The National are a week away from releasing a new album, First Two Pages Of Frankenstein, the band’s first since they were sucked into the orbit of pop stars like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran during the pandemic. That means its members are talking about their high-profile collaborations a bit more in-depth, and some new information is contained in a recent interview with The Telegraph.

Matt Berninger revealed that he had first tried to see if “Cardigan” and “Willow” — the #1 singles from Swift’s folklore and evermore — could have been songs for the National instead. The instrumentals for both were written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner as part of their characteristically prolific output. “There’s a lot of raw material,” Aaron Dessner said in the interview. “I might write 200 ideas, and Matt would focus on 10 or 20. A lot is left over.”

“I’d taken a swing at [‘Cardigan’] and ‘Willow’ and a couple of others, and I wasn’t having a lot of luck, so Aaron sent them to Taylor,” Berninger added. “I always have a lot of music to work on, and I am looking for something to connect emotionally. The reverse has happened too, where Aaron wrote something for Taylor, and I dove right in. It works both ways.”

“She is an incredibly gifted writer, with the lyrical prowess of a Joni Mitchell but also an entertainer on this level of, like, Beyonce, and I don’t think we’ve seen that before,” Dessner continued. “She made me so much better than I could have ever imagined on my own. It felt like a lightning bolt hit the house. Because I just do what I do. And then she would be like, ‘here’s this elaborately written narrative to your sad piano that you played on ‘Cardigan’.”

Dessner went on to talk about his work on Sheeran’s upcoming new album – (Subtract), and what he thinks of his pop collaborations in general:

Ed’s written an incredibly vulnerable, raw, intense record. I find it fascinating how different everyone is in terms of their musical brain, their rhythm and melody and lyrical sense. I couldn’t write a shiny pop song if I tried. So hearing Ed and Taylor find themselves in my sketches is weirdly life affirming, it gives me hope that people are not so concerned with instant gratification. I think young people do want authenticity, music you have to dig into. It’s not the way TikTok and social media works. But I feel like some of these really talented, big artists can shift the paradigm.

The National have 11 new songs of their own coming next week on First Two Pages Of Frankenstein: one of them features Swift, two of them feature Phoebe Bridgers, and one of them has Sufjan Stevens.