A different angle

The musicians of the Walkmen have known one another most of their lives, and they’ve been playing in bands together nearly as long. The present lineup formed amidst a fury of New York garage bands a decade ago, but from the start, frontman Hamilton Leithauser’s gravelly wails and the band’s sparse instrumentation, precise recording style and reflective point of view separated it from its contemporaries.

And while the scene that spawned the group is all but dead now, the Walkmen continues to land on “Best Of” lists year after year, playing major festivals all over the world and proving that it's still possible to have a lasting career in the music industry. The band's latest album, Lisbon, was released last fall to glowing reviews. Xpress caught up with bassist and organ player Peter Bauer to talk about touring, the new record and longevity. 

Xpress: The Walkmen spent the majority of the summer playing festivals — has it been refreshing to get back to more intimate venues? 
Peter Bauer: It’s very refreshing. You start to feel like you don’t know up or down at those things. Even the reaction is so vague. And when you’re playing during the daytime, everyone is two beers in and sort of bored still. Then, if we’re playing at night, Pavement and The Pixies are playing at the same time across from us or something. But it’s great playing your own shows, and it was a good feeling for us this fall. We played like 50 shows or something like that. It’s nice to be done, but it was fun at the time. And I thought we did a bang-up job. 

You only booked a handful of dates in the Southeast. I was pleased to see that Asheville made the list. 
You can’t go wrong with The Grey Eagle, man. That’s really the best food in the country! 

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there is a new business serving food now. It’s excellent, but it’s under new management. 
Why on earth would they do that? That’s like the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life! Honestly, that breaks my heart. That was my favorite food in the country. I think I liked it better than any actual New Orleans food. It was so good. Wow. Man that’s a bummer. 

Now that I’ve broken your heart, we’d better move on to something more positive. You named your last album Lisbon, and you mentioned to me earlier that your last show there was probably the best you’ve ever played. Could that be a lesson to other bands? If there’s a city you love to play, name an album after it and you’ll be forever welcomed with open arms? 
Already when we played shows there before, there was a really nice, strong relationship with the crowd that’s very unusual. But we played there in November, and it was fantastic. It was the best show I’ve ever played, you know. So yes, but it has to be a good song. I’ve found that Boston hates us. We have a song called “Lost in Boston.” It’s a terrible song, and I think we’ve been going downhill in Boston ever since we wrote that song. 

Things seem to be going uphill in the rest of the country. The band has been at it for a decade now, and your new album debuted at No. 27 on the Billboard charts. 
It’s been going well for us. And I think the more important thing is that most bands really start to stink at this point or a couple years before this. So we’re proud of finding another way to make music as a group without having the kind of youthful mentality that gets you pretty far. Once you lose that, you have to find a different angle in on these things for it to work. I don’t think there are many people who have done that, so we’re really happy about that. 

I know you recorded several albums worth of material for Lisbon; do you have plans for the leftovers? 
We released a lot of them on various kinds of half-assed Internet-release things. You kind of have to do that now because Amazon needs one and iTunes needs one and independent record stores need one, so that it’s different than the version sold at Target. Needless to say, you end up spending a lot of the extra stuff you have on appeasing different people. So they all came out. Unfortunately for people who actually would want them, you’d have to buy our record like 11 times to get them all. 

It reminds me of the special commemorative items in a happy meal or something. You don’t get to choose which one it comes with, so you end up buying 50 hamburgers to get all 12.
That would be the only ruder way to do this. Like, maybe you’re going to get the song this time. 

The Walkmen seem to release a new album every two years without fail. Not to get ahead of ourselves here, but should we expect another in 2012, just in time for the apocalypse? 
Well, we’re aiming for every year, and it becomes every two years. There’s about a year of delays every year. That’s how that works out. 

You all grew up together in D.C. and played in bands as kids. I wonder if you ever imagined you’d be doing it together as adults? 
No. I remember when they asked me and Ham [frontman Hamilton Leithauser] to play with them. They were some older guys — Paul, Matt and Walt — the other three. They’re about four years older, and they were the band we emulated growing up. We were really into them. They were kids from D.C. that were successful in New York and so on, so we thought they were a real cool band. When they asked us to play with them, it was awesome. They were the guys we had always wanted to play with and always wanted to sound like.

— Dane Smith can be reached at dsmith@mountainx.com.