Writing Music: The National’s Boxer

This was the album I was in love with last year. I’ve actually put this back on because I was concerned that I was going to destroy the enthusiasm for the Walkmen’s You & Me. And considering I have a writing project in mind for the album, that would be bad news indeed.

Boxer is such a great album. And now that I’ve taken the time since discovering the National to explore the rest of their work, the greatness of Boxer is not an anamoly. While some songs are better than others on Boxer,  there really isn’t a bad song on the album. In fact, the album as a whole just makes me happy. The songwriting is topnotch, but there’s something beautiful about the band’s sound that does it for me. In many ways, it feels like something I’ve never heard before but was already familiar with. And songs like “Fake Empire”, “Squalor Victoria” and “Slow Show” take me back to a lot of different times in my life, as if the music had been following me around for years now. Tori Amos used to have this effect on me with her early albums, like I had dreamt her songs long before I heard them.

Anyway, I’m happy to have Boxer back on rotation. You were never far away, but I certainly missed you.

Now let’s make some stories.