Walt Martin reveals The Walkmen's musical addiction and genius

I’m going to assume the liaison for my interview with Walt Martin from The Walkmen was a real human being. Of course, anyone who requested something from The Walkmen on their last album, You & Me, was probably dealing with Doug, a fake personality set up to play middle man before the band truly broke through with one of 2008′s top albums. After You & Me and last fall’s Lisbon, The Walkmen should now have enough people to handle any publicity requests.

Currently the Walkmen are writing at home and enjoying the downtime before their spring tour with The New Pornographers. If all goes well, the tunes are becoming simpler by the day, as the band’s focus is on the bare essentials in a song at this point. You won’t recognize the early Elvis influence, but it’s all over these recordings as The Walkmen are two for their last two in crafting brilliant rock tunes that stand on their own. And that’s exactly what they were aiming for.

SSv: You’re writing in the studio now, so is it nice to move past the songs on Lisbon a bit? I know you’re still supporting them for some time, but you’ve also been living with them for a while.

Walt Martin: Yeah, it does feel great. We take a long time to write, and even some of the Lisbon stuff has been in our brains for a while, so it feels great to be working on fresh stuff again.

SSv: When you get a break like this, how do you personally spend that time? Do you find yourself working all of the time or do you get some good space away from things?

Walt: We take a couple days off to decompress and hang with our families and stuff like that and then we pretty quickly get back to work. There’s so much down time when you’re touring, so you kind of feel like dead weight after a while. You get the bug to do something, since we have a hard time writing on the road. You want to get back and get working on stuff since you’ve had this time to think about it while we’re traveling.

SSv: Post-You & Me and post-Lisbon, what’s the difference in how the band feels?

Walt: As we go along, we try to get simpler and simpler. It just feels more mature. We just want to focus on the essentials of a song. I think on Lisbon and You & Me, we were focusing more on lyrics and melody and just having strong simple things happening and especially that’s the case on Lisbon. So I think it’s just about us learning to focus more and more on that. But that’s a very vague notion. [Laughs]

SSv: [Laughs] No that’s actually good, because I’ve heard that before from veteran bands. What informs that need to keep things simple?

Walt: Well, I think with the Lisbon record, Paul [Maroon] had this moment where he said, ‘We should just directly copy Sun City Elvis stuff, because it’s such a simple arrangement.’ Basically, it’s as basic as you can get and it relies entirely on the performance and the song and melody and lyric. So we felt if we could put together a record that didn’t have any of the flash elements or production tricks, then we’d have something really solid.

It took a hell of a long time to write it, but that sort of pointed us in a good direction. You can’t hear the Sun City stuff in the final product, since it was more of a guiding idea for us. But it’s there.

SSv: That has to be difficult to tame the experimentation that comes in your heads, right?

Walt: For sure, but I think on our first couple of records, we didn’t have a system down for how to write things, so there was a lot more screwing around and getting lucky and experimenting. I think we did get lucky a lot. We knew the basics of how to write songs, so I think that came through, but the cool stuff was a little bit of luck. I think by our third record, we ran out of luck a little bit and there weren’t as many of those magic moments. [Laughs] I mean, I like that record a lot, but I think we realized that we needed to sit down and figure out what we’re good at and focus only on those things. So that was a rebirth that happened for You & Me and that continued with Lisbon.

SSv: Was that a tangible thing to–

Walt: No, it wasn’t. It’s only looking back that we see that we did that. We never talked about it in any of those terms, but I think that’s what happened. It was about saying, ‘We do have these basic skills of putting the songs together, so let’s really streamline it and get into the craft of putting the songs together.’

SSv: If you weren’t aware of what you were doing differently in the moment, heading into You & Me, what did you think you were doing at the time?

Walt: I don’t know. I think we believed we were working harder. I really have no idea. Looking back on the whole Walkmen experience feels like one long process. It’s hard to differentiate between the records, but sometimes you can look back and see how we were changing. We never forced ourselves to change — to use different instruments or limit certain things or set-up different rules.

SSv: The last couple of albums have certainly been received the lion’s share of positive reviews.

Walt: With the You & Me record, we were very proud of that record, but we were surprised by the response. We were coming out of a low point where our manager quit and we didn’t have a label and we had this fear. We actually had a fake manager that people would write to. So we bunkered down to write what we wanted to write. It ended up being slower and a little more mellow or grander. We thought it was nice that we could play this slower material and people would get into it. It was the same thing with Lisbon. We were pleasantly surprised when people were into it.

SSv: Whose idea was the fake manager? [Laughs]

Walt: [Laughs] I don’t know how that happened. We just needed someone to field e-mails and phone calls, so we invented this person named Doug Dheil. Ham [Leithauser] and Pete [Bauer] were mostly fielding those e-mails. Doug would book shows for us and set up interviews and all of that. [Laughs] People would come to our shows and say, ‘It’s nice talking to Doug. He’s a real nice guy to set up this interview.’ We’re like, ‘Yeah, Doug’s a good guy.’ [Laughs]

SSv: What have you learned personally about keeping the songs simple?

Walt: When you’re in a band of five guys, there’s a tendency to do something and express yourself. I think that we’ve gotten better at taking a step back and realizing that when we listen to music, the most important thing is the lyric and melody and personality of the song. So we’ve come to the point where we can apply that to what we do. If that means that you’re not playing on a song or even only one of us is playing on a song, that’s okay. We’ve gotten better at focusing on the essential things.

SSv: So where are you at right now? What have you learned about keeping material fresh for you?

Walt: We don’t bury the stuff that much when we play it live. I guess we do make some faster songs more aggressive. “Juveniles” is the first song and “Woe is Me”… those get more intense when we play them live. I think sometimes the crowd can be surprised by that. On the solos on slower songs, we stretch those out and they get exaggerated and really quiet. We just do little things to keep things fresh.

SSv: How is 2011 shaping up for you? Is it a full year of touring Lisbon?

Walt: Well, it’s on and off. We go for a month or something through the U.S. and then we have a couple weeks off where we write and then we go to the UK for a month and then to Europe. It’s on and off. It doesn’t feel like it’s a continuous year of touring at all, which we don’t really do things that way.

SSv: What do you mean you don’t do it that way? You create purposeful space there?

Walt: Yeah, we’re in our thirties, so we wimp out when it comes to going on a six-month or year-long tour. [Laughs] We don’t do things for more than three weeks or so without getting to come home.

SSv: [Laughs] Is that really an age thing or does that protect the art in some ways?

Walt: I think it’s both. I think it’s an age thing and that we probably can’t handle it. We really like to be home and we like to be writing and we have families. But it is true. You wear your welcome, so we try these smart, efficient tours and not just drag ourselves around the country needlessly.

SSv: To go back to the difficult time you mentioned before You & Me, what do you learn about the band or your own self through a time like that?

Walt: We learn how much we’re addicted to making music. As much as we piss and moan about parts of this job, when it comes down to it, we’re entirely obsessed with what we do. So there was a moment back there when we were struggling when it felt like… we are all males, so we have a hard time talking about what we’re feeling or the state of our lives. You never knew what the other guys were thinking. So that was the big push toward writing new material and changing and writing better stuff, there was this unspoken feeling that we’re really, really all into this.