Behind his brother Tom's house in Los Angeles is the garage Matt Berninger refers to as his "little art womb," the walls covered in artifacts from his two decades as frontman of the National. A cue card from the five-piece rock band's 2014 musical guest spot on "Saturday Night Live" is framed above the couch. A painting by the Berningers' mother hangs between a poster for the documentary "Mistaken for Strangers," which Tom shot on tour with the group in 2010, and a handmade sign Matt acquired from a fan.

The sign appears over Berninger's shoulder as he video chats from the couch one early September afternoon. It reads, "MATT SCREAM AT MY FACE."

"Everybody likes it when I get down and scream in their face," he explains.

He can't do much of that now, what with the indefinitely postponed tour dates and a canceled music festival that he and the National's two pairs of brothers — Bryan and Scott Devendorf, plus identical twins Aaron and Bryce Dessner — had planned to hold in their shared hometown of Cincinnati. As the band's primary lyricist, Berninger is partial to a metaphor and likens their past decade to an accelerating bullet train. Everyone agreed they needed to slow it down. The pandemic destroyed the tracks.

It was an abrupt stop for someone who admits to taking on too much, at one point writing simultaneously for the band, for an off-Broadway musical based on "Cyrano de Bergerac" and just for himself. With touring now on the back burner, Berninger has devoted more attention than he might otherwise have managed to readying what, at 49, marks a new stage in his career: his first solo record.

"Serpentine Prison" features the same heady baritone and moody lyrics that are cornerstones of the National's brand. But without Aaron and Bryce's complementary guitars, Bryan's anchoring drums and Scott's reverberating bass, the mellow sound carrying over is decidedly Berninger's, fine-tuned by longtime producer Booker T. Jones.

"I didn't want an indie rock record, whatever that is," Berninger says. "I didn't want any kind of record. I just wanted a Matt Berninger record, you know?"

Inspiration strikes everywhere, which is exactly where Berninger's lyrics end up. He bikes around Venice, where he lives with his wife, Carin Besser, and tween daughter, Isla, and emails himself stray thoughts. He stares out the window and types on Microsoft Word. Sometimes he does that in the garage, although the art womb is mainly for listening to music and smoking weed, he (maybe) jokes.

The phrase "serpentine prison" came to mind as he biked past a twisting drain pipe with a cage on top — lyrical fodder for a song about the evolving traps we find ourselves in, he thought, or maybe a name for Tom's metal band. Similar imagery weaves through Berninger's recollection of his Midwestern youth: the Serpentine Wall near the river boats he partied on in Cincinnati, the snakes slithering around his uncle's old tobacco farm in Lawrenceburg, Ind.

There's even a serpentlike effect to how a touring band travels, Berninger says, in that "everybody has to follow the person in front of them like ants or you get lost in the airport and you'll miss the flight and the whole tour is ruined."

"Being in a band like that, it can run your life and control you," he continues. "So yeah, there's some of that in there."

Berninger and Scott Devendorf, his buddy from the University of Cincinnati's design school, formed the National in 1999 after deciding to give music another go. (In college, they channeled their love of Pavement and Guided by Voices into a garage punk band named Nancy, after Berninger's mother.) They enlisted Bryan and the Dessners, his childhood friends, to join them in Brooklyn, playing small shows while they continued working day jobs. Berninger left his gig as an advertising creative director amid the group's slow-burning success, which hit its stride with their critically acclaimed third album, 2005's "Alligator," and dipped into the mainstream five years later with "High Violet."

The National rode the second post-punk revival wave in New York, opening for the Walkmen during the "Alligator" era. In some ways, Berninger's solo outing feels like a retrospective of his career. The Walkmen's Walter Martin appears in the "Serpentine Prison" writing credits (for his work on the wistful second single "Distant Axis") alongside frequent collaborators such as Devendorf and Brent Knopf, the other half of Berninger's side project El Vy.

"It could have been called 'Matt Berninger and Friends' or 'Matt Berninger's Rock 'n' Roll Prison,' " he says. "I didn't know how to bring 10 or 12 songs from eight or nine people, how to make them all into one record. But Booker knew how to do that."

That's Booker of Booker T. & the M.G.'s, the R&B/soul musician and prolific producer who recruited Berninger to sing for a project back in 2011. Two Christmases ago, after Berninger and his father argued about the latter's decision to sell the family home in Ohio, the songwriter comforted himself with his dad's favorite record, Willie Nelson's "Stardust," and noticed that Jones had produced it. Something clicked, and Berninger contacted his old acquaintance about helping him produce his own covers album.

He sent Jones a collection of demos, both covers and originals. They wound up bulking up enough of the latter to make up "Serpentine Prison," with the covers sneaking onto its deluxe edition. Speaking over the phone, Jones recalls being struck by the naked honesty of Berninger's writing, which oscillates between fly-on-the-wall observations and deeply introspective reflection. He tells "compelling stories that you kind of have to put together for yourself," Jones says. "He doesn't take you for granted as a listener."

Berninger writes in jabs and winces, of a lonely man drifting through the world. The man broods. He spirals. He yearns for the time when he "used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders." Although the National's work arguably transcends the "dad rock" pejorative that haunted the band for years, middle-aged turmoil is a constant.

Even with its free-flowing sound, "Serpentine Prison" largely follows suit. "All for Nothing" begins with the narrator "standing in the quicksand with a smiling face." On "Collar of Your Shirt," he fears the demise of a relationship: "But I can feel it getting closer/ Like summer on the edges." His desperate ask for "One More Second," a love song the writer frames as a response to Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You," ramps up to "one more year to get back on track/ Give me one more life to win you back."

Berninger's work isn't devoid of joy or his sly sense of humor, but he still had to reassure a mildly concerned Jones on several occasions that "I've been writing songs like this for 20 years, I'm fine." He often names Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits as his holy trinity of songwriting inspiration and does so again, praising the fearlessness — wait, no, the bravery of their work.

"Bravery is leaning into fear. Fearlessness is insanity, you know?" he says. "I'm filled with fear. You can tell those men write their fear into their songs, and they share all of that — the ugly and the beautiful and the divine."

Despite his own propensity for bleakness, Berninger rarely crosses into nihilism. The National's second-to-last album, 2017's Grammy-winning "Sleep Well Beast," pulses with a political frustration that has only intensified since. But he clings to a sense of hope for the future, believing artists can lead through chaos with "some actual truthful vision."