The National recently released their seventh studio album Sleep Well Beast, which features a spoken word interlude on the song “Walk It Back.” The spoken word section is sourced from a 2004 article from The New York Times about the Bush administration—though the quote was attributed to a “senior advisor to Bush,” it was later widely said to have come from Karl Rove. The quote is as follows:

People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Now, Rove has weighed in on the quote and the band’s usage of it, after Newsweek reached out to the former Deputy Chief of Staff for comment. “Not familiar with the band and the quote is fictitious,” he wrote back in an email. “The only person in the room who supposedly heard this quote was the 'reporter'—none of the other people in the room heard anything like it, including its supposed author (me).”

Rove then went on to provide his take on a low-quality YouTube rip of the song, saying, “Off the record: starts with a Euro Tech Pop thing and transition into a more peppy tune that’s easier to dance to and has a sound track that on YouTube is impossible to heard. Suspect it won’t make Casey Kasem’s Top 40.” When given the Spotify link, Rove reportedly replied, “Off the record - thanks - but wasted enough time on this already. Now you tell me there’s a best audio available.”

In a recent interview with Variety, the National frontman Matt Berninger joked that while Ron Suskind (the author of the Times story the quote is from) is receiving a royalty off the song, he would love to give Rove a cut as well. “I’d love Karl Rove to see that check, just to remind him we know he said that,” Berninger said. They also responded to Rove’s comments on the song. Find that and listen to the song below.