Band: The Walkmen
From: New York, NY
Sound: The brash, reckless, romantic soundtrack to a late night in reverb city, starring impossibly dramatic guitar swells, hazy cathedral organs, and cathartic croons
Similar Artists: The French Kicks, Spoon, Calla, White Rabbits, U2
Listen Now: “In The New Year”

Did you ever have one of those friends growing up who took on a new hobby every other week? You would go to his house on a Tuesday and tiptoe across hundreds of scattered model airplane pieces, only to return the following Thursday and find a hastily assembled halfpipe in his backyard (which, of course, he’d already figured out how to build and master)?

When kids like these grow up, there’s no telling what they’ll get into. Hell, they’re just as likely to play dress up and record track-by-track covers of a 30-year old album as they are to become amateur food critics or brainstorm an adaptation of The Odyssey set on the Ohio Interstate.

And when it comes down to it, such eccentricities can be easily explained: talented people need places to put their talent. So when these talented people get together and pool their overarching, earth-shattering, unifying talent – you know, apart from food criticism and crafting epic novels – you get a band like the Walkmen. And if you’re really lucky, at least once in a career of a band like the Walkmen, you get an album like You & Me to savor.

Which is not to suggest the band (roll call: Hamilton Leithauser, Walter Martin, Peter Bauer, Matt Barrick, and Paul Maroon) had simply been slacking off until now. Very far from it; every two years for much of the past decade they’ve dropped a stunner of an album on us: in 2002, their immaculate debut Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone; in 2004, the critically lauded Bows + Arrows; in 2006, my personal favorite (until now) A Hundred Miles Off.

But in 2008, they’ve truly outdone themselves. You & Me is nothing short of a masterpiece; a sprawling meditation on the broad spectrum of sounds and emotions that have defined the canon of rock and roll, this record finally captures the band’s live intensity and refracts it through 14 of the most perfectly focused and immediately rewarding rock songs you’re likely to hear this year.

Several days after the band’s announcement that they would be pre-releasing a digital version of You & Me and giving 100% of the proceeds to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (in honor of a friend of the band, seven-month old Luca Vasallo), EAR FARM spoke with organist/bassist Peter Bauer about this benefit, the new album, the burden of analog instruments, and pretty much everything else under the sun (or is that “Red Moon”?)….

EF: How has the response to the Sloan-Kettering benefit been?

PB: I think its been great so far. The people at Amie Street seem really fired up about the whole thing.

EF: How do you know Luca?

PB: His parents are friends of mine, Greg and Manal. After he was born, about two months after, they found out he had this form of leukemia. We wanted to do something nice for them so I called them to see if there was anything we could do and they said we could set up a benefit for Sloan because they’ve been so fantastic and great to them.

EF: It’s a great thing and a wonderful cause. And I think everyone’s really excited to get their hands on the album early as well, which is a bit of a bonus.

PB: Yeah, they only brought this up a week or two ago before it came out, it was great how it just worked out immediately like that.

EF: I wanted to talk a bit about the general vibe that I’ve always gotten from The Walkmen, this real embrace of an analog sensibility as opposed to coming onstage with a bunch of laptops and everything, which obviously wouldn’t suit your sound. But there have got to be times lugging that huge organ onstage when you think to yourself, “I wish I just had a Nord Electro,” or something…

PB: Yeah definitely. Except every time we’ve ever had one of those it’s always been because of some unbelievable disaster. It’s always been in some strange place like Calgary where the organ gets lost and there’s no piano rental place in town. So as much of a pain in the ass as it is to duct tape everything together, it’s a lot more comforting to me at this point (laughs).

And I’ve never really used a synthesizer before. So whenever a situation like that arises me and Walt are kind of hunched over the thing punching buttons, we look like a couple of gorillas, like, “What’s this thing from the future?” even though it was made in like 1982 and we can’t figure it out.

In a sense, we come from a place as a whole band where we’re interested in old vintage equipment and sounds but over the years it’s also become a necessity. We literally can’t use new equipment, it sounds terrible when we do. There’s no going back now. You know, every time we record on a computer there are so many problems (laughs), it’s really just a practical matter for us.

EF: Talking about recording, do you guys still go reel to reel?

PB: Yeah we still use tape. This record is the first time we’ve used any digital stuff at all because Paul picked up the viola and he would just do 20 tracks of viola and we had to learn the basics of it (digital recording) because we didn’t have much money for string players. But for the most part, everything makes it to tape and then back onto tape at some point.

EF: And a lot of the recording was live tracking, all of you playing in one room?

PB: We did a lot more of that on this record than we’ve had in a few years. I don’t know how we forgot that was the only way to make things sound good (laughs), but I guess we did Pussy Cats (ed. note – the aforementioned 2006 cover of Harry Nilsson’s 1974 album) that way too. But the one thing was a matter of finding a really good room to record it. I’m not sure how we strayed from the live approach, but its always trouble when we did. And this was the first record where Marcata was completely gone, which was new for us. We were more on our own and had no place to record, it was different.

EF: Well the new record sounds amazing, I’m really looking forward to hearing it on vinyl.

PB: Yeah supposedly the vinyl mastering went really well, which we’re very excited about. It’s fifty-something minutes long, and apparently vinyl records start to deteriorate after 45 minutes or so but somehow they’ve said it came out really crisp.

EF: It must be a great feeling to get the vinyl back and have the first listen.

PB: Oh yeah I can’t wait to get a copy. We just got our CDs back today and we’re very excited. It’s been a lot of work and a long time.

EF: Well it’s been a two-year process right?

PB: Yeah, it’s been very intense and we’re excited to be done with it.

EF: So what about the fact that members of the band live in different cities? Is commuting between Philly and New York a difficult act to sustain?

PB: It can be, yeah, especially with a five-person practice. When it’s just one or two of us going back and forth everyone seems to do well but to try and get five people in two different cities in one place at one time is kind of an ordeal. It’s always like, “Well, we were in Philadelphia for this…” and they’ll be like, “We were in New York for that…” and we usually hang up and no on agrees on where to meet and its like, “Well I wonder if they’ll be there….”

EF: Ahh the endless struggle and give and take…

PB: Yeah exactly, we just try not to talk about it as long as possible (laughs)

EF: So you guys are starting the tour in New York with the Bowery shows? Was that an intentional move, the hometown show?

PB: It seemed like a good place to start. It can either go well because it’s a high-pressure show or it can go god-awful (laughs) so I don’t know. But its good to kind of leap into things, it’ll be fun. And LA is always fun too.

EF: Something else tour-related I came across on the review section of your site, you guys had a culinary critique blog going on. Do you think you’ll pick that back up again on this tour?

PB: Yeah I have a feeling that all the dumb crap we do - as soon as all five of us are together again and bored out of our minds – will start all over again. It usually happens pretty quick.

EF: I think that’s one of the coolest things about the food blog though, it illuminates life on the road in an interesting way, like, “Oh yeah, there’s downtime before soundcheck”, and that sometimes it’s a mission just to find a meal and its not all about performing onstage…

PB: There’s a lot of stuff like that that really gets you after awhile. It’s not going to be so bad this time. We’re not really going out for months on end, it shouldn’t be too bad.

EF: For better or worse, when you guys were coming up, there was almost like this “Class of ’01 and ‘02” in New York with other bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, the Strokes, Interpol, Liars…for awhile you were lumped in with all of them. Did you guys ever foster any relationships with those people?

PB: I mean, it wasn’t that chummy I guess, but we knew some of those guys, some of them were friendly, we’ve played with several of them. Especially when we were starting out, we played with Interpol a bunch of times, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ guitar player we’ve known for a long time. Maybe its because we’re jerks or something (laughs) but I don’t think we ever really considered ourselves lumped in a group that much, and no one ever offered either. It’s kind of what kids do, act like they’re in a gang. We just kinda want to do what we’re doing.

EF: Exactly, well of course most of it was geographic and so the press kind of created it as well.

PB: Yeah, right, exactly. And you know, we did play with a lot of those bands, and looking back on it, there were shows in these tiny dumps that today would be….

EF: A bill at Madison Square Garden or something…

PB: Yeah, we would play Brownies with the Rapture and Interpol and argue over who was going on at 9:00.

EF: It’s really interesting and hilarious to think of all you playing Brownies.

PB: Yeah, and when the Walkmen started, me and Ham had already been in a band for years in New York (The Recoys) and never really left so to us it seemed like the biggest dead end. Rock music didn’t seem like something you could do in a way that people would ever like because honestly no one really liked rock music at that point before all that stuff started. It was pulling teeth just to get friends to go, they’d be like, “There won’t be any fucking girls at a rock show. Girls don’t like rock!” and we’d say, “C’mon its free, we’ll buy you some beers” and coaxe them to go. And somehow it just suddenly changed and became the “in” thing to do, going to a show was actually okay. It worked out in our favor I guess.

EF: What about the New York music scene circa 2008?

PB: I have no idea. I don’t know, I’m kind of a homebody when I’m home. It’s a young person thing, not that I don’t like to go out and do stuff I just don’t know where to go. You know, if you work in a bar you don’t really go to bars. This is is the first time in seven years I haven’t been in a bar every night for three weeks out of every month. It’s nice. It would be hard for me to talk about current bands, I don’t even know who the big bands are these days.

EF: That’s probably a good thing in a lot of ways.

PB: Yeah I don’t think it really helps when you’re really in to whatever’s happening around you. We’ve done that in the past when we think we shouldn’t do something because someone else is doing it; not knowing is helpful, you don’t have to react.

EF: Well you guys definitely do your own thing, and part of that comes across in your love of playing cover songs. There were two Daytrotter sessions where you did Leonard Cohen and Neil Hagerty songs and then of course the Pussy Cats album, which I love. What is it about diving into someone else’s body of work that really appeals to you guys?

PB: Honestly, it’s just a really fun thing to do. We work really hard on songs, and I think we tend to overwork things and run them into the ground in a lot of ways. It always comes out good but its tough. We’re not one of those bands that write ten songs in two weeks and have a good time. It’s difficult music. With covers, you suddenly have five songs recorded out of nowhere, its like, “Wow, Jesus that was easy!” (laughs) It’s a liberating feeling. The songs we choose are ones we like and it’s just so much fun. Like the Pussy Cats, people tell us that it sounds like fun. It’s a lovely thing to do, to not have to worry.

EF: It’s like an exercise then?

PB: Yeah, and we always get a snippet of something from doing it. The Pussy Cats album was a big help to us, it helped us realize we can put strings on songs and stuff like that, it’s not that hard. Otherwise you get stuck and think you can do this but you can’t do that.

EF: What’s going on with the book? Are you guys still working on it?

PB: (laughs) No I wouldn’t say that we are, I don’t think we’ve ever been, really, to be honest with you.

EF: Was that just a red herring for the press?

PB: It was a week of getting really excited and writing five pages each and it was just unbearable writing it. We were trying to make it the worst book ever.

EF: It was fiction, right?

PB: It’s fiction, it was supposed to be very boring, realistic fiction and then it just took this bad turn into really creepy fiction. But we would actually try and sit down and write five pages of the most boring crap you could possibly write and it was really hard, because we really wanted to make it like 600 pages long so it would just be absolutely impenetrable. No one could actually finish it, so we just thought it would be a funny thing to sell. You know, another result of all of us just going crazy, you end up in Fort Lauderdale just going, “What happened?” and how did we get to “yeah lets write a book!” I don’t know. And that was what it was about, this guy driving from Ohio to Indiana on an Ohio turnpike.

EF: That was the crux of it?

PB: The crux of it was it was supposed to be like The Odyssey, but it turned out to be an absolute load of crap.

EF: I guess you can go stir crazy on the road then.

PB: Oh yeah, you really can.

Listen:
“In The New Year”

See The Walkmen Live:
18 Aug - New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
19 Aug - New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
21 Aug - West Hollywood, CA @ Troubadour
22 Aug - West Hollywood, CA @ Troubadour
23 Aug – San Francisco, CA @ Golden Gate Park - Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival
27 Aug – Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge
28 Aug - Vancouver, BC @ Richard’s On Richards Cabaret
29 Aug – Victoria, BC @ Rifflandia
30 Aug – Seattle, WA @ Bumbershoot Festival
06 Sept – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
09 Sept - Montreal, QC @ La Sala Rosa
10 Sept - Toronto, ON @ The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern
11 Sept - Pontiac, MI @ Pike Room
12 Sept - Chicago, IL @ Metro / Smart Bar
13 Sept - Minneapolis, MN @ The 400 Bar
14 Sept - Madison, WI @ Barrymore Theatre w/Okkervil River
15 Sept - Columbus, OH @ The Basement
18 Sept - Cambridge, MA @ Middle East Downstairs
02 Oct - Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle
03 Oct - Atlanta, GA @ The EARL
04 Oct - Tallahassee, FL @ Club Downunder
05 Oct - Orlando, FL @ The Social
07 Oct - Birmingham, AL @ Bottletree
08 Oct - New Orleans, LA @ Republic New Orleans
09 Oct - Houston, TX @ Walter’s On Washington
10 Oct - Austin, TX @ The Parish Room
11 Oct - Dallas, TX @ Pontiac Garage
12 Oct - Memphis, TN @ Hi-Tone Cafe
13 Oct - Nashville, TN @ The Basement
14 Oct - Newport, KY @ Southgate House

Visit The Walkmen on MySpace.
–
See the list of bands recently featured as EAR FARM’s Band of the Week HERE.