Hot New Joint: "Sunshine on My Back" by The National

It’s been a minute since we’ve heard anything from The National—they released Trouble Will Find Me two years ago, and were pretty much touring incessantly behind it ever since, only slowing down towards the end of 2014.

If history is any indication, the band is due for another album in 2016, but to tide us over, and to continue the promotional cycle behind the band’s documentary Mistaken For Strangers, on Thursday, The National released a new single—“Sunshine on My Back.”

Don’t get too excited. I mean, you can get excited, because it’s a good song. But it’s not a “new” song. It’s leftover from the Trouble Will Find Me album sessions. It’s a bit surprising that they opted not to re-release that album with “bonus tracks,” or an EP of material that never made the final cut; they’ve done that very thing with all of their records dating back to 2005’s Alligator.

And yikes. Alligator is a decade old now.

“Sunshine on My Back” is, for better or for worse, a “National” song. It’s exponentially more compelling than some of the weaker tracks on Trouble—the Bono-vibes of “Heavenfaced” or the lazy rhymes of “Graceless”—but it’s not quite up to par with that album’s best material—“I Need My Girl” and “Pink Rabbits.”

There’s a dramatic, underlying tension in “Sunshine” that the band has been toying with for more than a decade—it’s akin to Boxer-era, sonically speaking. It’s a song that moves quickly, forgoing the traditional verse/chorus/verse structure, and it tears through verses before reaching a refrain near the end.

Lyrically, National frontman Matt Berninger has either been known to be incredibly ambiguous, or insert himself directly into a song to make it personal and pretty direct—here kind of blurs the line slightly, reminiscent of Trouble’s “The Last Time,” where you are left uncertain, and slightly uncomfortable, by wondering if the “me” in the song is him.

It’s one of their more evocative songs—perhaps that has something to do with imagery of “sunshine on my back,” which is then followed in the refrain by “is the only kind I like.” Or perhaps it has to do with the bridge section of the lyrics—painting an awfully heartbreaking (and awfully beautiful) portrait of two lonely people, attempting to connect. “But just don't try to talk yourself into this love,
and sleep like a baby while I'm staying up,” the female protagonist, Tina, tells her male counterpart.

“Sunshine on My Back” will go down as not being one of the greatest songs in The National’s canon, but it rises above the mediocre throwaways that are hiding out there too. It’s a welcome reminder of why the band has been so successful—both critically and now commercially as well, and it’s also a reminder of why they have been one of most important, intelligent bands to come out of the last decade of popular music.

"Sunshine on My Back" is available now in iTunes