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Aug 26, 2016 Rostam By Christopher Roberts

Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen and Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend) have teamed up and are releasing a collaborative album, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, on September 23 via Glassnote. Previously they had shared “A 1000 Times” and “In a Black Out.” Now here’s another song from the album, “When the Truth Is…” Listen below. Also they have announced that the vinyl version of the album will be now coming out one week earlier than the CD/digital release, on September 16.

Batmanglij had this to say about “When the Truth Is…” in a press release: “This beat was initially inspired by The-Dream’s demo for the song ‘1+1’ by Beyonce…that demo was never released but you can find it kicking around online. It got me thinking about how much I wanted to make a 6/8 song that really smacked. Hamilton came up with the ‘would you listen to me now’ section the day I played him the beat. A couple weeks later I recorded the slide guitar solo…and pretty quickly we had all these finished sounding sections of a song…still it took about 18 months of passing ideas back and forth both online and in the studio to finish the thing.”

Leithauser had this to say: “I had watched the Muscle Shoals documentary the week before Rostam played me the original beat, and I was really jazzed up on all those soul singers. Percy Sledge, Wilson Picket, and Aretha Franklin (to name just a few) used to just belt it out with their hearts on their sleeves. I wanted to try and imitate them like Mick Jagger used to (or basically any other British singer from the ‘60s). The combination of doo-wap, hip hop (groove), and soul was definitely a curveball. This song brought our record into a very different arena, and I’m glad for that.”

Batmanglij recently announced that he had left Vampire Weekend and would be releasing music under his first name and shared a couple of solo songs. The Walkmen have been on hiatus for a while now and Leithauser has also released solo work.