Getting the ball rolling

Some writers carry around a notebook to jot down observations, one-liners and any other “Is this anything?” that may one day become “This is something.”

Others use the Notes App on their phones and don’t type at all, instead dictating their ideas while they’re walking the dog.

Matt Berninger writes on baseballs.

The singer-songwriter and frontman of American indie-rock band the National usually likes to spread out when he writes, using Sharpies — so there is an element of permanence — on whiteboards, which is about as opposite from a baseball as you can get. Berninger has a visual art background, and he likes seeing the ideas pile up and collide against each other on a large canvas.

A few years ago, he found himself on a flight when inspiration struck. He didn’t have a notebook, but he did have a pen and a baseball — the latter being a longtime tour companion to kill time.

He started getting his ideas out on the blank spaces between the seams, thinking he would transfer them later.

“And then, it was just so enjoyable to write on the baseball, and I found myself writing differently,” he says. “It was kind of like being liberated from a notebook, or from your laptop or things that create line lengths and different things. When you’re writing on a baseball, you’re writing around on a sphere, and so words start to bump up against each other, and you let yourself into a spiral, and you have to edit because you’ve run out of room.

“It just yanks the wires out and plugs the wires in differently. It’s a way to get my brain to not walk in the same footsteps.”

It was through this writing process that Get Sunk, the 2025 solo album he’s currently bringing across the country on his first Canadian solo tour, was born.

He had been battling with depression and writer’s block after the release of his 2020 solo debut, Serpentine Prison. His “sunk” period.

But sometimes you have to get sunk to get unsunk, as it were, and the resulting album is one that, well, sounds like it was written on baseballs. Get Sunk evokes a sundappled, phone-free, Midwestern childhood — Berninger was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio — but it’s the kind of nostalgia that aches a bit.

And if writing on baseballs doesn’t rewire your brain, you can always rummage around in someone else’s.

Berninger and his band have been performing a lot of covers on the Get Sunk tour, even recording a version of New Order’s 1983 synth-pop single Blue Monday, released, appropriately, in January.

Theirs is more atmospheric and dark than the original, the way Joy Division might have done it, perhaps.

“It’s one of those Top 10 songs for me,” he says.

Radiohead and Nirvana were also popular picks on tour.

“I would jokingly say, ‘Hey guys, let’s do Kid A tonight’ like an hour before soundcheck, and the band would take it pretty seriously and have it kind of worked out. And then they’d put the pressure on me, like ‘We’ve learned it — have you learned it?’” Berninger says with a laugh.

But it proved to be a useful exercise. Learning and performing someone else’s song makes you engage with it in a whole new way. For Berninger, the process of deconstruction and reconstruction also helped him identify some overthinking tendencies in his own writing.

“We did Blue Monday a few times and it was just really fun, but it’s a funny thing to cover it and realize, like, I don’t even know half of these lyrics,” says the singer, who provides vocals on his National bandmate Bryce Dessner’s Oscar-nominated song Train Dreams.

“I think sometimes because I can’t play an instrument, I almost take the lyrics too seriously and work at them too hard. And then I cover a song that I think is a masterpiece and the lyrics are like, these don’t make sense at all.”

For a lyrics guy, Berninger knows that everyone listens to music differently and, for some people, vocals are simply another instrument. They might be listening for vowel sounds, not actual words, and certainly not metaphor and meaning. That comes later.

“Great songs continue to reveal themselves. No matter how many times you listen to it, you’ll find a new little mystery. I’ll be the first to admit that the lyrics almost completely don’t matter at all — at first. It’s the personality of the songs, the gooey, emotional, blurry feeling that a song can give you,” he says.

And there’s only so much of that a writer can control. Berninger likens songs to wild animals.

“They are their own beings. You can’t really chisel and craft a song into being a good song. Sometimes, you can work on a song for years, and it can be so close to being a great song and just never get there. And then another one you can work on for an hour and a half, and it has something. That’s the mystery of art.”

The hardest thing about being an artist is when you can’t figure out why something’s not good yet, he says. He has had every experience as a songwriter, from the frustration of banging his head against the wall to the euphoria of having a song click into place.

“I admit it: I really, really get bummed out and I’m difficult to be around when I’m struggling with writing a song. But then, at the same time, it’s like, no one even needs this. There’s no reason for it. Then that’s liberating.

“Then it’s like, ‘Let’s keep looking for magic.’”

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