The National are back with another new song from their forthcoming album “First Two Pages of Frankenstein”. “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend” features Phoebe Bridgers, and it arrives with a new psychedelic music video, directed by Bridgers’ brother, Jackson, and starring Matt Berninger’s brother, Tom. The Berninger brothers frolic in the woods and on a playground, both wearing black suits. (Matt’s is accented with plumes of fresh flowers.) Bridgers makes a brief cameo, picking up a baby sitting on the playground.
According to a press release, “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend” was born after Matt Berninger broke through some writer’s block. “When I feel stuck, I’ll often grab a book off the shelf just to get some words in my head, and the first two pages of Frankenstein ended up triggering ‘Your Mind Is Not Your Friend,’” he said. “The book starts off with the narrator on a voyage near the Arctic Circle, and that image of being adrift helped me to write about feeling disconnected and lost and lacking in purpose. Once I started confronting that strange, blurry panic of not having ideas, everything began to crack open a bit.”
Berninger talked about working with Bridgers on the song: Well, I had gone over to Phoebe kind of trying to work on songs. We talked about writing songs, and we both write in similar ways, I think. And we’re both fans of the way we write and we talk about how to write and how to write about the things that you hate about yourself, which she’s incredible at. And so after that I was like, “I have to write about this.” Even though I was allergic to myself at the time. I was like, “This is all I can do with this, so I have to write about it.” So when finished the song, I felt it needed, since my wife was a big part of the inspiration, I kind of felt like it needed that a presence of another voice or another person, and Phoebe jumped in, she was just perfect for that. And because her voice is just such a tender, just warm hug and so it added that sort of dimension to it, which was crucial for it to work.
“First Two Pages of Frankenstein” is out April 28.
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