The Walkmen Say Their Latest Studio Session Was 'Short on Glamor'

While the Walkmen's 2010 album, 'Lisbon,' wasn't recorded in Portugal, the two vacations the group spent there a few years back certainly inspired the breezy settings singer Hamilton Leithauser laid out in his moony lyrics. Now in the early stages of plotting their next set, the sigh-inducing indie rockers, whose membership is spread out across Pennsylvania, New York and Louisiana, recently got together for another band getaway. But according to guitarist Paul Maroon, the spot they chose this time around was significantly less exotic.

Speaking from his New Orleans home, he explains how the quintet had grand plans to work on some songs at a remote spot in the Pacific Northwest with producer Phil Ek (Fleet Foxes, the Shins), but some penny-pinchers on the business side of things steered the band instead towards the Garden State.

"We were actually getting ready to go out to this gorgeous studio near Seattle," Maroon tells Spinner.

"[Our manager] wrote us an email saying, 'I think it might be a little cheaper to cancel the session and just do some pre-production in Trenton [NJ].' That sounds a bit cheaper, doesn't it? Cancel a week at the nicest studio in the country and go to Trenton. It was a little short on glamor, but that's all right."

While the six-stringer admits the locale was dicey ("It's rough. It kind of feels like an extension of north Philly, which is a war zone"), the pre-production sessions yielded quite a bit of new material. Maroon warns that not all the songs they whipped up are winners, though.

"We came out of it with 20 songs and that would have never, ever happened five years ago," he says of the act's current frenzied output. "We just write faster than we've ever written before. We have more bad stuff than we used to have, but we seem to have the same amount of good stuff."

Though they just wrapped the demo sessions for their sixth album of originals (2006 saw the release of 'Pussy Cats' Starring the Walkmen, a full-album tribute to Harry Nilsson's 1974 disc of the same name), it's unclear exactly when the troupe will actually track the album proper.

"We're probably all going to think about it for a while and then get together again to actually record the thing," Maroon says. If all goes according to plan, the Walkmen might just get a West Coast vacation out of it, too.

Watch the Walkmen Perform 'Woe Is Me' Live