The National’s concert at Edinburgh Castle was moving and euphoric

“That show was definitely a pillar, being so far from home and realising we’re not just another one of the ‘New York bands’”, Berninger said just over a year ago. “We definitely rode the fumes of the New York scene – the Strokes, Interpol – for a while.

“That brought a lot of people to our first shows in Europe and we milked that, but we did have a moment where we realised the reaction wasn’t connected to that. Whelan’s turned our heads a little bit – we’re not the B-side to Interpol any more”.

The National have come a long way since then. Now with 10 studio albums to their name - the most recent, First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track, were released within a few months of each other last year - they are unquestionably one of the most compelling live acts around. And Berninger - enigmatic, charismatic, a revered lyricist - bonds with audiences as few other frontmen seem capable of doing, as anyone who saw The National’s outstanding concert on Edinburgh Castle esplanade the week before last will testify.

It really was one of those concerts the intensity of which left you with a buzz that lasted for days. You couldn't take your eyes off Berninger who, as he always does, plunged into the crowd, hugged people in the front row, accepting their handheld cardboard signs before carefully placing them in a prominent position in front of the drum-kit.

It really was one of those concerts the intensity of which left you with a buzz that lasted for days. You couldn't take your eyes off Berninger who, as he always does, plunged into the crowd, hugged people in the front row, and accepted their handheld cardboard signs before carefully placing them in a prominent position in front of the drum-kit.

The set-list spanned many of The National's greatest songs  -- Eucalyptus, Bloodbuzz Ohio, I Need My Girl, Sorrow, Light Years, England, Fake Empire, About Today -- and reminded you of the potency of Berninger's considerable lyrical gifts against the backdrop of the soundscapes devised by the Dessner brothers, Aaron and Bryan. More than a few fans (including this one) welled upon at such songs as I Need My Girl, and England.

The final song, Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks, was sung entirely by the audience, arms aloft, with Berninger conducting us amidst minimal acoustic backing from the musicians. It was a splendidly moving - and communal - way of bringing a euphoric gig to a close.

If The National’s ascent in recent years has been stratospheric, every part of it is fully deserved. Looking back over their studio albums and the cumulative impact of Berninger’s lyrics, it’s hard not to take the view that they have become one of the defining acts of the age; it’s hard to disagree with the music critic, Graeme Thomson, who, reviewing Last Two Pages of Frankenstein, wrote that the band win Grammys, headline festivals and sell out arenas “with a kind of pulsing melancholy; a softly anthemic intimacy. The National”, he added, “have become huge while seeming not to lose sight of the smallest things. If they were an author, they might be Anne Tyler”.

The National - Berninger, the Dessner twins (both on guitar, piano and keyboards) and brothers Scott Devendorf (bass) and Bryan Devendorf (drums) - first got together in Cincinatti, Ohio, before relocating to Brooklyn, where they formed the in 1999.

They released their debut, The National, in 2001. The subsequent albums - Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, Alligator, Boxer, High Violet, Trouble Will Find Me, Sleep Well Beast, I Am Easy to Find, First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track - gradually saw them build a substantial fan-base. 'Gradually' is the key-word, however. Success did not come overnight. The band has had its share of moments when it seemed that the struggle wasn't worth the effort.

"When we were recording [2007 release] 'Boxer,' there was just so much tension in the band,” Scott Devendorf recalled in an interview with the San Francisco Examiner last November. “There was this really distinct feeling that if this record doesn't work, we're all going back to our day-jobs. And even after that album was a success, it took several years for the band to be a real viable thing, so we don't take anything for granted”.

More recently, the creation of Last Two Pages of Frankenstein was also difficult, for a variety of reasons that included a prolonged spell of depression and writer’s block suffered by Berninger. The very future of the band seemed to be in doubt.

“It’s never lost on me that I get to be a wizard of the black magic that’s music,” he told the New Yorker writer, Amanda Petrusich, in May last year. “I get to make these spells that make people cry, that make me cry. But to suddenly feel like that weird gift you had that enabled you to put little bits of words together and put them to a melody, or whatever songwriting is, this thing that you’ve built a whole life out of … The sparkles weren’t coming from my fingertips”. Mercifully for all concerned, Berlinger was eventually brought back - by time, and by the music that he heard his bandmates making.

His lyrics have long had their own admirers. As the journalist Laura Barton wrote in Uncut magazine last summer, his lyrics show a keen wit, an eye for the delicate, an unashamed intellect and a willingness to write openly about the insecurities of masculinity.

The vivid accumulation of specific detail in many of his lyrics brings home lacerating moments of loss and heartbreak. "The sky is leakin', my windshield's crying'/I'm feeling sacred, my soul is stripped/ Radio's painful, the words are clipped/ The grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes..", he sings on Weird Goodbyes, from the most recent album, Laugh Track.

Berninger's lyrics, writes the American academic, Dr Paul L. Thomas, in an online blog, "reflect the existential reality that our passions are our suffering, and we should never wish away our suffering because that would eliminate our passions as well. Feeling deeply is being fully human, not sad. And what resonates with me about Berninger’s lyrics is their sincerity about feeling deeply in our human experience.

"...While I am not claiming some sort of traditional argument that Berninger’s lyrics are universal themes, I am arguing that his lyrics capture the frailty and tenderness of being fully human and that his growth as a lyricist includes a level of sincerity that fill a person’s heart".

Sometimes, even Berninger is taken aback when he hears his lyrics being sung back at him by thousands of exuberant fans. Sorrow, a National classic from their 2010 album High Violet, is a case in point.

“Sorrow … is a really sweet song”, he told The Word magazine’s Rob Hughes in 2011. “It's about someone's love affair with their own sadness. It's not really about me, but to wallow in that stuff is sometimes really healthy. In a way it's a purging. It's about turning it around and owning it and not fighting these normal feelings.

“We live in an age” he added, “where we're trying to cure ourselves of everything, but sometimes we go through phases that we shouldn't make worse by trying to do that. It's just something that you go through. It's part of being alive and sometimes it's fun to celebrate that”.

Songs like Sorrow end up becoming communal anthems when you play live, Hughes noted.

“It's an amazing and weird experience to have a huge crowd of people singing 'Sorrow' at the top of their lungs”, responded Berninger. “It's not like people are cautiously celebrating sadness, but they're celebrating the idea of being emotional people together.

“A lot of our songs are about private or embarrassing moments, so you've no idea how much fun it is to see 10,000 people singing that stuff out loud. It's like we're all being losers together. It's an unbelievably good feeling when people connect to a song and sing along like that. That's why we're doing this in the first place”.

The National website: americanmary.com