Bringing The Dead To Life: An Interview With The National’s Aaron Dessner

The sheer magnitude of The National‘s Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner’s Grateful Dead compilation/tribute project, Day Of The Dead, is mind-boggling when you fully grasp the timeline. You can look at the track list and see 59 different songs or pick up the vinyl collection and hold literally 10 LPs in your hands and get a good sense of it, but do you realize that this idea was conceived in early 2011 – meaning it’s been incubating for well over five years now?

Finally, in 2013, Bryce came out at Bonnaroo and gave an update that he and a bunch of friends we’re ready to get together that summer to smoke some weed, hit the studio and put mortar to brick. Clearly one thing led to another, and another, and another, and next thing you know, they had six hours of music recorded, mixed and mastered across multiple locations over three more years. The 50th anniversary for the band came and went, but finally in 2016 we had liftoff.

After all that hard work, the natural inclination would be ride out the reception with a giant supporting tour to celebrate the magnanimous accomplishment, but instead the Dessner brothers have opted for a very special one-off celebration to take place at the Eaux Claires festival on August 12 and 13.

I spoke with Aaron Dessner (who yesterday was revealed to have worked with Bob Weir on his new solo album and will appear live with the Grateful Dead guitarist in October) about the decision for just a single celebratory Day Of The Dead performance, the preparation, the guests, and much more on the topic of the Grateful Dead, including the band’s potential influence on a new The National record.

JamBase: With respect to the Eaux Claires Festival and the Day Of The Dead performance, could you get into the logistics of this show a bit? Will you be playing as the house band so-to-speak, playing through the whole set with different guests, or will you cycle through entirely different acts throughout the set? How will that all play out?

Aaron Dessner: Yeah, the same sort of “house band” that was responsible for at least half of the tracks on Day Of The Dead – basically whenever you see it says “and Friends” on the record – that band will basically be the house band at Eaux Claires, but then a lot of other people will join us and filter in. There will be at least 12 or 13 different vocalists that come up during the set.

We will have folks like Justin Vernon, Jenny Lewis, Lucius, Matthew [Houck] from Phosphorescent, Matt [Berninger] from the National, Richie [Richard Reed Parry] from Arcade Fire, Moses Sumney, and many others. There are just so many people performing at Eaux Claires, so we designed it to be a real community kind of big jam. Obviously, there will be a setlist and stuff, taken mostly from Day Of The Dead and maybe even from some things that were not on Day Of The Dead, but the house band will get together and rehearse to make it easy on other people to join in as they want.

JB: I was going to ask about that. How much preparation will you guys get in beforehand? I’m guessing since it’s a core group, you must know at least good dozen or so tunes pretty well?

AD: Yeah, it’s the group that did a lot of the Day Of The Dead stuff and we also did that performance with Bob Weir a while ago. We are going to spend a week rehearsing before, but I also kind of believe in the theory that you shouldn’t be too rehearsed since so much of this is about spontaneity. But I see what you’re saying, we certainly could have done a proper tour and I think the record has enough support and attention on it that it would be fun to do a tour, but we also thought it would be fun to just get together once and having it be really special for Eaux Claires would be a really cool thing to do.

JB: Do you guys think you will jam in terms of improvised instrumental segments, or will this be more vocally oriented?

AD: I think both. There will be quite a bit of improvisation. Obviously, we want to get through a bunch of songs and have different people sing and everything, so it’s not like the kind of thing where we have a six hour set to do the whole record, but there will be plenty of jamming [laughs].

JB: How long is the set by the way?

AD: I believe it’s either 90 minutes or 105 minutes, so almost two hours. We should have plenty of time to stretch out a little.

JB: In terms of the records themselves, now that you’ve had time to process it and see the reaction from various places, what have been the songs you’ve found yourself going back to the most and which have turned out to be your favorites?

AD: It’s interesting, every time I take a little break from it and I come back to the record, I’m very pleasantly surprised. It’s almost a shock, just the scale of it and all the different corners it goes. I really like the breadth of it and I like that there is such a range. But I mean, when I hear the “Terrapin,” or the “Dark Star” we did with Cass McCombs, or “Wharf Rat” with Ira from Yo La Tengo, or “Brokedown Palace” with Richie, Caroline Shaw and Garth Hudson – those are some of my favorites. There are so many tracks on there that I can turn on and just listen to that one track, where I almost feel like if we had gone and only done that one song it would have been worth it. I feel that way about a lot of the songs.

We obviously did it because we love the Grateful Dead and we wanted to do something for the charity [The Red Hot Organization for AIDS/HIV research] and this would be a powerful way to do it, but there is so much heart and attention to detail in it. The tone of it is really cohesive even though it wasn’t all recorded in the same place. I really feel so good about it.

I also like a lot of the esoteric stuff like “What’s Become Of The Baby” by the German chamber group Stargaze, and The Rileys – Terry Riley and his son Gyan Riley – do this insane “Estimated Prophet,” which is cool because you have a composer that predates the Dead interpreting the Dead. Also some of the different cultural perspectives like Charles Bradley doing “Cumberland Blues” or Tal National doing “Eyes Of The World.” There really are a lot of highlights for me.

And then you have to love “To Lay Me Down” with Perfume Genius and Sharon Van Etten, which are probably two of my favorite artists, and that might be one of my favorite things. I could honestly probably spend another whole year listening to it and living with it.

JB: I was curious, you’re around that age where you would have been in high school when the Dead were still playing and it was kind of the last golden age for the jam band scene. Were you in that scene as a high school kid when you learned to play music? Were you in bands playing this kind of stuff when you were younger?

AD: Kind of, Bryan and Bryce and I used to play Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers, and even some jazz – my dad is actually a jazz drummer – so we kind of got our chops through that stuff. We learned it and then sort of unlearned it all.

At that time in suburban Ohio, the Grateful Dead was everywhere and Phish was really growing. I remember seeing Phish at Bogart’s in Cincinnati in like 1991 and I loved the musicianship, but I was never a huge fan of the songwriting in Phish. With the Grateful Dead, I loved everything. I was always more interested in the songwriting and the avant garde experimental aspect of how they played than the jamming-just-for-jamming sake. Don’t get me wrong, I love great moments and what they could do musically at times was very special, but I never really wanted to be in a jam band.

We got into Pixies and The Smiths and Sonic Youth around the same time, stuff that was more about songwriting but had this experimental aspect to it. It never felt opposed to me. I felt like I could love the Grateful Dead and I could love Sonic Youth or Pavement at the same time. That was coolest part about this project – which I kind of knew already – but it was cool to discover that Lee Ranaldo and Stephen Malkmus love the Grateful Dead too. All these heroes getting in the same room was special for us and a lot of our peers. You’ll still hear this stuff a lot like, “The Dead were uncool,” or “It really wasn’t my thing,” so this was a cool bond to form.

I also always appreciated the musicianship though in the sense that you could try to play like them, but you couldn’t ever quite get to it. It was so highly evolved how Jerry Garcia and Phil [Lesh] would play, or Bob’s [Weir] rhythm, or Billy [Kreutzmann] and Mickey [Hart] together. It formed this incredible alchemy of mixing modes and styles of playing.

When we would geek out on Jerry’s playing – even as we got better – it was so elusive. He played like fiddle sometimes or he’d play like a great jazz soloist sometimes. For the musicians in us, that really stayed with us. It wasn’t a heavy influence on The National as a whole, but things stayed with us, like the way I play guitar I can still hear it in songs that I’ve written. We were never doing really extended improvisation in the band. At least until now – it’s starting to happen more now. Maybe that’s one side product of this whole thing is that it may creep more into The National. It’s been weird having all these worlds colliding again. It’s been a lot of fun.

JB: The last thing I wanted to ask you is along those lines. I read that you are working on a new The National album. Do you think maybe we’ll hear some more improvisation? Or the Dead tended to reuse a lot of the same tricks in their chord progressions, do you think any of that will come across in the new record?

AD: It won’t be there in an obvious sense, but in general, the record we are making is much more experimental and it’s not as concise. There are some much longer form songs on it. Also, we have realized that for Bryce and me as guitarists, it would be liberating to free ourselves a bit more and wander, and that is kind of happening naturally. Maybe some of the angst in The National as we’re getting older – it’s getting less tense and we’re getting more open. I also think that’s coming from George Harrison’s influence and a couple of other things going on, but definitely this record feels like more colorful and breezier.

This Day Of The Dead project was just so much fun. You can’t help but enjoy yourself and smile. Even with Matt singing “Morning Dew” and “Peggy-O,” even though we did them in our way, it was such a good vibe. Everyone just relaxed a lot. It almost feels like there is a wind blowing through it, which is a nice feeling, and that’s probably the influence of the Dead.