This Brooklyn-based quintet did some heavy lifting and played to a lot of small audiences before the success of their third album led to acclaim and full houses. On tour to promote their newest release, lead singer-songwriter Matt Berninger tells Jim Carrollabout the positive aspects of taking the scenic route to success

IT WAS, reckons Matt Berninger, one of the longest overnight success stories he'd ever heard about. And he was the one who experienced it.

In spring 2005, The National released Alligator, which, like their previous albums (Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers and The National), was awash with elegant and graceful sounds and songs. Alligator was the work of a band relishing just what they could achieve within that traditional form involving guitars, drums and a lonesome deep baritone voice. Within a few months of the album's release, everyone wanted a piece of The National.

As the band toured Alligator from city to city and continent to continent, filling bigger and bigger rooms along the way, Berninger kept hearing about The National's overnight success. Overnight success? The singer could only chuckle at such a notion and wonder where everyone was the last time the band had an album to sell.

"We'd been around making records and touring for nearly seven years," he says wryly, "when people starting referring to us as this new super-hip-beat combo fresh out of Brooklyn."

Nevertheless, Berninger and his fellow bandmates have enjoyed the ride.

"It was really funny for us to get that kind of spin because we'd existed in the shadow of all those hot bands who had been getting the hype for so long. But compared with so many others, we'd taken the long, slow route. We were no overnight success, I can tell you. But it was really nice and thrilling to have a little bit of the spotlight shining on us after so long. Buzz comes and goes and we don't put much value on it, but it was cool to have it for a spell."

There's a lot of merit in the scenic route to success, he believes. "We've always attracted that word-of-mouth buzz, and that type of build takes time. The good thing about it is that you know people will find you. They will seek you and your record and your shows out.

"Alligator wasn't immediately catchy, and there really were not any big hit songs or pop songs on it. When we released it, we knew it wasn't going to be a huge splash record, but it's validating to have people much later start to really fall in love with it."

All that attention in 2005 meant that The National ended up touring with Alligator for longer than intended. Berninger admits that they considered keeping the car running and touring into the new year.

"Remember, it took a full year from the album's release to the point where we were selling out shows for the first time in our career so, yes, there was a temptation to keep riding that wave. But we realised if we continued to tour without a break and continued to milk Alligator, we would become worn out. A year is a long time to be on the road with the same songs and without a break. Financially, it would have been great but mentally it would have been terrible."

Instead of burning out or fading away far from home, they returned to Brooklyn, the place where a bunch of displaced friends from Ohio took their first steps together as a band in 1999. It was time to write another album, albeit one which would have a much larger audience.

Such anticipation was new for the band. "It does make a difference in a way," Berninger says, "the fact that we knew that people were waiting for it to come out and we knew people were talking about it. We'd never had to deal with expectations before so, if anything, we were very conscious of not screwing it up. I mean, we weren't going to run off and write mainsteam pop songs.

"I wouldn't say we had a strategy or a vision when we started working on Boxer, but I suppose there were some subconscious collective thinking going on. We got a sense that people were hoping Boxer would be like Alligator, but we knew it wasn't in us to just repeat ourselves."

There was, for a start, no process to repeat to come up with the same result. Berninger doesn't have a tried and trusted method of writing.

"Songs get pulled together in a variety of ways. It might start out with a handful of lyrics or a scrap of music. I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it is any good. I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality. Yes, it does take me forever to get a song finished."

What did change was what he chose to write about. While the literate and almost gothic templates and poise remain intact from Alligator and its predecessors, Berninger feels he has become a lot clearer in terms of structure, flow and even subject matter.

"Up to now, most of our songs have been a bit blurry because there is no lyrical narrative to them. I've always maintained that lyrics need to be good but they don't have to be obvious right away, and I suppose I've favoured being opaque over being specific. As we made the new record, though, I realised that there was a way I was using of talking about situations that was a lot more real than we had been in the past. The general mood was broader, more episodic."

He credits what he was reading at the time for this jump. "I was reading a lot of Jonathan Ames and I read Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute a couple of times. They definitely had a personality to them which influenced me, especially that off-centre way of stringing words and themes together."

Aside from those creative inputs and inspirations, Boxer gains from the confidence that comes from a previous successful record. While the fundamentals remain the same, you can spy the strides taken between Alligator and Boxer - they're in the way Berninger addresses his dreamy, allusional themes with a sharper eye and how the band colour in the script with a brighter spectrum of colours. Orchestral cushioning and brassy fringes may lift certain songs, but the overall feeling is of a band now wholly sure-footed about their calling.

The new album is also a little on the quiet side. "There was a point that we realised that there weren't any songs where I screamed my head off," Berninger says, "but we didn't worry too much about it. To force that on a song just because we've done that in the past was just never going to work for us."

As the current tour begins to move from festival stages to concert halls and theatres, Berninger and bandmates are happy and content to see faces in the stalls looking back at them.

"We toured a lot for years and often just played for the people working in the bar or the people in the other band who played that night. It's been a huge and welcome change that all of a sudden ther are a lot of people at our shows and they're paying attention to what we do."