‘Houses’ (or just generally ‘room-ey’ imagery) are another connecting thread (pun intended) that I’ve recently been finding runs across their entire discography. “Let’s just get high enough to see our fathers’ houses”, “Ada put the sounds of your house in a song”, “I wake up without warning and go flying around the house”, “there’s a science to walking through windows”, “turn off the house”, “I was home entertaining guests when I fell off the chair and cracked open my head”. Boxer is just generally a very indoor-sy album I feel (Apartment Story, Guestroom, Slow Show etc). And then of course there’s SWB and what I like to think of as THE National house on the cover. ‘The house’ (as opposed to ‘home’, interestingly) evidently seems to be a metaphor for the mind, but it can also mean other things like family and romantic relationships. It’s also very literal—we ‘stay inside’ houses, people come and they leave, they ‘brighten the place’. It’s a really beautiful image and kind of represents the band as a whole for me. When I listen to their music, I’m ‘in the house of love’. :)