![]() ![]() “Booker made it all feel connected,” Berninger says of the man behind the desk. The muse took hold, they invited over some friends to contribute and after two weeks last July they’d recorded 12 originals as well as nine covers. Inspired by this, he sent Jones a couple of his own that didn’t fit with anything else he’d been working on. Writing for Peter Dinklage or a voice inside Alicia Vikander’s head – those are fun mental flip-flops and inversions.” Christopher Walken and Nicole Kidman are going to play a character very differently. “When you sing a song, you inhabit it in the way that an actor does with a scene. “That’s another challenge – to write for someone else and know that you’ll never sing it,” he says. He and the band have also been working on songs for characters to sing in a TV musical adaptation of the 1897 play Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (which will star Game Of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage, no less). The National’s eighth album, 2019’s ‘I Am Easy To Find’, relayed the narrative arc of a young woman transitioning through life, his wife and collaborator Carin Desser’s lyrics sung by a cast including Bowie’s bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, indie rock star Sharon Van Etten and more. When you cover a song, even one that you’ve listened to a million times, it’s a whole different thing to perform it and inhabit it.”īerninger has recently spent a lot of his life looking at the world from other people’s perspectives. “Some songs are un-coverable – but it’s fun to try and step into someone else’s shoes and melodies and that role of channeling yourself and them. “We almost tried too hard with that one,” laughs Berninger. They got to work and started recording some of Berninger’s favourite songs – including ‘Holes’ by Mercury Rev, The Cure’s ‘In Between Days’ and an attempt at party rock banger ‘Sabotage’ by Beastie Boys. Fate aligned when the frontman became pals with ‘Stardust’s producer, the R&B legend Booker T. Originally, he set out to make a covers record in the same vein as Willie Nelson’s 1978 collection of pop standards, ‘Stardust’ – one of Berninger’s father’s favourite albums. It’s that same impetus that led him to create his debut solo album, ‘Serpentine Prison’. You have to honour everybody that you’ve stolen from and learned from.” “It’s like climbing up a diving board, then they suddenly raise it up 100 feet. “Those experiences are terrifying,” he tells NME. While ably assisted by the chat show’s awesome house band, Berninger rose to the challenge. However, EL VY were built on a foundation of fun and spritely pep. In Berninger’s own words, his day job band The National have often been more renowned for “sad-sack-mope-dad-rock-brunch-core-Americana” than putting on your red shoes and dancing the blues. “It was such an intense and scary thing – how do you pay tribute to David Bowie like that?” ![]() “We had one afternoon to learn that song, rehearse it and do it live on television,” he remembers, still aghast. While the rest of us were wallowing in Youtube holes and replaying the best of The Thin White Duke, mourning the first of many legends in that cursed year of 2016, he was tasked with honouring Bowie on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert that very evening by covering ‘Let’s Dance’ with his punk-inspired side project EL VY. Pretty much every music fan remembers where they were when they heard the news that David Bowie had died. ![]()
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