In his home in the Basque region of southwestern France, Bryce Dessner is taking it all in. In the past year his arena-filling indie band, The National, have released two acclaimed albums and toured the world. The musician and composer has also contributed orchestral arrangements to Taylor Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department – one billion streams and counting – and played synthesiser and piano on its closing track, The Manuscript. Now he’s going from Swift to symphony, having been unveiled this week as a new artist-in-residence at the National Concert Hall.
He’s excited about it all, of course. But he speaks with particular enthusiasm about coming to Dublin, where, among other projects, he will present the Irish premiere of Mari, his orchestral work named after the Basque forest goddess, along with his Violin Concerto and the Irish premiere of his Concerto for Two Pianos, performed by the French siblings Katia and Marielle Labèque.
For Dessner, the appeal of the NCH begins with the 19th-century Earlsfort Terrace building itself – constructed originally for the International Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures of 1865 and later converted into the original home of University College Dublin, before reopening as the NCH in 1981.
“It’s a wonderful, amazing hall and historic building. And then Dublin being the greatest music city in the world – or one of them, anyway, for sure. And then I have had a few experiences with the [National Symphony Orchestra, headquartered at the NCH], who are wonderful. It’s a great situation for me to come and have a relationship across their season, where they’re doing a bunch of different things. It’s special for me. I do have a lot of friends in Ireland. It’s a place where we feel comfortable and inspired.”
Having long served as the home of classical music in Ireland, the National Concert Hall has transformed across the past several years into a cradle for contemporary and avant-garde music. It has hosted the annual Haunted Dancehall festival, featuring cutting-edge artists such as Kelly Moran and Oneohtrix Point Never, and later this year will welcome a residency by the contemporary electronica composer Nils Frahm. When told that the Seattle drone group Sunn O))) recently headlined, Dessner nods enthusiastically.
“Listen to Das Rheingold [by] Wagner. Stretch it out and make it 100 times louder and it sounds like Sun O))). Things are more connected than we think. Sometimes the institutions, or possibly even sometimes it’s the critics around things [who create artificial genre boundaries], but I think to musicians, anyway, it’s all music.”
Dessner lives a fascinating double life. He is best known as guitarist in The National, a complicated and emotive indie group who have received three Grammy nominations and headlined festivals worldwide. But he is also a Yale-educated, classically trained musician who has composed for Kronos Quartet, the Orchestra of St Luke’s at Carnegie Hall and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in addition to soundtracking movies by Rebecca Miller and Alejandro Iñárritu. (He helped score the latter’s Oscar-winning Leonardo DiCaprio-fights-a-bear epic The Revenant.)
His next big Irish undertaking will be a headline performance with The National at the All Together Now festival in August. Then, in November, he takes up his artistic residency at the NCH. It will begin with a performance of Mari; in 2025 he will present the world premiere of a newly commissioned Cello Symphony with the cellist Anastasia Kobekina and the National Symphony Orchestra.
“The orchestra is going to be doing a bunch of work. It is a series of more recent big pieces that I’ve done. A violin concerto I’ve written for a Finnish violinist named Pekka Kuusisto; on some level it has almost an Irish side to it. That’s one of my big recent pieces. There’s a piece, the double piano concerto, with Katia and Marielle Labèque, who are like family to me, basically. That’s probably my most-performed piece of music now. That gets played a lot.”
Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Dessner lives on the French side of the Bay of Biscay, near San Sebastián, with his French wife, the singer Mina Tindle, and their son, Octave. Work and other obligations prevented him from seeing Taylor Swift kick off the European leg of her Eras tour in Paris recently, but he speaks enthusiastically of collaborating with Swift and with his twin, Aaron (also of The National), on The Tortured Poets Department. (Swift, for her part, graced The National’s 2023 track The Alcott.)
“She’s extremely prolific and confident. She’s only measured by her own work at this point. It’s bold and wonderful. She’s someone who is making her work and sharing it and has such a direct relationship to her fans. It’s pretty amazing to see.”
The relationship between Swift and The National has been one of the great joys and surprises in music recently. It began in 2020, when Aaron Dessner and his bandmates contributed, to varying degrees, to Swift’s wistful “indie” record Folklore and its follow-up Evermore. They’ve stayed in each other’s orbit ever since.
“The albums easily could have amounted to a credibility-chasing costume change: pop star goes coffee shop,” the Atlantic commented in a piece last year headlined “Taylor Swift and the Sad Dads”, using a popular sobriquet for The National. “Instead, they refreshed Swift’s style by pairing sophisticated, moody arrangements with a new lyrical approach.”
Dessner has huge empathy for Swift. There has been some controversy – or at least internet noise – about her decision to release a 31-track double edition of The Tortured Poets Department. The National went through a similar experience last year when they put out their albums First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track within six months of one another, despite warnings from some quarters that it was too much, even for diehard fans.
“Sometimes people advise you against ... for instance, in The National’s case, doing two albums in a year. But it felt like one body of work, and it did to her as well. It made more sense to release it. Also to get on to the next thing. I think they’re great.”
Swift isn’t the only A-lister to come into the orbit of The National. Aaron Dessner has produced two albums by Ed Sheeran while the band’s frontman, Matt Berninger, has sung with Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers and Chvrches. Last year Bryce outdid them all when he collaborated with the obscure New Jersey songwriter Bruce Springsteen on Addicted to Romance, a track for the Rebecca Miller movie She Came to Me. (Miller, who is married to Daniel Day-Lewis, is good friends with Katia Labèque.)
“Bruce is so incredible and such a hero to us. And such an incredibly generous person. I can’t say enough good things about him, basically. It was wonderful to work with him,” Dessner says.
He grew up listening to Springsteen in suburban Cincinnati. Did he have an out-of-body experience while working with the blue-collar icon? “We met Bruce early on. He came to see [The National] play before we were well known. We spent a night with him. He was sharing stories. And he’s incredibly down to earth. He is Bruce. You’re in front of this incredibly charismatic, handsome, amazing man. He’s humble and nice.”
In his time in music Dessner has encountered his share of egotists and primadonnas. Springsteen, he says, is an example of how to wear your fame lightly and use it as a force for good.
“He kind of ruined rock stars for me. Because anyone who is not gracious ... ‘Well, Bruce is. What’s wrong with you?’ There are a few over the years, and it’s, like, ‘Come on, cut the crap.’ Bruce is just an example to everyone, basically.”
Among his many other endeavours, Dessner puts on the semi-regular Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival in Cork with his friend Mary Hickson, the music curator. It was at the Everyman Theatre, in Cork, in 2017 that he and Aaron shared the stage with the actor Cillian Murphy for a spoken-word performance.
“Mary is one of my best friends. Cillian and [the playwright] Enda Walsh have become good friends as well. Over the years we’ve been collaborating with those guys on Sounds from a Safe Harbour. Cork is like a second home. If I had to pick one city in Europe, it would be Cork – I have so many friends and had so many great experiences. We’re all on email threads working on the next Sounds from a Safe Harbour, for 2025.”
He was delighted when Murphy won the best-actor Oscar for Oppenheimer, texting his congratulations after the ceremony. “Cillian is absurdly talented. Maybe he’s like the Bruce Springsteen of actors: a humble, nice human being. I wrote him and he wrote back. He hasn’t changed at all. Maybe that’s very Irish, actually.”
Murphy’s ability to remain grounded amid the hoopla of Hollywood is remarkable, says Dessner.
“He’s an outsize talent. But he’s a humble, normal guy who basically wants to spend time with his family. I’ve seen him in plays over the years, and work he’s done with Enda Walsh ... Those performances are so insanely powerful and virtuosic in real time. You’re seeing one of the great artists of our time – seeing him doing it without any help of cameras or editing ... Of course he’s had major successes and things – Peaky Blinders is massive – but Oppenheimer was on such a global scale. It’s one of the biggest movies of the last 20 years. So for him to have that moment was wonderful and exciting, and he deserves it.”
The National are one of those lightning-in-a-bottle bands that come along once every generation. They’ve taken up the baton from REM and Radiohead by conquering the mainstream even while they retain their credibility as independent artists. After a few lost years during the pandemic, when Berninger struggled with depression, they’ve come roaring back, releasing those two LPs last year and then putting in a triumphant turn at 3Arena in Dublin in September.
“All the gigs in Ireland are special, to be honest,” says Dessner. “I know I sound like a broken record saying that, but I’m not lying. It’s something about the audience. The way they connect. The way they sing. The band is comfortable in its own skin, finally. We’ve always been dodging things or trying not to sound a certain way. There’s been a fair amount of internal [debate] about which direction to go. And I think we’re just calming down and accepting each other and embracing what we are and enjoying playing.”
