The National is a band that was at one point famous for not being famous at all back when their openers, a little group called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, would attract people to the shows — but the people would leave before the headlining act. This ironically proved to draw attention to the band’s 2005 album, Alligator, which was placed at the top of three of the most prestigious year-end music lists, Billboard, the LA Times and The Onion. Back out touring for their new full-length, Boxer, the band is selling out venues all over the U.S. and Europe, and they’ll be coming ‘round our direction on Saturday. Lead singer Matt Berninger reminisced about the good old days with Daze, and got a good laugh about some identity confusion in Germany…

Daze: I know you have at least one brother. Is he the only one that you have?

Matt Berninger: I have a brother. He’s not in the band, though.

Daze: Did he ever want to be in the band? Did he ever feel left out?

MB: No, he’s nine years younger than I am but he made the first video for us that we’ve used. He just moved to New York in January, so he never felt left out. He was doing other things.

Daze: The members of the band all grew up in Cincinnati and all lived in Brooklyn when the band began — was this a coincidence or did you all know each other growing up?

MB: I knew Scott [Devendorf] in college, so we became good friends there, but I really didn’t know his brother Bryan, or Aaron and Bryce until we started getting together after we’d already moved to Brooklyn, so we never played music together or did anything really together in Cincinnati. It wasn’t ’til after we’d lived in New York for about four years that we started to do this.

Daze: Was there any kinship of the Cincinnati emigrant to New York that brought you guys together?

MB: I think it was when we were starting to put people together to make songs — we weren’t looking for Cincinnati people. It was just that Scott’s brother was in a band so the fact that we’re all from Cincinnati was definitely just incidental. I do think that there is something nice about how everybody’s got semi-similar roots. We usually try to spend a couple extra days in Cincinnati when we’re touring there, so that sort of thing makes it nice, but its hard to tell if there’s some sort of underlying kinship because of us all being from Cincinnati, but it definitely doesn’t hurt.

Daze: What was the order in which the pieces came together for the band?

MB: It actually started with Scott and I and my friend Mike Brewer who lives in Columbus now — he was living here for a while — he had a four-track, and so the three of us started playing around with stuff, and then he moved back to Ohio. Then Scott called his brother, Bryan, to come over to goof around with stuff and then he called Aaron and Bryce [Dessner]. It was actually over a long period of time; it wasn’t a conference call, and no one said let’s start a band … the truth is I think Bryce didn’t even start until almost a year after Bryan and Aaron started doing stuff. Bryce didn’t come into it until later. It was a slow birth for a band.

Daze: I have two questions regarding something I’ve read about your band name. First, I read that you wanted to make your name sound as simple as possible, and you settled on “The National” because you saw that it was benign and meaningless. I’m wondering what the appeal is to make your band’s first impression to people meaningless?

MB: I don’t know what the real idea behind that was. I guess we figured we needed a name, and every time we tried to come up with names it was something goofball or sarcastic or ironic and those kind of names, but we realized there was something annoying about them. We didn’t want the name to have anything to do with the music or try to illustrate anything at all. It sort of backfired because the name has been interpreted as us being a political band of some kind, which we’re really not. [Chuckles]. So it was to avoid any kind of connotation but I think that’s almost impossible with any name you pick. And the downside was it was impossible for anyone to find our website, or anything like that, so we probably should have thought that through a little better, but it is what it is.

Daze: What exactly did you guys say and do to assure Germans and other Europeans that your band’s name did not signify any relation to the Nazi party and ideals? Do you have any interesting story about that?

MB: Oh yeah, we played a show in Germany that was boycotted by this very left-wing group because they though we were somehow connected to the Nationalists. The German National in Europe has a much more ominous connotation. Nationalism is different over there just ‘cause there are so many countries that being a Nationalist means you’re very ethnocentric and xenophobic. The Nazi party, you know, they were national socialists. So it definitely has an ugly ring to it in some countries like France and Germany, especially. But that was a very brief and very isolated case where people thought that we were somehow associated with that, and it quickly blew over. But yes, that was another negative side effect of our so-called benign name.

Daze: What was your initial reaction when you realized that your show was getting boycotted there for that reason? Was it more laughing or like, “Wow…that was really bad…”?

MB: This wasn’t a big show; it wasn’t like it was a big arena. It was a pretty small show. The funny part is we played the show and there were a lot of people there but the people that boycotted the show invited us back to their squat actually, and that’s where we ended up staying. And they wanted to talk politics all night. So they stood outside and tried to boycott the show, but eventually afterwards they invited us back to their place, and we passed the wine all night and we talked politics, which wasn’t something we normally enjoy doing but in this case, [laughs] we thought it was important to explain to them that we had nothing to do with the right wing politics. Ultimately, it was kind of a funny footnote.

Don’t miss the National play the annual free show on the Arts Quad on Saturday, Aug. 25 with opening band White Rabbits. They are pretty sweet, it’s free, and you have nothing better to do at 6 p.m. anyway. After listening to Boxer, I guarantee it.