The National - i should live in salt, 2013

"In truth, that song is very much—but not on an every line level—about my younger brother, Tom. He was very much in mind the whole time I was writing thoughts and lyrics for that song. It’s about maybe feeling some guilt about having left somebody or abandoned somebody. Not that I felt so guilty. I left for college when my little brother was nine years old, and then we became reunited when he joined us on tour. He just finished making a film about that, and it’s really good. It’s called Mistaken for Strangers. But we spent a lot of time together over the past couple years, and he lives with my wife and I still, actually. It has been a great thing, and it has also been a really toxic situation. But now we know each other as adults, and I think the song is a reflection on our relationship, and some of it is my guilt or feeling that he went in a different direction than I did. He’s a brilliant, hilarious, happy man, but the spirit of the song is about him. The salt in the song, I couldn’t say why I put that in there. It could be something like “I should live in tears” or something. I don’t know. It just felt good. Maybe I’m hiding some of my earnest emotion in that one behind a weird title."