The Walkmen Prepare for Next Leg of Tour, New Album Release

By Melissa Traynor

The week before The Walkmen were about to embark on a fall tour with Here We Go Magic, I caught up with Pete Bauer, their bassist and organ player. The band had just returned home from a few shows and new experiences in Norway on the first leg of the tour and were taking a few day’s break. The band had recently decided to extend their tour into October, the next date of which will be Sept. 20 at the Pearl Street Clubroom in Northampton, Mass.

Bauer spoke about some of the band’s misadventures and coming off a year’s worth of praise from their summer 2008 release You & Me and looking ahead for a record release in the new year.

Melissa Traynor: Where are you right now?

Peter Bauer: I’m in Philadelphia – home.

MT: Are you on break?

PB: We’re playing every weekend, sort of, right now.

MT: How did the first couple dates of the tour go, and how was Norway?

PB: Norway was good. Norway was a neat place. I’ve never been there before. I really liked Bergen. It made me think of what Alaska must be like – it’s very removed from the rest of the world. They were selling, like, wolf skins and whale sandwiches at the fish market, which I thought was pretty damn weird.

MT: Did you try the whale sandwiches?

PB: No. I would never try the whale sandwiches. I thought that was pretty brutal. I thought it was pretty strange that there were people out there eating a piece of blue whale in between two pieces of white bread, which is what they were doing. That’s just not for me.

MT: Did you try anything else that was crazy?

PB: No. Honestly, everything costs about $200 there, like, for a sandwich. So you just kind of don’t eat. But it was fun. It was a nice-looking place.

MT: So you have a couple of dates coming up with Here We Go Magic. Northampton is the first one that you’re playing with him – Luke Temple?

PB: Something around there, yeah.

MT: How did that pairing come about?

PB: You know, I don’t know much about them actually. Our friends say they’re a really good band, so we just sort of trusted our friends. We’re looking forward to hearing it, though. They seem to be one of the New York bands doing better right now. And in the brief things I heard it all sounds good.

MT: Have you heard their music before?

PB: I mean, I’ve like gone on the Internet. Someone was like, “hey, what about this band to play with?” We were like, “alright, sounds good.” But I actually haven’t gotten the chance to like, sit down with them yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

MT: I know it’s a bit late, seeing as your last record came out last summer – You & Me – I’ve been listening to it, well, since then and I want to ask – it seems like it’s a departure from A Hundred Miles Off in terms of feel and the general sense of the album. But then again, it could just be a logical progression. Can you talk about that?

PB: Yeah, I think we tried to make a really good record with You & Me and I think we went a little crazy with A Hundred Miles Off, so it came out a little crazy, you know? And I think it was actually – it was sort of a different thing. We were all kind of doing different things when we were making A Hundred Miles Off and we were very focused and put-together to do You & Me and really trying incredibly hard to make a good record. There’s definitely a different mindset, you know? With A Hundred Miles Off, we just sort of like, I don’t know, out to lunch.

MT: What kind of mindset were you in for You & Me?

PB: We were just trying to do something more direct, and, you know, friendly for other people, I guess.

MT: Friendly – that’s a good way to describe the songs. They’re very accessible.

PB: We were definitely very worried when we were making it. That’s sort of what we brought onto the record, it was really weird. People seemed to not like us. We sort of tried to make something that would not be stand-offish and not angry sounding. That’s the big difference, I guess. We grew tired of making very angry-sounding music and realized we didn’t really listen to angry-sounding music.

MT: Did you think that your previous albums were angry-sounding?

PB: Yeah, sort of, you know, like stand-offish. [You & Me] was trying to make something that wasn’t – love songs or something like that.

MT: I heard, rather, I saw videos of you on YouTube filling in for your frontman Hamilton during a show…?

PB: Yeah.

MT: The song was “On the Water.” What was the deal there?

PB: He just missed his flight and was too cheap to take a cab from the airport on the next flight and took like an airport shuttle, otherwise he would have made it. So, it’s one of these things where you don’t get paid unless you play at the right time. We were opening for this band – and they didn’t really care what we were doing as long as we play something. So I just got up there and started singing – and it was pretty bad. [laughter] But I didn’t really have time to think about it beforehand. So, it was fun- I liked doing it. I’d like to have another shot.

MT: Have you ever had to do that before or have you done that since?

PB: No, I’ve never sung into a microphone since, like, college. So, it’s been like 10 years.

MT: Speaking of “On the Water,” I saw that the video came out a little while ago. What was the inspiration for that? It was kind of odd, but in a cool way.

PB: You know, this guy made it. We don’t really have too much to do with the videos a lot of the time. That was the sort of thing where this guy wrote it and sent us a screenplay sort of thing and said, “Do you want me to do this?” I thought it came out pretty well. It seems to be like the sort of thing that people actually sort of like. I was sort of surprised. Usually videos are like, visual garbage, but that one you could follow and it had a story and it’s kind of neat. It’s sort of sad that the bunny died at the end, though. I didn’t like that. [laughter]

MT: I was kind of surprised.

PB: Yeah it’s definitely a curveball. You think the bunny’s going to get away and then they just blow its head off. It’s just like, “What? Why did it do that?”

MT: Well, you approved it.

PB: Yeah. [laughter]

MT: Are you making any other videos off that album?

PB: No, I don’t think so. We made a couple that were, you know, this and that. And I think that was the last one, unless, someone else is absolutely dying to make one. I think we’ll start releasing new songs soon and new material.

MT: What are you working on now?

PB: We’re working on our new record. It’s probably half done. We recorded a lot of stuff, but I don’t know how much of it will actually make it on the record. It could be released elsewhere, or whatever, but we think sometime in the new year we’ll put out a record. It’s trucking along – pretty fast. And, you know, hopefully we won’t have a very long break between this record and the next one.

MT: For the new record, is it going to resemble things you’ve done before, like revisiting, or are you pushing for something different?

PB: You know, it’s hard to say. We’ve got like 13 songs, but it’s hard to say what this record will actually be like – for some weird reason. It might stay like it is, or it’ll be a like completely different type of thing when we’re done. Right now we have a lot of quiet, country-ish-sounding songs. Hopefully there will be some sort of counterpart to that, that will be different. It’ll be very quiet, as of now, using a lot more acoustic guitars.

MT: Are you playing any of it on the road?

PB: Yeah, I think most of it – whatever we play in Northampton will be pretty new. That whole tour starting next week, we’re going to try to get our new stuff in order to play live.

MT: Do you have a tentative name for the album?

PB: No, no we don’t even have tentative names for the songs yet. We have songs – songs with words, they just don’t have names. It’s sort of like that last thing that comes together for us.