New Music / Reviews
Album Review: The Loves Of Your Life by Hamilton Leithauser
Nostalgia and hope collide as an exceptional narrator welcomes all with open arms.
“The Garbage Man” is the opening track of Hamilton Leithauser’s fourth solo album The Loves Of Your Life. It begins with a foggy and cinematic old-Hollywood swoon. You can hear the swarm of flies distinctly drone in the ebb and flow of the string section. These strings draw a slow motion ballroom while simultaneous giving a sticky, oleaginous quality. The atmosphere is immediately set for this picturesque album, of the metropolis of New York City and its inhabitants, revealing that “The rainbow’s in the gasoline”.
The rainbow unfolds in the episodic chapters of this record. Leithauser chronicles each track upon encounters with strangers, acquaintences and friends in his home of New York. Despite this expansive brief of diverse character biographies, the album maintains clear coherency. While the jangly upright pianos, crooning guitars and homely vocal harmonies lend to a nostalgic tone reminiscent of an old America, the music is also hopeful and bright.
This optimism is aided by Hamilton Leithauser’s anthemic vocals, which he’s now described as his “calling card,” as well as the wandering galloping tempo and major key and that most of the tracks rest in. Indeed, Leithauser says in an interview with Stereogum that he had come to a road-block lyrically before this record. While instrumental elements were existent, the lyrics were not solidifying in the way they had in the past, either when Leithauser was frontman of the The Walkmen or in his solo work. It was the random brushes with strangers that finally captured his imagination, like the Cross-Sound Ferryman who struck up banal conversation with him and his daughters on their journey, and the Polish woman sat next to him on a bench in an empty park, regaling her embellished life story which is the foundation of “The Stars of Tomorrow”.
These chance-meetings were catalysts which inspired this narrative form of writing new to Leithauser and quite literally made him want to sing again. This record is truly one of an artist finding his voice. The pure enjoyment translates into the music making the vignettes feel not like a faded memory, but like relived youth that retains the colour and wonder of things to come.
On “Wack Jack”, a bitter breakup song that Leithauser describes in an interview as having a “nasty flavour,” he sings:
“Years away / When your name is just a name / And my love’s a couple candles / Twinkling on your cake / That burn won’t hurt you anymore / But I’ll still keep your picture lying in a drawer”.
The melancholy of holding on to memories is nonetheless coupled and contrasted with the imagery of childhood: chalk on pavement, cakes and candles.
“Here They Come” is cinematic on many levels. We start with a picture of the credits rolling in front of our cowboy, a solo mid-afternoon movie-goer, killing time to avoid his problems and the real world. Before the clanging chorus of realisation, where the internal pitchfork-weilding-mob approaches with the self-accusatory: “I was a fool / I was blind / I kept my eyes shut half the time,” Leithauser croons:
“You say the lovers in your life / should listen to you more / you can tell them to the Usher / Showing you the door / All the lights are on / and all my candy’s gone.”
The petulant child in agony, all out of candy and popcorn and excuses — we all know one and often, we all are one.
The caricatures’ internal monologues are all relatable, made easier by the compassionate tone of the songs. It is not difficult to be the person reminiscing the long-lost friend, wanting to reassure them that you’ve still got their back, like in “Don’t Check the Score,” “Til Your Ship Comes In,” and “Stars and Rats”. Nor is it hard to be in the frustrated shoes of a collapsed relationship of “Wack Jack” or “The Other Half”. It’s easy to empathise with the Isabellas of our world, those doe-eyed kids tortured by privilege. To me, “Isabella” sounds like a rock-lullaby (“a rock-a-by” perhaps…) where sweet repetition glazes over deep emptiness.
Importantly, while the characters are blemished, the light that they’re cast in is forgiving. Leithauser has stated that he is unabatedly “rooting for everybody” in his life and in his songs. Despite the pensive themes, they’re contrasted with uplifting sentiment, sonically achieved through the often buoyant melodies and matching imagery. See the littering of word painting throughout the record, like in “On Cross-Sound Ferry (Walk-On Ticket)” as the song changes movements to a waltzing cadence on, “riding round the carousel” and “rolling on the summer swell.” Perhaps it is the nature of the slideshow album, able to catch fleeting glimpses and eavesdrop into these private moments, that allows for the overall playfulness and lightness of the work.
Of course, the testimonial ballad to New York is not novel. The Walkmen, which Hamilton Leithauser fronted, were champions within the New York post-punk alternative in the 2000’s, with contemporaries such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Strokes and Grizzly Bear. On The Loves of Your Life, the clean harmonies and sprightly step echo a newer New York great — Vampire Weekend. This is perhaps unsurprising as Hamilton Leithauser recently collaborated with Vampire Weekend’s Rostram Batmanglij in their joint 2016 album I Had a Dream That You Were Mine. There is a particularly Father of the Bride sound in “The Garbage Man” and “Cross-Sound Ferry.”
Yet Leithauser manages to carve a unique space with this album by making the stories of big smoke feel universally familiar and comfortable. It’s not just back-up vocals featuring his wife, daughters and daughter’s former pre-school teacher, or the fact that the album was recorded mostly in Leithauser’s DIY home studio called “The Struggle Hut,” that makes it endearing. The album itself just feels welcoming.
In “Don’t Check The Score” the flute whistles and sing-song hums bring to mind another prolific bard, Sufjan Stevens. So to does the seasonal references of December nights, Christmas lights and the Fourth of July. This celebratory backdrop is pitched against the contrasting props of empty cups, plastic bags and flashing sirens. Contrasts complete the album on “The Old King,” where the titular line “The loves of your life” is followed with: “the glass and the wife / one guts you hollow / one twists the knife”. The jaded friend endlessly ruminates: “No battle lost / Growls the old King / No war un-won / He spits and he sings” while a chorus of girls angelically chant “Whatever happens / Know you can love me” until the cynic joins in at the end, “Whatever happens / You know I love you” and we are left guessing at either the message of irony or sympathy.
The scrapbook that is The Loves of Your Life is incredibly cohesive and triumphant. The delightful dichotomies present in the rainbow and gasoline, the stars and rats, the poignancy and optimism, the wisdom of age and innocence of youth, the excitement in normality. It all makes for a very balanced, beautiful and hopeful album. I’m rooting for Hamilton Leithauser, I’m rooting for this record, and the record makes it easy for me to root for the future too.
Released Apr 2020 on Glassnote Records
words by Joy Qin
Personal favourites: The Garbage Man, Isabella, Wack Jack
