Pinning down onto their most graceful and delicate ideas with the help of their friends, The National create a pseudo-cinematic journey of an album.
Key tracks: “Oblivions”, "Not in Kansas", “Rylan”
The first album by The National I bought new on release day was High Violet, in 2010. I was riding high on my relatively recently found obsession with the band and the album came out at a time when I needed to hear something like it; it’s now firmly canonised itself as one of my favourite albums of all time. During the tour following the album’s release, the band occasionally road tested new songs they had written following the creative flow in the album’s wake. One of these was a song called “Rylan”, a slow burner with an infectious melody that shortly became a fan favourite - including mine. “Rylan” also became a bit of a ghost afterwards, wheeled out in random concerts every once in a while across the years, showing small changes every time it made an appearance, but never seeing a studio release. The more elusive it became, the more its status as a secret gem only grew.
I love coincidences that make it look like the puzzle pieces of the universe are clicking into place, and so as "Rylan" was debuted at the start of the decade, it makes some kind of cosmic sense that it finally became something tangible at the very end of that same decade. Its sudden appearance at the tail end of the I Am Easy to Find tracklist was like seeing a now-distant friend you thought you might never see again, and its appearance ten years on from its debut only serves to highlight the changes the band have gone through in that time between. From grassroots stalwarts to the A-tier indie heroes, The National have been slowly evolving and changing their sound throughout their career and, even across the 2010s where they effectively codified their signature sound, they've transformed significantly. You can make a direct and easy comparison with "Rylan" alone - from the live videos of its early appearances (some professionally recorded) to the studio version in 2019, it's clearly the same song but so massively different in approach - and much of those changes around it are all over I Am Easy to Find in general.
We can probably credit the resurgence of "Rylan" to the same person who we can largely thank for I Am Easy to Find in general. Director Mike Mills, a close friend of the band, was planning an experimental short film and he tentatively approached The National to soundtrack it. What he gained was an open access to a Dropbox account of sketches, demos, samples and clips going back years - scattered ideas the band had worked on but which hadn't found their shape yet. The final film (a genuinely touching short piece starring Alicia Vikander) and the album share their name but aren't rigidly connected: the album isn't the soundtrack to the film even if segments of its music are used throughout, but they both exist in a symbiotic relationship. Mills would pick demos he liked, the band would work on those songs further and independently as they got excited about making a record album, and both parties ended up inspiring one another. There's only a few direct links to the film: the titles of the interlude segues that give the album a cinematic feel of its own are inspired by the poem that acts as the film's narration, and the otherwise non sequitur like lyrics of "Where Is Her Head" are the only set of words directly requested for the film (where they're a part of an in-universe children's book). Otherwise the two works are entirely separate and t
It's a beautiful journey, as well. I Am Easy to Find is the most graceful record The National have made, full of delicate songs that swivel lightly in the air. Even the sad piano ballads (the title track and "Light Years", both almost devastatingly haunting and gorgeous) are gentle like walking on water rather than drowning in sorrow and melancholy, and the closest the album gets to loud and noisy are the psychedelic hullabaloo of "Where Is Her Head" and the opening "You Had Your Soul With You", neither of which invite Berninger to scream his lungs out - and "You Had Your Soul With You" even changes tract partway through as it introduces the strings and Gail Ann Dorsey's vocals, which mark the point where the album shows its true colours after the brisk intro. On other albums they might have been heavier songs (emotionally or in sheer sound), here they share the same soundspace as the pristine and careful moments of nearly meditative elegiac beauty that most of the album spends its time in; with only the anguished lashing out in the choruses of "The Pull of You" breaking the thunder. Even when the lyrics swing to the melancholy - and it's The National so that's the main modus operandi still - there's a pinch of hope within them, the songs leaving you with the impression that maybe everything can be fixed rather than the narrators losing themselves and their loved ones to their personal demons, with a heavier emphasis on trust between both sides (which the guest vocals intentionally or inadvertently emphaise). Those themes and main sonical reference points of the album takes many forms: the spacious and swirling "Oblivions" which almost feels like the film's and the era's main theme due to its prominence, the light-footed hook machine "Quiet Light" that's impossible not to get lost within, the torchlight anthem "Hey Rosey" and the dream-like and hypnotic slow dance "Hairpin Turns" among the best. They're all equally gorgeous and strong, and it's odd to think that all these songs started out as random seeds and stems, because they form such a cohesive whole where each idea presented supports the next.
That whole meditative experience comes to its peak as the album passes the halfway point, with its two extended centrepieces. "Not in Kansas" is the one song on the album where Berninger takes unchallenged center space as he mutters a stream-consciousness litany about his hometown, listening to R.E.M., being nervous about punching nazis, Christianity and everything else under the sun, like someone who's returned to somewhere he left a long time ago and whose mind is racing with everything that changed across the years - set largely to a sparse guitar and kickdrum beat that's miles away from the rich production surrounding it. And then the song literally broken apart by a hymn, a choir reciting a Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 lyric like it was a religious scripture sung at the end of a funeral. It's unlike anything else in The National's catalogue and it's nearly dream-like in its presentation, from the lyrics that wander around from distant point to another to the sudden structural breaks, hypnotically looping for nearly seven minutes (according to Berninger he removed several verses from the final version - and I could easily listen to those as well, maybe he'd finish Life's Rich Pageant by the end). "So Far So Fast" is the flipside of the coin: all driven by the voices other than Berninger, swept by a detailed, vivid arrangement that flickers with heavenly abandon through the headphones. It's a comfort blanket of a song while still coming across so fragile it might break at the lightest touch, like the sight of the light shining through your familiar home windows breaking through the night but with the uncertainty of not having visited for years. It's completely lucid in contrast to the fever dream of "Not in Kansas" and that's what makes the two songs perfect counterparts - the rambling chaos and the oasis to recover.
And then there's "Rylan". I love "Rylan" and the way it's been realised here, in what could be considered its final form now, is sublime. The driving snare-heavy that beat pounds away with fire under its feet and the lyrics and vocal melodies full of tiny little hooks are both familiar from the prior versions of the song but they've been tweaked and lifted up, sounding more vivid than ever. Kate Stables of This Is the Kit now sings the second verse, and the sudden change of tone from Berninger's murmur to her lighter voice flicks the mood and weight of the verse completely from the first, before the song builds back up again to its grand finale. The orchestral breakdown is majestic, and the towering conclusion it builds up to has been redefined into a capital-M Moment. "Rylan" is an incredible song and by and far the album's centrepiece, and it's been recontextualised so perfectly you could never tell it started its life so long ago. It's no longer just a homeless song that transcends eras, it's now the anchor of I Am Easy to Find specifically - the giddy, vibrant rush to the finale after the heavier waters that started the second half of the album, serving an important role in the record's flow. It's the homecoming welcome for the final stretch of songs loom in the horizon; and out of the album's context, it's the fulfilled wishes of a decade ago coming to a beautiful reality.
It's obvious now I place a lot of weighty personal importance for these songs, and I make a lot of references to peace, comfort, serenity, et cetera above very intentionally. It's what I Am Easy to Find has come to represent to me. A lot of the records by The National end up tying themselves into the particular timeframes of my life around their release, and I Am Easy to Find's release window in the late spring of 2019 was also when I was recovering from what was supposed to have been a simple surgery with a quick few week recovery time, but which turned out to be a three-four-month ordeal through most of which I could barely move, popping painkillers and watching the summer go by from the flat I was bound to (good prep for the 2020 isolation party). I Am Easy to Find became something of a consolation: a peaceful musical space I found myself retreating to over and over again during those months, escaping within the rich arrangements and finding comfort and a way to process what I was feeling there.
So I Am Easy to Find became special - it developed a meaning outside what was intended, but which it attained through its own strengths. It's the most beautiful set of songs that The National have released, and possibly their most immersive album - a record with interludes, segues and running themes where all those actually feel necessary, and not fluff to make a record look fancier than it is. It absolutely gains much of its power for me for reasons outside its music, but I don't think it would have imprinted itself on me so heavily without its inherent strengths - after all none of the albums I bingebought during that period (when you have nothing to do but stay inside and listen to music...) have latched onto me to this extent. I Am Easy to Find is a rich and complex album, full of intricacies and concepts that tie together into a cohesive, unified story told through music alone - and its songs are just plain great. It's almost unfair to other artists how The National can seemingly just coast along effortlessly from album to album with a consistently incredible quality of songwriting, to the extent that even their random Dropbox demos ended up making a collection of songs so strong others would kill for. But that's just how it is - it's another incredible album from a band who churn them out almost predictably by now, and a personal masterpiece because even now playing it is akin to opening a door to a pocket universe where things are OK no matter how ablaze the world outside is.
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