Songfacts®:

• The National singer Matt Berninger has sung in the past about being prone to sadness, and the pandemic exacerbated his depressive tendencies.
  
  In an interview with The Independent in 2023, Berninger discussed how the COVID-era had affected his mental health and bought on writer's block. "It lasted such a long time, and the longer it lasted the more paralysed I got," he said. "I froze up, and I got worse and worse for a long time."
  
  In "Once Upon A Poolside" he sings about the feeling of having to become the frontman every night, even when still in the depths of his depression. He found himself walking on stage to sing The National songs at a time when he could barely even hold a conversation. "Right from the top this song is wondering 'Am I going to make it through?'" he noted to Uncut magazine. "But writing a song that asks, 'Is this the beginning of the end?' was a good way of saying, 'Oh no it's not.' In a funny way."
• Once upon a poolside
  Underneath the lights
  
  These lines paint a picture of Berninger getting ready for a performance, employing the metaphor of swimming pools to convey his preparation. Merely observing a swimming pool doesn't capture the experience of being in the water, swimming, and splashing. Mentally, he must dive into in the deep end.
  
  "The song you walk out to is almost over and you can't stall it anymore," Berninger explained to Apple Music. "You have to go to get started, you have to do this thing."
• Berninger wrote "Once Upon a Poolside" with his wife, the writer Carin Besser, and The National guitarist Bryce Dessner. It's the opening track of the band's ninth studio album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein.
  
  "The song, it feels very much like a prologue to a complicated mess," Berninger told Apple Music. "There's something about the line, which is a line that I stole from something my wife was writing: 'What was the worried thing you said to me?' Which is the one line that she's got in that song, but I keep coming back to that. I think it feels good because it's introducing by saying this record's going to unpack a lot of worried things."
• Progress on the ninth National album hit a roadblock as Berninger grappled with writer's block. It got so bad his bandmates feared things had come to an end.
  
  The opening piano line that Bryce Dessner wrote for "Once Upon A Poolside" sets the album's tone - tender, half lost, half broken. "It was written in a time of desolation," he recalled to Uncut. "People say we always say it nearly ended, but it nearly ended this time, and you can hear it in that song."
  
  Dessner sent Berninger the piano line originally titled "Simple Thoughts," with a note: "Hey, if you can't write, let's just do this differently." Then, Berninger wrote the lyrics for his music.
  
  Berninger recalled hearing Dessner's piano sketch for their first time, feeling "its calm but warm melancholy. And right away I started writing about being in a band."
• Sufjan Stevens provides backing vocals throughout the song, adding a haunting and ethereal quality to the track.
  
  Bryce Dessner played in Stevens' band in the early 2000s, and since then they've collaborated on each other's records. "He was really instrumental in Boxer, which is one of our classic albums," Dessner told Spin. "He's all over it, and I've played on most of his albums. We share a house together in upstate New York, and he's a really close friend. When Matt and I wrote 'Once upon a Poolside,' I sent it to Sufjan right away. To have him contribute to it, opening the album, felt like a rite of passage as someone who has been part of our family for a long time."