Hamilton Leithauser Loses Himself in New York City’s Stories on The Loves of Your Life

Between his decade of fronting New York City quintet The Walkmen and his subsequent releases, both solo (2014’s Black Hours) and collaborative (2016’s I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, with Rostam Batmanglij), Hamilton Leithauser has proven himself one of the most consistent indie-rock songwriters of the 2000s. Though his former band could never quite top their 2004 breakout Bows + Arrows, they never put out a bad (original) album, either, aging gracefully right up until their “extreme hiatus” in 2013. Leithauser now returns with his second solo effort, The Loves of Your Life, an 11-track collection of warm, nuanced Americana as essential as anything the 41-year-old father of two has released to date.

On Leithauser’s solo debut Black Hours, written and recorded before The Walkmen’s indefinite dissolution was revealed to the public, he crooned about troubled relationships, loneliness and a search for purpose (“Do you ever wonder why I sing these love songs / When I have no love at all?” he asked on dour album opener “5 AM”). It wasn’t all doom and gloom, of course: Working with his Walkmen bandmate Paul Maroon, as well as the late Richard Swift, Fleet Foxes’ Morgan Henderson, Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman and former Vampire Weekender Batmanglij, Leithauser looked inside himself and found an abiding desire to reach out to others—“Our directions swing together,” he concluded on, ironically, “I Don’t Need Anyone,” the first song he wrote for the record.

Now, with The Loves of Your Life, Leithauser expands his scope in that same searching spirit, satiating his hunger for connection with the stories of others. Written about real individuals, some old friends and others strangers, the songs are as manifold as the human lives they encapsulate, with Leithauser often stepping aside to speak in his subjects’ own words. Written, recorded, produced and mixed in Leithauser’s cramped, DIY New York City studio The Struggle Hut, the album achieves a powerful sense of place, capturing the city and its innumerable narratives—NYC is well-trod creative territory, to say the least, and could have easily made for a mundane effort in the hands of a lesser songwriter. But Leithauser has spent his entire career on its wavelength, and dedicates The Loves of Your Life to the people who make the metropolis what it is, bringing all of his skills (he plays most of the instruments on the album) to bear on rendering their stories in poignant detail.

Nowhere does this generosity of spirit shine brighter than on album opener “The Garbage Men”: Built on a mesmerizing blur of horns and voices (the latter of which belong to Leithauser’s wife, Anna Stumpf, and their daughters, Georgiana and Frederika Leithauser), the song evokes the city’s gritty glory (“The rainbow’s in the gasoline,” Leithauser sings, “Til the garbage men go by / All the emerald shards / On the black top / Like the stars in the sunshine”). These quick-hitting images find the beauty in the breakdown—the scattered pieces of our lives, broken and fragmented, but full of meaning to those willing to pick them up off the sidewalk and see.