And just before I go, to follow the Songs of the Day up, this seems apt. A quite breathtakingly beautiful track. Heard on the radio a couple of days ago and I've been playing it every since. The first song from The National's most recent album Trouble Will Find Me, from two years back. With a title to die for. These things matter. All about sibling love, written by lead singer Matt for his much younger brother Tom, about the moment he left him to go to college. These things matter too.
'Matt: That song had been kind of cooking for a while and it was one of the first songs that was being written [for the new album]. Some of that stuff was mostly written after you [Tom] had been fired and then later when you were living with us. Tom was in my head a lot and the song … I don’t think I did anything wrong but I left for college when Tom was 9 years old, and I was almost his older brother/hero when he was a kid, and then I kind of just poof, disappeared, right when he started to need me the most. You go from being a little kid to a teenager in those years and that’s when you need help from an older brother, and I was gone. I was off to college then off to New York, and he ended up taking a very different path and sometimes stumbled along the way, and so did I in the path I was going on. I think there was a certain amount of guilt of abandonment so that song was channeling some of that. But at the same time, the song is trying to recognize that we’re different and we have different enemies and we have to fight our own fights sometimes. It was the first time I’ve ever written anything about him. It was going to be salt, or pepper, but salt won [laughs]. I don’t even know what it means: Salt, regret, salty tears.'
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