Here's What Happened When Matt from The National and Brent from Menomena Became EL VY

EL VY shot by Deirdre O'Callahan

Sitting in a corner of the oversized top floor bar/lounge area of a hotel that overlooks the World Trade Center memorial, Brent Knopf and Matt Berninger are breaking up a bar of dark chocolate, wondering how much of an effect it has on their nervous systems.

“Is there a link between caffeine and chocolate?” asks Knopf.

“I have a six year old,” replies Berninger with a chuckle. “It's definitely a stimulant.” They both laugh. They're relaxed and easygoing, their interaction suggests suggest they’re old friends and indeed they are. While the pair have forged separate musical careers—Knopf in Menomena and Ramona Falls, Berninger as the frontman of The National—they first met some 12 years ago, toured together a couple of years later and started toying around with the idea of working together sometime after that. Their memories of exactly when all that happened are hazy but after many years, the project now has a name—EL VY—and they've finished an album, Return to the Moon. Their project is finally fully tangible and real.

Equal parts experimental, moody, and playful, the album’s nine songs strike a chord somewhere between the music Portland-based Knopf and LA-based Berninger have made with their full time bands in the past. Centered around two fictional characters—Didi Bloome and Michael—who are inspired, in part, by Minutemen’s D. Boon and Mike Watt, the record was written remotely and over email, swapping ideas as and when they could.

“It was just so fun,” says Knopf. “I had a blast. It came together in this really organic, fun way, just a combination of stuff we'd been working on on the back burner for a while and some late, last minute contenders that just came out of nowhere. We finished the record with our friend Craig [Silvey], and now we're preparing for some piano and voice promo shows, and it feels great. It's been super exciting to translate the songs for piano and voice. I'm having a great time.”

“I really can't wait for it to come out,” adds Berninger. “Working on this was not easy—we worked really hard—but it was always really fun. When we first started talking about it years and years ago, one thing we always said was we didn't want to start a new band and we didn't want something that was going to add more anxiety, or stress, or become a burden in any way. And we stuck with that. That's maybe why it took a long time, but a year or so ago when I finished touring Trouble Will Find Me, we dove into it and then started working really hard. It was several years of just a fun thing that was in the background, where I would open up files on the tour bus or in hotels when out with The National. It was just a safe, fun place to go in the midst of all this other stuff that was happening. And it stayed that way, even when it came down to working hard on it, which we did for many, many months. The whole thing has been a joy."

Continued below.

Noisey: Given that you guys wrote this record remotely, how did that affect the dynamic of the songwriting process compared to how you both usually operate?
Brent Knopf: Well actually, with Menomena, even though we lived in the same city, we did most of our writing individually.

Matt Berninger: And The National almost never write together in a room. We're actually trying to do that now for the first time. I lived in the same house as Aaron [Dessner, The National’s main songwriter] and there was a studio in the backyard that I almost never went into, because I write lyrics and melodies and stuff with my headphones on my laptop with GarageBand in bed. That's how I write. So this project was not dissimilar. The music was very different from The National stuff, so I think I was writing differently because of what Brent had sent me, but the process wasn't that different.

Did you find it liberating to write something outside of your usual format? Was it a release to get away from the day job, as it were?
Brent: I think what I found intriguing was the aspects of our songwriting that this project has drawn out in us. I tend to veer towards the gloomy and there's definitely the full emotional spectrum on this record. I also feel like there are more lighter emotions on this, some more breeziness and airiness, so that's been fun to see.

Matt: Both of us write gloomy stuff usually, so it was a surprise to see the chemistry of the way he writes and the way I write coming together and suddenly the result was not gloomy. I thought it might be even darker, and it turned out not. And we had no discussions about what kind of record to make or what sort of songs to write.

Brent: I feel like we had time to really explore an idea and twist it around. I'd send Matt a version of a song and he'd up the tempo by 20 bpm and turn the verse into the chorus and make the chorus the verse and send it back to me, and then all of a sudden I'd have these new ideas and I'd change the chords in one section and send it back to him and that would give him a different idea for the melody. Those kind of twists don't happen as readily when you're in the same room or at the same table, because you need a second to try things out. You need to be captain of your own ship.

Matt: I think we both had this attitude of “Give it to me and I can ruin it, and then I'll give it back to you and you can fix it.” We both had the same philosophy to each other: let me do a bunch of bad shit and eventually between both of our barometers hopefully we'll take all the bad stuff out and pull it together into something. But there were no rules; nobody was driving the car. It was like we were both in the backseat. We were both in the backseat and we put a brick on the accelerator.

Veering towards the cliff edge…
Matt: Yeah, but hoping it wouldn't go off the cliff!

It is very playful, though. It's got this real joyful exuberance to it.
Matt: There are stakes to putting this thing out, but honestly I no longer worry about the stakes of a record connecting with anyone other than myself, or the people I’m making the record with. I think that’s happened to me not just with this project, but ever since I had a kid. All the guys in The National, we’re having fun and we’re writing stuff that we never did before because, well, why the fuck were we so worried about writing a bad song? Let’s go off and risk falling on our face.

So it was a fun jumping off with the knowledge that we could fall on our face, but that that’s okay.

With that in mind, do you see this as a new band, or as a band with the heritage of your past works on your shoulders?
Matt: We keep trying to avoid calling it a band. I have a band, and I love that band, and that’s my band. So I don’t think of this as a band. This is a collaboration between really good pals. But I guess we are a band. I don’t know!

When you first met, did you have an idea that you might collaborate and work together?
Brent: Certainly not 10 years ago.

Matt: The memory that I have is you came to [now-defunct Portland venue] Berabti’s Pan. We’d known each other for a long time but we weren’t close. You were actually closer friends with Scott [Devendorf, The National’s bassist], but you came up and said something really nice and we chatted a little bit and I think it was shortly after that that I said, “Oh, by the way, if you’ve ever got any leftovers that you’re not using for Menomena or Ramona Falls, send it to me.” But I don’t know what year that was, because The National played with Menomena a bunch of times. But in my brain, the spark, the idea in my brain of doing something with Brent happened in Portland after having a conversation with him after a National show. And I obviously don’t remember when that was!

Brent: We were both so drunk. We felt so ashamed later.

Matt: I knew he was so prolific, but I didn’t realize how prolific. He sent me 450 ideas that he had been collecting. I think we determined that he sent me 11 or 12 hours of song ideas—but some of them were 20 or 30 seconds long. I just made a playlist of that and I would start to cherry pick from a huge folder of songs and put them in another folder, which I would call The Moon and I would occasionally pull it up, throw them into GarageBand and try to write some lyrics or some melodies for it. And that was happening on tour with The National in buses and hotels and backstages. And then I would put it down and not touch it for months, then send him little ideas and then I wouldn’t hear from him. There was a period when I sent you a bunch of sketches back that had some ideas and I didn’t hear from you for like, six months.

Brent: No! Really?!

Matt: Do you remember that? And I was like, “Maybe he hates all this stuff.” Honestly, there was a long period where I was like, I haven’t heard from Brent at all about these 20 ideas I sent him back.

Brent: The cold shoulder! Matt: Yeah! And I thought that maybe this thing was petering out or had lost its steam, and then six months later he sent me this thing back that had those 20, plus 20 more ideas, and he’d taken them and pulled them apart, and I’d then do the same thing. But it wasn’t until about last year when we really decided that there was all this stuff we’d been tinkering with sporadically over the last couple of years and were like “Let’s finish this. Let’s make a record!” And then we worked really hard for several months.

It sounds really cohesive as a record, both thematically and musically. It’s disparate, but it fits together and it works really well. Why do you think that is?
Brent: Part of it is the way that it’s sequenced, but while we were working on it, every now and then Matt would send me a tune by Minutemen to check out, and it was pretty funny to see allusions and references to Mike Watt and D. Boon, through their alter-egos, crop up in these songs.

Yeah, I was going to bring that up next—the themes of this record and the presence of Minutemen. That narrative obviously helps bring it all together.
Matt: The melodies and stuff we were tinkering with over years, but the writing of the lyrics kind of happened in a much smaller period of time, and during that period of time I was listening to Minutemen a lot. I love their documentary, We Jam Econo, and the friendship between D. Boon and Mike Watt. And then my daughter, who’s six, was listening obsessively to the Grease soundtrack. For whatever reason, maybe because I’m seeing my daughter grow up and become who she is, I started thinking about my past and my childhood. Mostly it’s my teenage adolescence in Cincinnati and how I fell in love with music and stuff. That was in my head a lot, so all those things, once the record was 90 percent done, I was like “Shit, there’s all these connections.” And then I started going with it—Didi Bloome is a character based on D. Boon, Michael is based on Mike Watt—that’s why I named them that. I turned D. Boon into a woman because it’s also about my life and it’s also about falling in love. And there’s a little bit of Olivia Newton John in there, too, so it’s a spider web of interconnected strands of themes. But it’s not sequential. It’s not Tommy.

I read a quote that said this is the most autobiographical work you’ve ever done, Matt, which seems slightly ironic given how much is inspired by Minutemen.
Matt: Yeah. I mean, I’ve never met Mike Watt, but the documentary is about two pals in San Pedro who just became friends and music was the glue that glued these two dudes together. And they were kind of misfits, they were a punk band but they were also writing jazz, and so I connected with how it was about friendship, and I think my strongest friendships, and a lot of them are my earliest ones, were all founded with music. I don’t watch sports or anything like that, so music was how I found my tribe of people that I connected with in Cincinnati. I just used other personalities as foils to tell these stories and set these scenes. I think. I’m just figuring it out!

So Brent, did you feel any disconnection with regards to the subject matter, given that you were writing this music that presumably became something else when Matt would write lyrics for it?
Brent: I can’t be bothered with lyrics! I never pay attention, so it didn’t really matter what they were. [Laughs.] Actually, I just trusted Matt to do his thing.

Matt: I think we trusted each other. We commented on each other’s stuff and we gave our opinions, but it was also just follow your gut. I don’t play the guitar or the piano – I can cut things apart and arrange them, but I talked to Brent about lyrics the whole time. It was kind of reckless and we didn’t have any kind of vision at the beginning because we didn’t care what kind of record it was going to be. We were just going to the let the record be whatever kind of record it wanted to be and it got there in a weird, reckless way. We didn’t try to rein it in at all. We just let it go. Like “I’m The Man To Be” is the last song we wrote and it’s the only song like it on the record and it happened very fast at the last minute.

Brent: It was so last minute that we didn’t have the luxury of rethinking anything. Usually, I’m able to sit with a song and let it sink in and rework stuff, but with this one…

Matt: …there was never a moment where it was like “Are you sure you want there to be a chorus about attaching kites to your dick?” We didn’t have time. It was too late. It was mastered before we realized we shouldn’t put that in there.

EL VY's Return to the Moon is out on 10.30 via 4AD