Todd can still remember the first time he heard The National back in 2007, and years later he was excited to discover that Matt Berninger, the band’s lead singer and lyricist, wore his tailoring. Mutual admiration turned into friendship, and as Matt was getting ready to tour in support of his new album, Get Sunk, he invited Todd up to his house in Connecticut to talk about his creative process and to give a masterclass in how to style the season’s suits and sport coats.

Todd Snyder: Clothes pop up in your lyrics from time to time. In one of my favorite songs, “Mistaken For Strangers,” you have the lyric “Showered and blue-blazered/Fill yourself with quarters.”

Matt Berninger: I stole that line from a book called The Extra Man by the writer Jonathan Ames.

TS: I remember the first time I heard Boxer. It was one of those moments when a band and an album became part of the soundtrack of my life...

MB: Boxer was the album where we found what we were doing. That was the first record where I was trying to impress Carin [Besser, Matt’s wife]. She was a fiction editor at The New Yorker and a poet. So Boxer was an elevated thing for us.

TS: How do you start a song? Does it start with a lyric?

MB: There’s songwriting and there’s poetry. And they’re as different as swimming and ice skating. It’s still just words. Or just water. But they’re totally different things. 

TS: Is songwriting more of a puzzle than poetry?

MB: It’s a sculpture.

TS: Where did Get Sunk, the title for your new album, come from? It’s awesome by the way.

MB: I had walked away from a lot of projects when I had writer’s block, and that was my sunken period... And getting past this very fearful, insecure, sunken place... I started writing with a whole new perspective. It cleared everything... So it was good to have gotten sunk.