Hamilton Leithauser by Josh Goleman
Hamilton Leithauser is planning to release his new solo album The Loves Of Your Life on April 10th, and has now shared its latest track Don’t Check The Score.
“Don’t Check the Score is about rooting for an old estranged friend,” The Walkmen singer says. “Maybe it was a rocky road and weird goodbye, but you’d like them to know you’re still in their corner.”
“When I used to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my friend introduced me to ‘day trading’ which is just compulsive gambling on the stock market. It can be done from your home (or work) computer. Instead of working, we would gamble all day. It was incredibly fun when you were up, and not as fun when you were down.”
“This was around 2001, so we only had a dial up connection on one shared computer. It took like 45 seconds to login to the website to check your bet (hopefully you’d made like $55 or something). When things looked sour, you’d say ‘don’t login!’ Out of sight, out of mind—sort of. In reality you’d just be biting your nails thinking of nothing else…definitely not working. Anyhow, the title is a metaphor for looking the other way, or avoiding an inconvenient truth. I guess I could have called it Don’t Login but I think there’s a lot more nobility in a sports metaphor than a day trading metaphor. Eventually, I stopped trading, because the house always wins.”
“So today this song goes out to all the gamblers, betters, troubled souls, long-lost friends, and sad-sack day-traders who can’t face logging in. Right now, don’t login.”
Leithauser wrote and self-produced the record at his home studio during the course of the past three years, and has described it as ‘a collection of stories about real people he’s met over his years living in New York City’.