Kornhaber: There’s a sample or spoken-word segment about “the reality-based community” losing their power on the Sleep Well Beast track “Walk It Back.” What is that?

Berninger: Well, according to Wikipedia, it’s Karl Rove who said that to [the journalist] Ron Suskind, but I don’t think he officially admits to having said that. After Trump won, I just chewed on it over and over again. It’s basically someone saying, “Yeah, we know what we’re doing. If we can control people’s understanding of what is true then we get to do whatever the fuck we want.” That’s been the secret strategy for a long, long time.

Kornhaber: So what is that quote doing on what sounds, to me, like a song about a relationship?

Berninger: I don’t think of one song as being a relationship song and one being a politics song. It’s one big giant bowl of stuff for me. “Fake Empire” [from 2007’s Boxer] is a political song, but it’s also a song about getting fucked up and avoiding responsibility in life. It’s a drinking song, too.

Politics is personal. I don’t understand why people separate love and politics in their art—and I don’t know who does. We don’t expect people who write novels to be like, “Oh, this chapter is the political chapter and over here is the love chapter.” Somewhere along the line, musicians felt it was uncool to be political. It never made any sense to me. Who’s cooler than Nina Simone? And why would you take it out of your toolbox of stuff to write about?

Kornhaber: But when you think about the world, you think about the dynamics of politics being the same as the dynamics of relationships?

Berninger: How you respect yourself or someone else in the most immediate relationship is political. If somebody sitting next to you in a movie theater is eating popcorn in a way that bugs you, your choice to go, “ugh, shut up,” or your choice not to do that is political. How you treat your wife is political.

I’m a big believer that the tiniest little things you do have a significant effect: “I’ll do the brave, kind thing versus the self-serving, ego-driven fear thing that gets me the piece of pizza or the tax cut or anything else.” When you choose to do the small thing, the petty thing, the selfish thing, it affects everything.

If you go out and look at political songs and political signs, so many of them come back to the same thing about kindness and gentle hearts. So love songs are super political to me, and political songs are super romantic.

Kornhaber: You sing a lot about sleep on this album. It’s in the title, the first single is about dreaming, and you seem to be addressing someone who’s asleep a lot of the time. What are you getting at?

Berninger: Trauma causes lots of reactions, and a lot of times we have to shut down for a while. I was kind of fascinated with that. There’s a time where you stare at the ceiling and think, “If I can just get some sleep, when I wake up something will have resolved itself.” And often it helps! Dreams are a way of expressing some dark fear we’ve got to get out one way or another.