THE MAKING OF BOWS & ARROWS BY THE WALKMEN - FEATURING PAUL MAROON, WALTER MARTIN AND PETER BAUER

Intro

Dan Nordheim:

You’re listening to Life of the Record. A podcast celebrating classic albums, as told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

The Walkmen formed in New York City in the year 2000 by Paul Maroon, Walter Martin, Matt Barrick, Hamilton Leithauser and Peter Bauer. All five band members had grown up in the Washington, D.C. area and several even played together in bands as kids. In the late nineties, Walter Martin, Matt Barrick and Paul Maroon formed Jonathan Fire*Eater in New York while Hamilton Leithauser and Peter Bauer formed The Recoys in Boston. When those bands broke up, the five of them joined together to become The Walkmen, releasing their debut record Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone in 2002. Their follow up record, Bows & Arrows, was released in 2004. 

In this episode, Paul Maroon, Peter Bauer and Walter Martin talk through the making of Bows & Arrows on its 15th anniversary.

Paul Maroon: This is Paul Maroon, I used to play in The Walkmen and I had a few thoughts on Bows & Arrows, which we did about 15 years ago.

"What’s In It For Me”

Paul Maroon: The first song, which is called, “What’s In It For Me,” I remember we wrote it as an introduction like it was supposed to be the first song on the record. 

Peter Bauer:  “What’s In It For Me” was the last song we recorded for Bows & Arrows and I think the only song we recorded at Marcata, which was our studio in West Harlem that we recorded our first record in. For the rest of it, we went down to either Sweet Tea in Oxford, Mississippi or Easley-McCain in Memphis, Tennessee. If I remember it right, it was probably trying to come up with a song that could be the first song on the record, when we didn’t really having anything else like that. 

Paul Maroon: And for the progression, I was sort of copying one of my favorite piano preludes, “Shostakovich Prelude No. 1 in C major.” It’s Opus 34, it goes like this (plays piano). You can hear the opening progression is sort of similar to our song. I also remember the drum beat being an exciting moment and we had rented a nice microphone, a C12, that we used for special occasions. So the drums are mostly that one microphone. 

Peter Bauer: The song is mostly Walt playing a Hammond chord organ, which is called a Hammond S6, which is a really fantastic organ that he bought for probably a hundred dollars on Craigslist, right now I think still. They’re different than any other kind of Hammond. They don’t have the same insides. It has like a left hand where you can play different chords on buttons. And I remember thinking it was my favorite organ sound that he ever got. 

Paul Maroon: We played it on an old pump organ that we found somewhere. You couldn’t really get enough, or maybe the pedals were broken so you could hook them up to a vacuum cleaner to just blast air into it and it becomes really loud. And I think that’s how we recorded the organ on that first song. 

Peter Bauer: I remember when we finished doing everything on it, we finished mixing it and we were mixing it to quarter inch tape and we were all very very happy with it. And then I think we tried to mix another song like a week later and we tried to put that mix at the end of the quarter inch tape and I think Walt recorded over the ending of our final mix of What’s In It For Me and at that point, Marcata’s board was totally manual. Nothing was saved, nothing was written down so you just do the mix and you go home and listen to it and see if you want to do another mix, but there wasn’t really anything. So we erased the end of the mix. So I think in mastering, Fred Kevorkian who mastered the record, had to digitally add a tiny bit of the ending because we taped after the last one second or so. 

“The Rat”

Walter Martin: Ok, the first song I’m going to talk about is “The Rat” because that’s kind of like the one that people like a lot. My memory of writing “The Rat” is, this is at Marcata our old studio, Paul coming in with that guitar part and it totally kicked ass. And I had wanted to put this really totally kick ass sort of Joy Division-y kind of beat on something, which has like (mouths drum beat) at the end of every measure or something. I kind of stole the idea from a Joy Division Peel Session, where he does that. Anyway, Paul’s guitar part was very kick ass and intense and I thought that making it incredibly intense with that kind of drumming would be really cool. 

Paul Maroon: The second song, “The Rat,” I remember the progression starting, the progression and the descending notes just playing on a really cheap acoustic guitar. I was thinking maybe we needed one of those songs with all the eighth note guitar strums because all of the other bands we were hanging out with had a song like that (laughs). That was the basic idea for that and of course the singing and drum beat are what make it great. 

Walter Martin: And then Ham started singing, I guess because the guitar part is like (sings guitar rhythm), it reminded him a tiny bit of “Help” by The Beatles. And so Ham started singing “Help” on top of it, with that first note being the IV of the chord, which is a little bit unusual and has a really powerful thing to it. And within about I’d say ten minutes, the song suddenly was like “Holy crap, this is a really good song.” And I think Paul had probably spent a lot more time on it at home so we didn’t write it in ten minutes. I don’t know how long it took him to write that guitar part. It could’ve been years, months, days, maybe it was just ten minutes. Anyway, we put it together very quickly. 

Peter Bauer: “The Rat” was like a bear to record. We recorded it three times I think total. We definitely did it once in Memphis and then some other weird time. And we knew it was like a popular song. Definitely looking back now, if people were to say we had a hit, which we didn’t really have a hit, but if there was one song that was popular and people remember it, it was probably “The Rat.” You know, like your Uncle would remember kind of thing. 

Walter Martin: And then we struggled to end it, we could never figure out an ending for it. Because we had like a key change and all of this stuff. And then we finally figured out how to get to the main part so we could kick ass a little bit at the end and then get out. 

Peter Bauer: The record company definitely wanted us to record it correctly. And they got this guy Dave Sardy to come in and record that one song after we’d foiled it a few times. We were kind of difficult people too, I’ll give you that. And we were very young and sure of ourselves. Dave was like this kind of hot shot record producer guy and we definitely didn’t hit it off. We were really difficult, he was difficult and it ended pretty badly I think. We got the song, everyone was happy about the song, it came out and he did a fantastic job. But it was pretty heated, we didn’t get along great. 

So that was the last time I ever saw him and then twelve years later, at least for twelve years, I moved to Los Angeles and it was the first day of school for my kids. We just moved them across the country from Philadelphia. We go down to the schoolyard to meet our teacher and there’s Dave Sardy with his kids and our kids are the same age. And it was a really funny moment because I think the last time I saw him, twelve years ago, we were just like shouting at each other. And then I see this guy, he’s really nice and he’s very welcoming, he’s like “These are my kids, your kids look really nervous, here let me help you out.” And ever since then, we’ve been fast friends, he’s great. It was a real one-eighty from that experience but I love Dave. Dave did do a fantastic job and I work with him now. Funny turnaround.

“No Christmas While I’m Talking”

Paul Maroon: The third song, what’s the third song? Oh “No Christmas While I’m Talking.”

Walter Martin: For “No Christmas While I’m Talking,” I actually got the title from misunderstanding a song by The Fall called “No Christmas For John Quays.” And I remember listening to it in my friend Aaron’s car, and it was kind of hard to hear and I thought he was saying “No Christmas While I’m Talking” and I thought “Wow, that’s such a fucking good line, I wish I thought of stuff like that.” And then I found out that that’s not what he’s saying and then I thought “Oh great, now I can use that.” So we tried to find a good spot to use that and I don’t think that the lyrics in that song actually have anything to do with that title but nonetheless we superimposed that title. 

Peter Bauer: We always had really stupid titles for our songs, like fake titles or working titles. And usually we’d change them to something pretentious like “No Christmas While I’m Talking” or something like that. 

Paul Maroon: “No Christmas While I’m Talking,” which is supposed to be a rumble like The Pogues used to do or Shane McGowan actually or no, The Pogues. Like “The Paddy’s On the Railroad” song or “The Paddy’s On The Railway?” That was the basic idea behind that and I think the progression is straight up stolen from “Coney Island Steeplechase,” which is a Lou Reed song.

Peter Bauer: This kind of idea which I think stuck a couple times in our music, which is based on these Irish dirge rumbles. We all love The Pogues and they had a lot of parts in their songs where’s this just this kind of rumble and it’s following the singing. There’s no inherent beat to it, but it’s kind of out of time too. You’re following the singer’s movement versus everyone following the drummer or something like that. We had a little bit of that on our first record. There’s a song called “Rue The Day” where there’s a break that sort of does that. But this song is pretty much full on, the whole song that way. One example of The Pogues doing that is “The Auld Triangle,” there’s a lot of that in that. There’s a Shane McGowan solo song called “Granuaille” which I think is a really good example. So anyway, I think we were sort of ripping that off. But it’s also just a thing that became part of our band is that feeling of always following Hamilton, versus where most rock bands are following the drummer.

Walter Martin: I always loved that song, it has the chords actually the way we borrowed from “Over You,” that Velvet Underground song from their live record. This super super light song. And so we sort of did the opposite with our arrangement. We made it the heaviest rumble, sort of non-rhythmic rumble. And it was great to open, we opened many many shows with it because it really set a great tone. It was just a great way to start a show so I’ve always loved that song. 

Peter Bauer: I remember playing this song in the weirdest situation you could possibly play it, because it is like a five minute, relatively pretty boring dirge with no beat. We opened for Incubus at the Oklahoma State University Homecoming game or Homecoming. So there’s like I don’t know 60,000 people from Oklahoma who’ve never heard us. Oh this is totally sober, you’re not allowed to have a drink in the stadium. So they’re all looking at us, it’s like 5pm or something, and this guy from SportsCenter comes on. He was introducing the show and he says, “Ladies and Gentlemen…” oh first of all he has a moment of silence for the victims of 9/11. And so the whole stadium is silent. And then he goes, “Ladies and Gentlemen, they opened for Modest Mouse, The Walkmen.” (laughs) And it’s just dead silent and we start playing this five minute dirge to all these Oklahomans. Needless to say it didn’t go over great. 

“Little House of Savages”

Paul Maroon: The...oof, fourth song, “Little House of Savages,” we did in the country. Walt had this great riff for the guitar and then we built the rest of the song. 

Walter Martin: For “Little House of Savages,” the main guitar riff and drum beat section, the (mouths guitar part) and the (mouths drum beat). That little section was something that I had written for our old band Jonathan Fire*Eater that had never turned into a full song. But that riff section, that drum beat and guitar section, were still floating around and hadn’t been used. 

Peter Bauer: “Little House of Savages” was written in a farm house in upstate New York that was owned by our friend Matt Stinchcomb from the French Kicks. And I think we all went up there for the week to try come up with songs because we were a little bit behind writing songs for this record. 

Paul Maroon: We were just sort of hanging around in the country trying to write Bows & Arrows at some point. At a friend’s friend’s house. We didn’t have our own country house (laughs).

Peter Bauer: The main thing I remember about that week was there was sulfur water in every shower you took. It was like bathing in rotten eggs. Really extreme sulfur water. But it was a good time.

Walter Martin: We were writing in upstate New York at the French Kicks’ house actually, they had like a barn up there. And so we were up there working and started playing that song or playing that riff and drum beat. So we already had that song “The Rat” done, which is really dark and nasty and loud and aggressive and all those great things. We kind of wanted a companion piece for it, so I remembered that I had that section with that sort of kick ass beat, well I thought it was kick ass, beat and guitar riff. 

And then Ham put singing on it and we added a second part and it became finished. And it was great. And we played it for years because it was a lot of fun to play live. Because it was very nasty and dark and aggressive so that was cool. 

Peter Bauer: We recorded it in Memphis, Tennessee at Easly-McCain, which is where we set out to record the whole record with Stuart Sikes, that’s how it started. We got this van and we drove down to Memphis. Easly-McCain was a wonderful, strange little studio down there in a really rough neighborhood, like where you would call Domino’s Pizza and they wouldn’t deliver because the neighborhood was so tough. We had a great time recording there. And I think we got at least what felt like the majority of the record there before this hurricane came by and knocked out half the power in the city, at which time we were there and were like “we don’t know what to do.” And luckily Stuart, who was engineering the record, knew about this studio in Oxford, Mississippi, which was maybe an hour and a half away. And that place was called Sweet Tea and we went and finished the majority of things there. That’s also a fantastic studio. It was owned by Dennis Herring for a long time. I don’t know if it still exists anymore but it was a hell of a joint. And that was sort of we did the second half of the record. 

“My Old Man”

Peter Bauer: We opened with “My Old Man” for a long time on tour and it was sort of at the point where we decided we really wanted to be this incredibly loud band. I don’t really know what was in our heads. It was like this sort of weird groupthink where we all decided we just wanted to be louder than any other band. And we had this soundman named Chris Colbert who was always our soundman, whose nickname is Pepperjack. He was so psyched on it too just trying to make it louder than just anything you can possibly imagine. It was so unpleasant. But it was kind of, I still think it was pretty cool. 

I played the bass on it so the weird thing about the bass is that you only play one note I think for the entirety of the song. It’s like a five minute song and you just play F# the whole song until the very end, I think there’s one note four minutes and fifty five seconds or something. But weirdly, that was always something people would come up to you and be like, “Man that’s so sick, you only play one note.” People really like that. Which, God bless ‘em. 

“138th Street”

Paul Maroon: “138th Street,” which is named after the street where we all lived. Ham brought that in kind of done. The verses were done and then we put in the choruses and stuff. But I remember it being the first song we had a strumming guitar on. I think that’s because we listened to The Basement Tapes a lot at that point. I don’t know, it’s one of my favorite songs on the record. 

Peter Bauer: The title of the song “138th Street” comes from the house that Paul, Walter and me lived in together in West Harlem for a couple years. Right when we were starting the band. And then variations on a couple of us lived there for at least five years. It was like an old brownstone that we rented on 138th Street. And it was right by Marcata, the studio. 

I remember doing “138th Street” at Easly in Memphis and I have a very visceral memory of we used to get these barbecue sandwiches like everyday. I think maybe lunch and dinner, we’d get these same barbecue sandwiches at this gas station that Stuart Sikes recommended. And we would just endlessly eat these barbecue sandwiches. And I remember trying to record the song but there wasn’t words for it yet. Or there wasn’t complete words for it yet. I think it was one of the few times all five of us tried to help Ham write the lyrics and just failing miserably. We had these dummy words that we were putting on it. Something to do with Donald Rumsfeld. You know, it was during the Iraq War. I mean it was like a joke (laughs) but it definitely didn’t help speed things up. 

“The North Pole”

Paul Maroon: Let’s see, what else is on that record? I don’t know, I can’t remember the rest of it. 

Peter Bauer: I always liked the song “The North Pole.” I don’t think that it was a Walkmen band favorite at all. It started out really, we loved it at first and I think we had a really great thing. And then our old manager sent us on tour for a really long time so by the time we recorded it, we’d sort of run it into the ground and didn’t know quite what we were doing anymore. 

So the version on the record, I think it’s probably, the whole record I think of Bows & Arrows is mostly successful. Everything we were trying to do, you know, sometimes it’s a battle, sometimes it’s not. Everything kind of came out how you’d hoped it would come out. The North Pole is the one where you’re like “I don’t know, I think it could’ve been a different kind of song.” But I still like a lot of things about it. 

“Hang On, Siobhan”

Walter Martin: The piano part from “Hang On, Siobhan” is something that I got from this record that I found in my parents’ record collection of my grandmother, Frances Powell, who was a music teacher at an elementary school in Washington D.C. She’s actually Hamilton’s grandmother also. We’re first cousins and she’s our grandmother. We never met her, she died before we were born unfortunately but she was a great musician and a music teacher. 

Peter Bauer: The main piano part was something that Walt had, like the melody, from maybe his grandmother. It was like a hymn that his grandmother played and there was an old recording of it even. We were drawing from that. 

Walter Martin: This record I found had her playing piano and young children singing along Christmas songs. And there was this one song that I had never heard the melody before and I actually don’t know what it is, I researched it and everything and it sort of doesn’t exist apart from this record. So I felt like it would be nice to use it. It’s not exactly from the record but it’s pretty close. So yeah we took that and built the song around that beautiful little very simple single note melody. 

And Ham put some really great words on it and Paul added the change, which has a nice key change in it and does very cool things for that melody when we return to it. Yeah I love that song. It’s recorded very quietly and has a great, great mood. 

Peter Bauer: And then there’s a turnaround two-thirds of the way through the song, like a key change really. And that was inspired by something by Paul Robeson, like some piano turnaround that Paul listened to all of the time. And so that’s the basic musical bones of the song I think. 

There was a girl named Siobhan that used to sing with Walt and Paul and Matt, sort of pre-Walkmen band. I don’t know if that’s where Ham got the name or not? You’d have to ask him. 

“New Year’s Eve”

Peter Bauer: “New Year’s Eve” is a nice little song. I’d imagine it was thought of as a record ender when we first came up with the idea. That’s sort of what it feels like in some ways. And one big influence for it is that song “Anywhere I Lay My Head” by Tom Waits where there’s like the nice light beginning and then there’s kind of party music playing you out. That’s sort of how it’s laid out, like that last song on Rain Dogs. 

We used to play this one live, for those of you who don’t know, we had a couple piano songs.  So somehow right when we started the band, we made this decision that we’d always, well I don’t know if we’d do it forever, but we ended up doing for thirteen years was carry this upright piano around with us. So we bought these sixty four key pianos that you could fit in the wheel well of a Jeep Cherokee because that’s how we started touring. And we’d drag it everywhere we went. If we went to England, we’d go buy some rat-infested, nasty piano in some strange suburb and drag it around and carry it up stairs in London. It just got to be part of this crazy mindset where we always had to have a piano for God knows what reason. We’d always play “New Year’s Eve” and we’d play the song “We’ve Been Had” and a couple other songs. And one tour we even had two pianos. We started to get so into Craigslisting the pianos that if you could find a cheap one, then you’d want to get your hands on it. So we had a trailer and we had two upright pianos and we’d drag them to these little night clubs and throw them on stage. I mean, I don’t know what we were thinking. 

“Thinking of a Dream I Had”

Walter Martin: “Thinking of a Dream I Had” is definitely one of my favorite Walkmen songs. 

Peter Bauer: “Thinking of a Dream I Had” is my favorite Walkmen song I think. Doing that band that we all did, I don’t know thirteen years or so, I definitely think it’s the one that stands out for me as the coolest and most fun song we had. I don’t know, I love the beat, I love...I guess I love everything about it really. 

Walter Martin: My memory of writing that is being at Marcata, our old studio, playing with Paul and he playing guitar and I’m playing drums. I always wanted to do a song that has (mouths beat) on the rack tom, just a gallop. And then you kind of are waiting for the drum beat to really start but then it never starts and it’s just a stupid gallop going the whole time.

And so we tried to figure out how we could get away with that and Paul had that very exciting guitar tone and rhythm that sort of made it work. And then with that weird bass part that kind of sounds like The Stooges bass part that (mouths bass riff). I think which actually was something I had from Jonathan Fire*Eater days too. Anyway, somehow that combination allowed the rhythm to really kick ass even though it didn’t have a proper drum beat, it just had sort of a crazy gallop. And so that was really kind of great. And we had that music for a while. It took Ham a long time for some reason to get singing on it. And we almost had to bag the whole song and we were so bummed because it was just the end of making the record. We really wanted that song to work because we really wanted some big energy at the end of the record. Suddenly he came in at the 11th hour with all of the singing for that song. And we were thrilled. We actually recorded that vocal at Marcata, I think we did, at our old studio. Which we weren’t doing much of right then. But yeah I remember definitely mixing that song very sloppily with sort of all five members of the band with hands on the faders, mixing it manually. That’s a great memory because I really do love that song. 

Peter Bauer: One moment I remember with it is...we’d play it all the time and someone would always not want to play it, and I’d want to play it and then I’d always kind of put my foot down and complain until we played it. You know, but it would kind of go in and out of the set list. And then eventually one night, we were playing at this place called Grimey’s in Nashville. It was the old Grimey’s, like The Basement, and these guys came up to us and were like “Hey, we have a Walkmen cover band on New Year’s Eve, do you think we could play a song with you?” or before you or something like that. And we’re like, “Well how about you guys just play with Ham in the encore, like you name the song and you play it.” And they were like, “Ok cool.” So we stopped playing and they came up and played “Thinking of a Dream I Had” with Hamilton in the encore and they were so much better than us. They made it sound so much more like the record and it was great. (laughs) They really cleaned the floor with us.

“Bows & Arrows”

Peter Bauer: “Bows & Arrows” ends the record Bows & Arrows and I love a lot of things about the song. I think that the verse and the chorus are two of my favorite Walkmen parts. I still don’t understand the first part of the song or the end of the song, which are the same part. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I just sort of sat down and didn’t raise my hand anymore. But I just don’t get the beginning or the end. But I do love the verse and I love the organ and the melody in the chorus.

I think when we were recording this song is when we got to a point where we were at Sweet Tea in Oxford, Mississippi. It was just endless, we’d been recording forever and we were all bored out of our minds. To the point where your brain really sort of shuts off and just one of those endless, it’s hot as hell, you’re in Mississippi and it’s 100 degrees. And you’re just not really thinking anymore. And we were putting tiger balm on our eyes just to, I don’t know because you’re so bored, you just want to do something and it’s kind of painful and you’re laughing about it. I think it’s important to explain how bored you are because it’s the only reason you would not think about what you were doing enough to do this. And so then I was like, “Hey Ham, why don’t you go put the tiger balm down your pants.” God knows why, I mean but he was like, “Yeah sure, I’ll do that.” And so then he went and did that. And it was (laughs) his reaction, sort of flailing about, jumping around was one of the funniest things that I think I’ve ever seen.

Outro

Dan Nordheim:

Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about The Walkmen. You'll also find a link to stream or purchase Bows & Arrows. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"What's in It for Me"

"The Rat"

"No Christmas While I'm Talking"

"Little House of Savages"

"My Old Man"

"138th Street"

"The North Pole"

"Hang On, Siobhan"

"New Year's Eve"

"Thinking of a Dream I Had"

"Bows & Arrows"

Words and music by Matthew Barrick, Peter Bauer, James Leithauser, Paul Maroon, Walter Martin 

Les Bambo (ASCAP)

© Record Collection / Warner Music Group

Intro theme:

“Winter Cold” by North Home

Intro/Outro Music:
“Seance” by The Batflowers

Produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Mixing assistance by Nick Stargu

Mastered by Jeremy Whitwam

Playlist - Spotify link

Shostakovich Prelude No. 1 in C major, Opus 34

Joy Division - “24 Hours”

The Beatles - “Help”

The Fall - “No Christmas For John Quays”

The Pogues - “Poor Paddy on the Railway”

The Velvet Underground - “Coney Island Steeplechase”

The Pogues - “The Aud Triangle”

The Velvet Underground - “Over You”

Shane MacGowan - “Granuaille”

Bob Dylan & The Band - “Million Dollar Bash”

Tom Waits - “Anywhere I Lay My Head”

The Stooges - “Loose”