AARON DESSNER

Sometimes you become the person people try to pin you into a corner to be, which is not really fair.

Big Red Machine is really a community effort: I guess it involves almost 30 musicians. It does come out of our friendship, but it's really something that is deeply collaborative.

One of the negative sides of a really intense arc as a touring band is there are big gaps in your memory because you're so exhausted.

There are some things that you see that are hard to talk about. You can't talk about it. You just bear witness to them.

Die Like a Rich Boy' has, for me, some of the strongest lyrical content I've heard in many years; an epic love song laced with dark imagery and acerbic social criticism.

And my parents live down in West Virginia, and I have to drive through the Shenandoah Valley pretty often to go visit them. You actually drive right by Gettysburg and some other spots where there were huge battles.

The song 'Hymnostic' is kind of a gospel song, and that song is really fun to sing with as many people as possible. And anyone can sing it, you know?

After years of touring you experience music festivals that are mostly the same - where you copy and paste the same experience into a muddy field in California or a muddy field in England.

Sometimes my brother and I - we're twins, and sometimes we joke that we're like a two-headed monster. We can be hard to deal with because we don't break ranks; we stick together.

The National's favorite experiences as musicians are when we are collaborating with people a little outside of our world as a band.

I always want to have time to experiment, and have transitional things, and have these weird non-songs, but usually the stuff I'm working on comes down to this weird deadline, where it just never happens, and it's kind of a bummer.

I had been living with my family in France as COVID was starting to spiral out of control in Europe. I said to my wife that maybe they should come back to the States with me because I was worried about getting separated.

I busked a few times in Asheville, North Carolina, when I was 18. It was terrifying. I was probably just trying to meet girls.

I'm very fortunate and grateful to wake up every morning in the rural countryside I live in, looking at farmland and these beautiful mountains.

Our writing, especially during 'Boxer' - the recording process was the writing process, which is not the way I would advise anyone else to do it.

Our recordings, you feel that it's been, not labored, but you feel that it's been constructed in a way where sometimes it's hard for us to create the feeling that this was done in a room.

My wife is from Copenhagen and her father has been a huge Liverpool supporter since the early 1960s.

I used to think of 'alternative rock' as a radio format, kind of the way 'indie rock' used to have more meaning. But it means different things depending on where you are or what country you're in.

Anyone who's speaking up about anything becomes a target.

David Longstreth is one of the great guitar heroes of our generation.

I think the idea is that every time we perform Big Red Machine music it should be different somehow - like, different people, different songs maybe, definitely different versions of the songs.

It's very exciting to have a festival in the heart of Boston. It's an amazing experience to be in a city and to be able to walk in and out of a festival. I think that's part of what's going to make Boston Calling really special.

We wanted to create an opportunity for people to share anything, on their own terms, revenue and all. Get away from the commerce side of music, which can be exciting and necessary but ultimately dilutes the creative impulse. The further and further you go down that path is sometimes the further you are from the reason why you started making music.

One of the hardest things about being a musician is finishing a project and then having to wait three or six months to publish it and to do all the sort of promotional behaviour.

White people need to wake up and tell the truth about US history and the inequality and the ways in which racism is so entrenched.