The National is not cowardly. They won’t cave to thuggery and brutish demands to do this and do that, or else. They do respect the art and act of the petition. Much like the Live Earth pledge and petition that Rosario Dawson and Al Gore are working for, fans of the New York-by-way-of-Ohio band have already taken the time to mount a partially effective petition to get some of their favorite, less visible album tracks into the live set. This mysterious petition, which The National did not elaborate extensively upon when they visited, was likely an act of the Internet, because pens and paper and the bricks and mortar are dying a slow death. The fans demanded these songs that, for reasons of time constraining and not being able to always get what you want, could not fit into the band’s regular set. They like their set the way it is right now too, so there wasn’t much this petition could do. There’s not too far that it could really be taken. The guys took the opportunity to use the Daytrotter forum to formally answer this plea, this begging, the petition once and for all. The fans cried for these songs in a live setting and this is the closest that they’re going to come to getting them that way. From the sound of things at the conclusion of the session, this could be the only live version that you’ll ever hear of these songs. They were recorded June 10, the day following a sold out show in Madison. They were here a few hours after The Maccabees, a lovely English pop band that left The National a love note as they left. The band had pizza before the session and then promptly taught themselves how to play the Psychedelic Furs classic song five minutes before it was recorded. Enjoy the rareness petitioners! – Sean Moeller

Song descriptions, in the form of a paragraph from Matt Berninger:
“Lucky You” is an older song off of our record Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. We get a lot of requests for than one live but rarely play it. We actually received a formal petition with a ton of signitures to play it but we never did. We’ve been focusing mostly on the more recent stuff, but we thought Daytrotter was a good opportunity to put a live version out there once and for all.
“Gospel” is a hard song to play live although we try it a lot so we
thought we’d give it a shot with you guys. The version of “Slow Show” was an experiment. The same thing happened to Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. “Pretty in Pink” is song I’ve always been in love with. Everything about that song is great and the lyrics are as good as they get.

First song
Lucky You (The National) [3.61MB] [15383 downloads]


– original version appears on Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers

Second song
Gospel (The National) [3.96MB] [34026 downloads]


– original version appears on Boxer

Third song
Slow Show (The National) [3.90MB] [13902 downloads]


– original version appears on Boxer

Fourth song
Pretty in Pink – unreleased cover
(downloads of this song were capped at 5000 copies.)