Highest Rated Comments


CatamenialPneumoThrx205 karma

This is one of my favorite stories to tell, and it directly involves your band, the National:

It was the summer of 2010 and I had just graduated from college. I was up in Buffalo, NY visiting one of my friends from school, and was in the Buffalo airport, at my gate waiting to board my flight back to NYC.

As I tend to do when I am alone and waiting for things to happen, I was on CNN.com on my blackberry, reading an article (this one http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Music/06/17/before.i.get.old/index.html) about success for late blooming bands, that primarily focused on this band based in Brooklyn, that I had never heard of, called the National.

The plane starts to board, and I have to put my phone in my pocket, and I stand up and wait for my boarding zone to be called. Eventually it is, and I sit down in my aisle seat on the left side of the plane.

I look to my right, and I see these two dudes sitting next to me, in their early 30s, dressed like Brooklynites (always obvious), wearing sunglasses on a plane on an evening flight, and one of them looks like Jesus Christ himself, and they both look extremely familiar…

I take my phone out of my pocket, and look at the article that I was IN THE MIDDLE OF READING, and it is immediately clear that I am sitting next to two members of the band (whom I now know as the Devendorf brothers) that I was in the middle of learning about!!!

Any question that I had that these were members of your band were answered when the Jesus-looking fellow proceeded to play the finger drums on the seatback for the majority of the flight. Hilariously, we were sitting in the emergency aisle, and when the flight attendant came by to talk to us about the importance of this seating location, Bryan had already memorized the emergency pamphlet and was reading it off to her from memory. This apparently had never happened to this particular flight attendant, as both she and I were in stiches.

Anyways, when we got off the plane, I asked them if they were in fact, from the National. They seemed surprised that I had recognized them, and I told them that I was a huge fan of High Violet (then a blatant lie). Since then I have become a HUGE fan (actually), and have been to two shows (Raleigh, NC and at the Beacon Theatre in NYC), which have blown my mind. I hope to see you again at the Barclay’s Center in June!

Favorite Songs: Slow Show, Green Gloves, Karen, Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks