together into a great big blob of darkly humorous Eastern European existentialism. One of Kundera’s novels is called Life is Elsewhere. I had to google Life is Elsewhere to even remind myself of the plot just now. I know that I read it and loved it, but even after reading the plot summary I could not remember a thing about the book. (Does it make me a bad person that I don’t really care that I am unable to remember anything at all about a book by one of my favorite authors? This is a question for another time.)

What I really want to focus on now is the title: Life is Elsewhere.

This title has come back to me again and again over the past twenty-five years; not because of the power of the story but rather because of the resonance of the idea. For me, life has been elsewhere ever since I graduated college in 1987. First, I went to the Peace Corps in North Yemen. I knew it was a two-year gig and that when it was over I would be moving back to the United States. Once I got back I lived in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maine, and Montana over the course of the next five years. None of these moves felt permanent and none of the places felt like home.

By the time I was 29 and living in Billings I was ready to commit to a place to call home. I was considering moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico to start a teacher certification/Masters of Education program. In the meantime, I met the woman who became my wife. She was a Montana girl and rather than moving to New Mexico I stayed in Billings for another 18 months. Shortly after we met we knew we would get married. We also knew we would be moving. She wanted more than what life in Billings was able to offer. She wanted graduate school and a bigger world of ideas and challenges.

So this is the story I tell myself: I was looking for a place to commit to; a place to put down roots and build a life one connection at a time. But instead of a place, I found a person. And then we moved to a new place and then to another. And now here it is a full 25 years since I graduated college and still I have not found a place to build a life.

Of course, life has been happening anyway. As I said, we own a home and have jobs and a daughter and two dogs. But I have not built this life that has been happening to me. As John Lennon wrote, “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” I have been a participant so far, not a decider. (In this one way I hope to become more like George W. Bush in the coming months and years.)

There have been a couple of consequences that I can see to the way my life has unspooled itself. One is that I have never felt the pleasure that I imagine a person gets from feeling truly part of a place, with roots that reach down into the soil and connections that bolster and support all around. The other is that my long-suffering partner, Erica, has been forced to stand in for the place I want to call home. In the absence of a place to live my life fully, I have substituted a person and Erica has had to be the place I grew my roots and also the connections that bolster and support me all around.

As anyone who has spent more than ten seconds thinking about it can tell you, this sort of relationship cannot sustain. It is bound to crash under the weight of so much need and expectation. Luckily, we have both seen the problem and taken steps to change things. No single person is big enough to provide all the things a place can give—even the smallest sort of place. I realize I have been waiting to get to wherever it is we are going to build our lives for 25 years now and that is way too long.

So, it is with great excitement that I am looking forward to our next move. We are heading to Ithaca, New York sometime in the next few months and I could not be more thrilled. Of course I am feeling a fair amount of stress about selling our crappy house in New Haven and buying a not-crappy house in Ithaca, about finding meaningful work that pays well, and about my daughter’s new life in a new place. But all of these things pale in comparison to the excitement I feel about finally moving to a place with the full expectation that it will be where my life is. I will miss the school where I teach and the families who go there. I will miss my friends in New Haven. But not enough to make me stay. I am ready to put down some roots, to join clubs, to plant trees and asparagus and rhubarb instead of things that grow once and are gone, and to commit to living life where I am living instead of in my head in some future place.

Hot damn. Let the wild rumpus begin.

Update, September, 2014: It took 2 years, but we have finally bought a house in Ithaca and we are loving it. Also, it took a year, but I found a job as a writer working for Cornell's College of Engineering and it is going great. This fall, I will learn how to grow asparagus.