Stuck on a Winning Streak

By: By Matt Carr | December 10, 2010 | Music

“If I had known the graceful song I should know/To slow down all the madness/I would have sung,” laments Hamilton Leithauser, his nervy and emotive vocals intact and passionate as ever on The Walkmen’s sixth album, Lisbon. Torch songs technically deal with unrequited love, but this playfully titled “Torch Song” is about an elusive and lost song — one whose power is a respite from restless nights. “A whispered melody to calm you and keep you close,” he sings.

Driven by a 6/8 piano rhythm and an uncharacteristically soothing backdrop of barbershop and doo-wop inspired vocal harmony, this song about a song ironically reveals itself to be its own remedy and Lisbon its sparse and nuanced means of delivery: an 11-track, 41-minute elegiac lullaby that is The Walkmen’s most tuneful and rewarding album to date. Forget the myth of the suffering artist. These happily married 30-year-old musicians are making the most remarkable and relevant music of their careers.

“They say, ‘can’t please everyone,’ but I’m stuck on a winning streak,” Leithauser croons in the very next song. And as far as The Walkmen are concerned, that’s undoubtedly true. With 2008’s horn-dusted You & Me and this September’s Lisbon, these five childhood friends have honed the jagged edges and antagonistic qualities of earlier releases into two subtle and meticulously crafted records that showcase a band comfortably maturing and thriving in its own skin.

“I think You & Me and Lisbon are miles better than our previous albums,” organ and piano player Peter Bauer told me while on the band’s recent European tour. Calling from a pay phone in a public square in Barcelona with a background abuzz with passing motorbikes, Bauer painted two portraits of the band: one a young group of kids trying to figure things out, and the other a veteran band that knows exactly what kind of music it wants to make.

While The Walkmen came up in small New York City clubs, the band’s roots lie in Washington, D.C. Four out of five members attended St. Albans, an all-boys preparatory school that’s graduated fistfuls of famous politicians, including former Vice President Al Gore and Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh. In Walkmen lore, though, it’s home to the ska band The Ignobles — the first group started by Walkmen bassist Walter Martin, drummer Matt Barrick and guitarist Paul Maroon.

It’s no coincidence Leithauser would later join this gang. When he entered high school, these were the seniors he looked up to, especially Martin, his older cousin. The two grew up together up on the same cul-de-sac in the Tenleytown neighborhood of northwest D.C.

“If you’re 14, and there’s a bunch of guys that have an interesting band and are doing well, you look up to them,” says Bauer, who struck up a friendship with Leithauser while attending the neighboring Maret School. “Walt would tell Ham about some record, and Ham would tell me. When the band moved to New York, we thought, ‘Wow, maybe we could do that someday.’”

Inspired, Leithauser and Bauer salvaged the instruments left behind in the homes of The Ignobles’ parents including a “crummy old organ” and formed their own group, the Late Breakers.

“I remember this girl who was a friend of ours coming up to us saying, ‘I’m a friend, and I really mean this,’” recalls Bauer. “‘You guys are terrible. Really terrible.’”

Eventually, Leithauser and Bauer also left D.C., forming the bluesy garage outfit The Recoys in Boston. By then, The Ignobles had become Jonathan Fire*Eater and the Mick Jagger slur of lead singer Stewart Lupton and frenzied organ play of Martin had turned their rock band into a rising star among the New York press and underground rock scene.

The buzz swelled enough to garner a major label bidding war that concluded with the band signing a three-record $1 million deal with Dreamworks. Dead set on retaining their artistic integrity, however, the band’s 1997 major label debut Wolf Songs For Lambs was a commercial flop for Dreamworks, selling a paltry 6,000 copies. Due in large part to growing interpersonal problems within the band, Jonathan Fire*Eater split shortly after in 1998.

Somehow, undeterred by their mercurial experience with the music industry, the nucleus of Martin, Maroon and Barrick stuck together. Using capital raised from investors, the three young musicians built their own 24-track analog studio in a former car showroom in New York’s West Harlem neighborhood. They named it Marcata and as their first order of business invited Leithauser and Bauer, whose band had also been dismantled, to join them. Enter The Walkmen.

“We were very excited and very nervous,” says Bauer of their first practice together. “The other people involved in The Recoys didn’t have the same feeling that they wanted to do this with their lives. But we did. I mean, we were kids who ripped off Jonathan Fire*Eater, me and Ham.”

Musically, there were few bridges to gap. Two Recoys songs, “The Blizzard of ’93” And “That’s The Punchline,” were even adapted for The Walkmen’s debut, 2002’s humorously titled Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone. The real difference came with the change of singers, replacing Lupton’s bluesy swagger with Leithauser’s untethered, glass-shattering howl, which has become one of the most defining signatures of The Walkmen sound. Watch the lanky six-foot-four-inch singer perform, and his head cocks to a 45-degree angle, revealing a neck straining and popping with stressed veins and muscles. Leithauser’s singing is so impassioned that he typically blows his voice 15 or so times a year to the point of not being able to speak, he told The Washington Post back in 2007.

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