Running a Different Race

It’s 1995 and it’s springtime in Washington, D.C. The private schools have started to roll out lavish proms for their distinguished juniors and seniors. St. Albans, a prestigious school for boys, is holding its prom at a fine Washington hotel on a warm, lovely evening. Boys, dressed like champions in black tuxedos and suits, twirl their corset-adorned dates around in circles. The cool kids, who have convinced their limo drivers to let them drink, swagger through the ballroom burping up Zima and St. Ides. The band plays the pop hits of the day. People dance, scream and publicly display affection without shame. When the band takes a break, the dance floor clears out as girls and boys run off to gossip with their friends. While the kids chatter and the chaperones schmooze, a 17-year-old, Hamilton Leithauser, takes the stage. He grabs the microphone and shouts for everyone’s attention. “Hey!” Everyone looks to the stage. He screams out at the top of his lungs as if it’s the last thing he’ll do on earth: “Fuck you all!” And then he collapses.

If you missed the St. Albans Prom of 1995, don’t worry, you can still see Hamilton Leithauser screaming onstage. The 6’4″ singer of the Walkmen frequently shouts his lungs out at the crowd and abuses the living hell out of stage monitors by jumping on them. The rest of the band is right there with him: Matt Barrick attacking the drums, Pete Bauer sweating waterfalls over his bass guitar and Walter Martin and Paul Maroon exacting Jedi-focus on the organ and guitar, respectively. Actually, Leithauser plays guitar, too, but doesn’t use it so much. Rather he wears it on his shoulder for effect.

The Walkmen‘s approach to making music is distinctively modern. The band flexes a dual dedication to past musical traditions and the creation of new sounds. Their songwriting gives nods to 1960s classics like Dylan, the Kinks and the Stones, and they use vintage instruments from the 1950s and ’60s because “they just sound better.” It’s what the Walkmen do with these traditional rock-and-roll tools that separates them from many of their peers. At the band’s command, guitars become animals of reverb and overdrive, played with unrelenting intensity; drums pound like a marching band on crack; organs attack rather than fall into the background. Leithauser takes lines that Ray Davies would have crooned tenderly and shoves them down your throat, but not without preserving the beauty of the melody. This all might suggest an inevitable punk-rock result but the music moves between loud, atomic romps and beautiful, driving ballads. The lyrics speak of dreams, fractured relationships between friends and lovers, and confused nights on the town, capturing the electricity of city nights and ironically lonely moments on busy streets. Says Leithauser, “We write songs by playing and playing and playing until something sounds new to us. Until it sounds like something we want to record and call our own.”

The band’s members grew up in Washington, D.C., four of them attending St. Albans. After playing in various bands in New York and Boston (Jonathan Fire*Eater and the Recoys) they formed the Walkmen in New York in 2000. They practiced and recorded at their own recording studio, Marcata, in Harlem, and in 2002 released their first record, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone. The critics gave the record strong reviews, associating the band with other hot New York acts such as the Strokes and Interpol.

The Walkmen multiple songs MySpace

The Walkmen’s attitude on stage is distinguished yet arresting. The band’s modern day New York attitude seems to wrestle with the photographs of their preppy D.C. youth. The vicious energy with which they play belies the image conjured by the crewneck sweaters, corduroy jackets and oxford shirts that have no doubt been carried over from their St. Albans days. A recent year of touring — and that’s what it takes for the band to pay its bills — culminated with a headlining slot at 2005’s Noisepop Festival in San Francisco. The band attempted their typical high-energy set, but they seemed to be five long-distance runners dipping into their reserves on the last mile of a marathon. In an act of desperation, Leithauser got his banshee on and screeched his way through the lyrics.

Later that night, when we talked in a bar, he spoke in a low Tom Waits rasp. A year of touring had rendered him inaudible. As he slumped into a bar stool, drink in his hands, he told me the whole band needed a break. “You just get bored with so much touring and you want to get out there and scream your brains off and run around. It’s something to do when you’ve got nothing else to do all day. When it’s more fun to be up there you don’t get bored,” Leithauser says. Nevertheless, the Walkmen reconvened at Marcata to write a new album. That’s when they really hit the creative wall.

Walter Martin explains, “At the beginning of working on this record we’d play as all five together, but we couldn’t pull anything together at all.” Furthermore, Barrick and Maroon had both relocated to Philadelphia, while Bauer had crossed the bridge to live in Brooklyn with his wife and newborn son. Faced with a writers’ block that might have sunk other bands, the Walkmen adapted to the situation and literally separated themselves into different parts, Voltron-style, to create songs for their new set. “We’ve never been productive as a five-man group with all of us in the same room writing. So Ham and I just started putting stuff together,” Martin says.

Meanwhile Maroon worked up pieces of songs in his Philly home studio that he would later share with the rest of the band. “We were able to get a good system where we could make songs from various parts that people were working on in different places. We got lucky.” To freshen up the sound of their new songs, Bauer, previously the bassist and Martin, previously the organist, switched up instruments.

The band eventually regrouped to stitch together the new songs. They tightened them up with some brief touring before heading to Arlington, Virginia to record at Inner Ear studios. Their engineer, Don Zientera, who produced D.C. bands Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Nation of Ulysses, brought a raw sound to the band’s music.

A Hundred Miles Off is as loose as the Walkmen have ever been on record. While their first album showcased the band’s atmospheric side, and the second, Bows and Arrows, offered a more concise and driving set, this third album kicks out a free, even rebellious energy. Per usual the band keeps one foot in the future and another in the past. They mix their contemporary raw fervor with 1960s rock influences. Basement Tapes-era Dylan is referenced all over the album, both in instrumental arrangements and vocal delivery. Despite this, the album remains as distinctive as anything the Walkmen have done.

The lyrical focus remains consistent with their previous records: there are numerous references to dreams (“What’s good for you is good for me / You were in a dream I had last night”) and uneasy relationships (“I was always after you until you started after me.”) On “Lost in Boston” Leithauser wraps his malaise, confusion and detachment from urbanity into one sharp verse: “Lost in Boston / Sipping rum and chocolate / A hundred thousand blinking lights / Are making me exhausted.” But while their music has often exuded a New York authenticity much like a Martin Scorsese picture, the new album establishes a more universal sound. You can hear it in the New Orleans trumpets of “Louisiana,” the djembe on “Brandy Alexander,” and the stab at early ’80s D.C. punk on “Tenley Town.”

“I think this record is great,” Leithauser says. “We’re moving forward. All of these new songs are really fun to play. We’re just trying to play them and make them sound good for you rather than spazz out.” But Leithauser makes clear the band’s ultimate dream: “To sell a million records. A lot of money. It would be nice. We’ve toured with a lot of bands that have made a lot of money. And they’re definitely running a different race. They’re living a different lifestyle. But it requires a big radio single. That’s the only way you can sell a million records, and I don’t think we have a radio hit on this record.”

“We’ve never had one,” adds Martin.

Leithauser continues, “We’re not trying to write one. If it happens it happens. The success of ‘We’ve Been Had’ ” — a track from their first album which became a jingle in a Saturn commercial — “was nothing like a real radio success. You’ve got to have something like Modest Mouse’s ‘Float On.’ But Modest Mouse has been a band for twice as long as we have.”

Martin agreed, “It’s definitely possible to be popular and good. Modest Mouse had been around so long that they had such a loyal fan base. If they never put another single out they’ll still be able to do their thing.”

The Walkmen, like Modest Mouse, have not compromised the integrity of their music, despite their desire to make it big. While the Strokes have adopted studio slickness on their third album and Interpol’s sound continues to flirt with the mainstream, the Walkmen have unapologetically and consistently brought an abrasive sound to the forefront. Their guitars continue to screech, the bass and drums still pound away, and Leithauser still loves to scream. Still, it’s possible that five or six years from now the Walkmen will find themselves with a single that they could have never imagined hitting the top of the charts. In the meantime, they get by.

“We can afford to live in the most expensive place you could possibly live in,” Leithauser says. “Touring is how we make money. There’s a big scam in the record industry and you don’t make any money from royalties. Just keep coming to shows.”

As for the next Walkmen album? If the band had their way they would record an album every year, but the necessity of touring usually keeps them too busy to kick around the studio and write new material. And they hate writing on the road. This time around, however, they saw an opportunity to work on new projects in between finishing A Hundred Miles Off and gearing up for the next round of touring. They recently recorded a song-for-song cover album of Harry Nilsson’s infamous Pussycats album at Marcata as a farewell to the studio, which closed shortly after we talked. (Columbia University bought the building and kicked the band out of their space.) The next time the band writes music they’ll be working in pieces again, with Bauer, Martin, and Leithauser in New York and Maroon and Barrick in Philadelphia. Nevertheless, the band has also been plugging along with a novel written by all five members entitled John’s Journey.

“The book is sort of a tour joke that’s gotten out of control. We thought the idea of a band writing a novel was funny,” says Martin. Leithauser adds, laughing, “It’s going to take a long time to write. It’s stupid that we told everybody about it because now everyone’s expecting it, but it’ll probably take a long time to happen.”

Ham says, “We just got an email and a phone call the other day about people wanting to put it out. Someone will put it out definitely. But it’s a vacant book where absolutely nothing happens. It’ll be a 2010 release.”