The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser, Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend launch collaboration


Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam




Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen and Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend, have launched an intriguing collaboration with the track ‘A 1000 Times‘.

“’A 1000 Times’ started with a beat I made while Hamilton and I were working out of my studio in LA,” Rostam says. “We picked it back up in New York and finished writing it in Washington, DC.I wanted us to do a song where the snares would crack as hard as Hamilton’s voice. To me, the song became about that interaction between the vocals and the drums.”

As Leithauser explains, there’s much more to come from the pair, all of which is to be revealed in the coming weeks.

“On that first trip we got so much more done than the 1-2 tracks we’d talked about,” he adds. “We had big parts of maybe 5-6 songs that actually ended up making it onto the record. We knew we liked it all, but we hadn’t discussed the amount we wanted to make together. It was kind of a funny moment, like a ‘how far are we taking this relationship?’ kind of thing.”

“I don’t think we made a decision until a few months later, when our next session went well again. At that point it was definitely going to be a lot more than a few tracks on my next solo record.”


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