The National – Sea of Love

It’s Tuesday. That means it’s new release day in the US. Depending on where you get your music news, you might not have known that there was anything other than the new Daft Punk album out today (in theory, but it was streaming on iTunes last week and was in my local record shop on Friday so…). But the album that arrived on my porch today was Trouble Will Find Me by The National.

Here’s where I admit that this is the first physical copy of one of their albums that I own. I’ve bought all the others as digital downloads then burned them on to discs to have in the car. My car is old. I have a smart phone and a bluetooth FM transmitter and I can actually rig that all up to stream music off the phone through the radio but I travel such distances that the frequency needs to be changed a few times during the drive and it’s kind of a pain. As long as the CD player still works, I’m going to keep using it. Now I finally have the booklet with all the liner notes and the lyrics and art work. I miss that when all I have is a file on the computer.

I’m going to be seeing them live in two weeks so I wanted to make sure I had enough time with the new album before the show. I’m really looking forward to it because it’s a relatively small place. The last time I saw them was at the Beacon Theatre in New York on the last night of their week-long run there, wrapping up their world tour for High Violet. The Beacon is a beautiful theater, not that big, and I had excellent seats so it was a great show. Still, I really love small shows and I’m excited to see how the dynamic is when they’re in a place that’s about half that size, general admission, at the start of the tour and on the road. The beginning of summer instead of the beginning of winter. It’s all different.

They’ve been quite busy promoting the album with appearances on Jimmy Fallon, David Letterman, a six hour performance at MoMA PS1, and even a documentary. Then today there were three pop-up shows announced on Twitter and pictures and video trickling out all day long. Given that their previously announced New York show is at the Barclays Center, I think these small shows today were highly sought after and for once I didn’t envy all those people scrambling to get into them. See you in a couple weeks, guys!