Our editor’s pick of the albums reviewed on these pages during the past seven days is The Loves Of Your Life, the new solo album from The Walkmen frontman Hamilton Leithauser – revisit the 8/10 review and check out the album via Spotify:
“You would’ve thought New York in itself would be enough to provide you with all the stories you’d ever need, but there came a point during the three years in which Hamilton Leithauser was making The Loves Of Your Life that ghosts and monuments simply weren’t enough. Instead, he chose to write about people.”
“In a sense, that shouldn’t have been a radical departure for an artist whose last album – 2016’s collaboration with former Vampire Weekend guru Rostam, I Had A Dream That You Were Mine – dealt with such rich, ostentatious glances at its inhabitants. But this time, nestled in a cramped home studio dubbed The Struggle Hut, he wrote the music in conjunction with former Walkmen bandmate Paul Maroon, playing more or less all the instruments himself. However, the words simply wouldn’t come. All this changed though after a suitably weird epiphany on, of all things, a ferry.”
“The encounter took place whilst Leithuaser, travelling with his daughters, gave conversation with a stranger who was alone. Eventually, the realisation dawned that this man was riding the boat without a destination in mind, an act of eccentricity which would eventually lead to Cross-Sound Ferry (Walk-On Ticket) and almost a dozen other characters drawn from nearby memory.”