THE NATIONAL - Sleep Well Beast (2017), listens #2-3
The way time fell this week, I ended up listening a third time before getting around to writing anything up. Hence the minor break from the usual format of real-ish time reactions to spins #1 and #2. Hey, as long as I do three posts on Sleep Well Beast , the overall approach to blogging about a record as I absorb it remains the same. I remember when the third listen was a bit of a task for some of the early National records. It was exciting to be done with listen number three of the self-titled, so I could stop writing about it and listen to something else. (As mentioned before, three is my usual magic number before I say I "know" a piece of music; the stuff that clearly isn't for me might not survive on my list to even make it to three spins, of course.) I don't think I ever had any doubt that Sleep Well Beast would be getting at least four, and more likely five or six full runthroughs before I'll be satisfied that I've gotten everything I wa