There was even the occasional positive reinforcement thrown in, recapped in this dispatch from Neel, "At cafeteria. Dressed mad preppy today-- khakis, boat shoes, sweater. Murdoch calls Sal and I start walking away when I hear him answer 'Hello Mr. Murdoch.' Sal goes, 'Neel! Hold up!' I turn around. 'Mr. Murdoch says you're dressed perfectly today, and to keep it up.'" One time, Sal even put "Murdoch himself" on the phone, and a (presumably Australian) man asked Neel "Are you Indian or Pakistani?" When Neel replied that he was Indian, "Murdoch" said "OK" and hung up.

For years now the National have been singing about the city and wine and girls and maybe growing up a little, and if Boxer saw them embracing the bittersweet sting of maturity and nostalgia, High Violet follows hard on its heels with a set of songs about New York and Ohio, about the terrible, undertow pull of a (gasp) settled, normal life, about being a little in love with melancholy but also being self-aware enough to realize that love is a little ridiculous and self-destructive. Becoming an adult is a slow processes that involves thinking that you're not a certain kind of person, and then waking up one day and realizing that yeah, you are; recently, National songs have been about coming to terms with that as much as anything else.