Interview: Hamilton Leithauser, The Walkmen

Tomorrow, one of indie rock's leading purveyors of mood and atmosphere, the Walkmen, play the Cat's Cradle at 9 p.m., with the Lower Dens opening. In advance of the performance, Recess' Kevin Lincoln spoke to frontman Hamilton Leithauser about the band's new album Lisbon, getting lumped together with Interpol and whether each record is harder to make than the one that came before.

Listening to Lisbon, it seems like there’s this sense of pomp and grandeur, and a certain size that encompasses the album: after all, it’s named after an old-world city, the songs have titles like “Woe is Me,” “Victory,” “Stranded.” Do you think this is an accurate characterization?

You mean in that it’s world-weary?

Yeah, world-weary and sort of confronting a lot in one go.

It felt like a big undertaking. I’d say in the end, when you finally have eleven songs that you’re happy with, it’s almost amazing that that’s all you came up with. But it really takes a lot of work to get there.

So you think you can kind of feel that in the songs. Do you think that’s something that would characterize all of the albums that you guys have put out?

Yeah, it seems to feel harder and harder as it goes along, I don’t know if that’s always true. It always takes a long time to write songs, but this time it really just felt like so much work.

Now that you guys are six records deep and getting towards what I think of as kind of like a Spoon-esque elder-statesmen territory in the transient world of indie-rock, how do you think that affects your work and what does that mean for the future of the band that it is getting harder with every album?

I don’t know, it’s kind of bleak to hear it that way, but—I don’t know, we’re sort of slow and steady, we work at our own pace. It would be nice to be able to work faster, to be able to do more, but it just takes a long time to write twelve or eleven songs or whatever it is. It’d be nice to be able to move faster, but what are you gonna do.

I feel like I remember reading at some point that when you guys are recording the albums, are you in the same place or are you guys spread out around the country?

We’re very spread out. Walt (Martin) and I live in New York, and Matt (Barrick) and Peter (Bauer) in Philadelphia and Paul (Maroon) lives in New Orleans.

Paul being in New Orleans, I imagine that had something to do with the Pussy Cats record and A Hundred Miles Off and everything, that kind of influence?

Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely one of our favorite spots whenever we show up, traveling around the country. It’s a really great city.

So, going back to Lisbon, it seemed like the pace picked up a little bit from You and Me, which I thought had this very nostalgic, deliberately paced sound to it, whereas Lisbon has a little more punch; you know, it’s got those same swaggering ballads but at the same time, like “Angela Surf City” and some of the other songs, they’re just a little faster. Is there any reason for that, or when you were writing the record was that just how it came out?

That was how it ended up, but it wasn’t like that for the year-and-a-half that we were working on it, the first year-and-a-half was a lot more coming from the same direction. But we ended up with a couple of those songs that are on it, like “Stranded” and the last song, “Lisbon,” and a couple others were more from the earlier sessions. And then at the end, we really liked those songs but we didn’t feel like we had a complete record that had really broken any new ground until we did get a lot of those more upbeat, more sort of fun, bouncy songs. And then it felt like we had a new direction, and that was when we could all agree that we’d finished the record.

You guys have steadily maintained this consistent balance between the hard-charging, powerful rock and the slower wavering ballads, sometimes erring more to one side or the other: what keeps you writing songs in both registers?

I think we generally prefer doing the slower stuff. For us that’s kind of the most fun music, it’s more of what we listen to, but it is nice to kick doors down, we can do that, we do that pretty well. It’s hard to get to the point of being able to have everyone slamming it out and still feel like you haven’t been there before and you’re just like well, why are we doing this again. But you know, every once in a while you can get something—like, we did the Angela song this time, and it felt like we sort of earned our way back to everybody just kicking the doors down.

After the general acclaim and crossover success that you guys had with “The Rat” way back in the middle of the decade, was there any sort of pressure, internal or external, to try and write its successor, or try and write more of those furious, anthemic songs?

Yeah, you’re told to write more of those. It’s very clear what people expect. At first we had the song “We’ve Been Had,” that was kind of our calling card off that record. And when you finish that, that was what everyone was asking for, all the record labels and everyone, well you just need to write another “We’ve Been Had.” But then you write “The Rat,” and everyone’s like, well you just need to write another “Rat.” They’re just responding to what you did.

So you guys have always been pretty strongly identified as a New York band. Have you ever felt a temptation to push back at that label? With A Hundred Miles Off and Pussy Cats and Lisbon, you certainly have at least worked around it, but have you ever tried to work against that?

I guess when we were starting out, or I guess sort of right after, we all lived here for the first eight years, six, seven years of the band, all five of us were in New York. What we figured out was we only played in New York, we’d go around and we couldn’t get shows outside of New York, the only place anybody ever knew who we were  was in like the East Village. And we would go around and play once every two weeks or something like that at these clubs. And then a lot of the bands from New York, the Strokes and Interpol and all of them, those were the bands we were sort of playing around with, they started getting really popular and I think that probably helped us out. Everyone would write an article, and instead of just writing about one band they’d write about the New York City rock world, and they’d include us as sort of like an “also” band. So I guess it definitely helped us out for a while, because it gets your name out there, but after a while it definitely started to get to be a ball and chain; we felt like we were trying to do our own thing but we feel like people weren’t really recognizing—I don’t know, when you get grouped in with bands, you kind of just want to be doing your own thing. That was the only time it ever would’ve gotten under our skin.

It’s funny to even think about you guys even being lumped in with those bands, because they’re great bands, but the sound isn’t really the same.

People used to write, they sound exactly like Interpol or something like that (laughs), and it’s like, no we don’t, we just don’t at all. You’d read that, one person would write it and then a lot of journalists just copy that one person. I think now people wouldn’t write that, but it’s sort of frustrating at the time because you want to be like, man, that’s just wrong.

I really enjoyed your year-end reading list on The Millions, which is one of my favorite websites.

Oh, it is? Yeah, that’s great, Max (C. Max Magee) is an old friend of mine, the guy who started it.

Yeah, I mean, the lists are great just in general, it’s a great feature. But this year I was particularly impressed by your choice of Stoner by John Williams—

Oh I love that book, that’s a great book.

He’s one of those writers’ writers, the kind of guys that people with only a vested interest in literature tend to get into, so I was wondering about your reading habits and how you stay involved with that sort of stuff?

I can’t remember how I originally got to that book. I read a lot, I think that might’ve even been recommended on one of those automatic reading sites where you put in what you like and then it comes up. It’s kind of depressing but in the end it really sort of ends up working out.

Have you done any writing yourself, poems or fiction, anything outside of songwriting?

You know, I would love to be able to, I think that would be so fun, and you know, we spend so much time working alone, and we have so much time where you get tired of working on music. I wish I could do it, I just can’t start it out.