As if The National’s shows are not heavy enough on their own accord, the Brooklyn-based band happened to share their night at the Hollywood Bowl with the tenth anniversary of September 11th earlier this week – a benchmark that seems to have come too soon. Now I’m not about to give you a walkthrough of my 8th grade morning because I don’t think that’s really how we process collective memories anyway. I think what we mostly remember are the private moments that make a shared event part of our own personal history.
The memories that have lingered for the past decade weren’t necessarily detailed progressions, but scattered thoughts, like the moment of silence during morning announcements, or the episode of Saturday Night Live with Rudy Giuliani when Paul Simon sang “The Boxer;” all those celebrity telethons, and the comfort we took in one another when we were really unsure of where to place laughter. But I think that’s what I took away most closely from that time – that even in moments of widespread tragedy, unsettling emotions such as laughter and joy still very much exist. The knowledge that beautiful things persist alongside the awful, and the realization that everything is always in motion. That’s how I remember it.
So when I was sitting down to put this show into words, I tried to remember what I’d like to take away from the night years from now. I could tell you about Matt Berninger’s stoic delivery and how his voice is actually a well of emotion, whose rock bottom is this raw, purging scream that gets rid of everything that’s left on songs like “Abel” and “Available,” or I could go on about the way St. Vincent joined them on stage for a while. But what really made this night feel special was the way a show that big could be experienced so personally to the individual. In part due to the Bowl’s open, laissez-faire policy situated in the middle of a giant rock surrounded by a bunch of trees in a way that makes you want to just laugh at the sky, you must also credit The National’s ability to safely foster a climate of emotional warmth through all the quietness of the show.
This particular night then, was all the wine in clear plastic cups, the conversation about accepting blue cheese into your life as a mark of adulthood, and the round tin filled with homemade peanut butter bars. It was the picnic on the fringes of the lawn before we all scattered to our separate seats, and the bench by the trees that we ran from when “Runaway” caught us by surprise – a song that live feels like it’s resonating from within you like a slow-burning gas flame. It was a text received that said “I’m actually crying,” and the shared feeling of complete paralysis after they so damn elegantly floated off with “About Today,” sending the audience into total peace with the moment for the remainder of their respective nights. It was all these things together that’ll make me remember The National at the Hollywood Bowl that time when I was twenty-three.
It wasn’t lost on me that as I was having this gift of a night, a lot of people were concurrently recalling their personal worsts. By the time Berninger mentioned the date in his introduction of “Thirsty,” a song written in New York days after the attacks, it was clear that the show itself was a fitting eulogy. As this line in a book goes, “it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all,” it made me realize that there was no better tribute to the somber anniversary than a night spent so blissfully present in the company good friends, face-to-face with how grateful we should be to have just what we have.
