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Mar 27, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Hamilton Leithauser

Hamilton Leithauser (formerly of The Walkmen) is releasing a new album, The Loves of Your Life, on April 10 via Glassnote. Now he has shared another song from it, “Don’t Check the Score.” He has also shared another funny teaser video for the album, this one featuring actress Sienna Miller. Check out both the song and video below.

Leithauser had this to say about the song in a press release: “Hi - Today I am releasing my new song ‘Don’t Check the Score.’ It’s about rooting for an old estranged friend. Maybe it was a rocky road and weird goodbye, but you’d like them to know you’re still in their corner.

When I used to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my friend introduced me to ‘day trading’ which is just compulsive gambling on the stock market. It can be done from your home (or work) computer. Instead of working, we would gamble all day. It was incredibly fun when you were up, and not as fun when you were down. This was around 2001, so we only had a dial up connection on one shared computer. It took like 45 seconds to login to the website to check your bet (hopefully you’d made like $55 or something). When things looked sour, you’d say ‘don’t login!’ Out of sight, out of mind—sort of. In reality you’d just be biting your nails thinking of nothing else…definitely not working. Anyhow, the title is a metaphor for looking the other way, or avoiding an inconvenient truth. I guess I could have called it ‘Don’t Login’ but I think there’s a lot more nobility in a sports metaphor than a day trading metaphor. Eventually, I stopped trading, because the house always wins.

So today this song goes out to all the gamblers, betters, troubled souls, long-lost friends, and sad-sack day-traders who can’t face logging in.

Right now, don’t login.”

When The Loves of Your Life was announced Leithauser shared a lyric video for a new song from it, “Isabella.” He also shared a teaser video for the song in which New York-based singer/songwriter Maggie Rogers gave him a haircut and made him cry. It followed another funny teaser video that Leithauser shared last month in which he got beaten up by actor/writer Ethan Hawke. That led to the new song “Here They Come,” which was one of our Songs of the Week.

In the “Here They Come” teaser video Leithauser said his new album is made up of songs about real people, many of them his friends. “‘Here They Come’ is about a friend who tends to run from his problems,” Leithauser further explained in a voice over, as he walked around New York City. “When the going gets tough, he tends to just cut and run. The song is about the specific moment when the lights are coming up in a movie theater where he’s been hiding out all day.”

In the “Here They Come” teaser Leithauser then arrives at Café Carlyle (where he had a series of residency shows in January) to play the song for one of his friends, who turns out to be Hawke. Right off the bat, the actor is annoyed that Leithauser is late. Then Hawke has a violent reaction to the song.

Back in 2016 Leithauser teamed up with Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend) to release a collaborative album, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, via Glassnote.

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