Singer/songwriter and Underground Punk artist Walt Hamburger has released new album …And Louie!, which deviates in part from his previous solo records in that its supported by a raucous full-band sound. Walt Hamburger has recently been on the first leg of his album-supporting tour, and delivering the same songs solo in inventive ways. Hamburger is best known for his time in The Hamburgers, working with One Week Records and Barely Standing Records, and his charitable work on behalf of animal welfare.
Hamburger’s record …And Louie! Turned out to inadvertently collect energetically driven songs that explore different relationship scenarios, from the questionable to the euphoric. The tracks are also marked by observant songwriting, supported by Production that shows off the virtuosity of the players, who included Neil Hennessy (The Lawrence Arms), Asher Simon (Joey Cape’s Bad Loud), Mikey Erg (The Ergs, The Unlovables), and Jon Snodgrass (Drag the River, Scorpios). I spoke with Walt Hamburger while he was out on tour solo about the making of …And Louie! and the weirdness of modern dating.
Your new album has a great big, full-band sound. How are you approaching that live on your tour?
I’m doing it solo. One of the things that got me into doing so stuff in the first place was seeing great musicians take their full-band songs and play an acoustic version of their songs that people really got into. Whereas, I noticed that if you’re just an acoustic musician, it’s nothing different live. When I was excited about doing more of a full-band sound with this record, I thought, “If I can make it catchy enough, people will gravitate towards a different version of it, and maybe help me sing along to parts that I can’t do just by myself.”
Not that this album was strategically designed, but some of the side effects of doing a full-band album are that you get on different playlists that you wouldn’t normally be on and reach different audiences. I can still play the full-band stuff when I’m at home and it’s more feasible. I say this as a joke, but I don’t know how anyone manages to tour in this economy! [Laughs]
I talk with a lot of bands about the realities of touring. It’s quite a rock and a hard place trying to make touring a money-maker. I can see decreasing the risk by going solo. I think you’ve toured solo in other countries, too. Is that challenging to be alone?
It’s not so bad when I’m not that far from home, time-zone wise, but when I’m in Europe and by myself, it gets pretty lonely. The time can tick pretty slowly. I’ve been through the same areas touring a few times now, and it’s not so bad. But when you’re going to new cities, and towns you’ve never even heard of, you’re meeting people from the first time, and trying to impress random audiences. When you’re in new places, it can be a little scary, but there are the plus sides of making your own schedule and seeing the world. It’s not all bad.
I remember when I was in Rome, touring with Belvedere, we were seven hours ahead of Wisconsin, and I was trying to get ahold of anyone, because I was at these aquaducts from pre-Jesus times, over two thousand years old, and it felt pretty weird to experience that alone. I was trying to call my mom, my girlfriend, my sister. Sometimes when I get to see these amazing things, I wish that there was someone there to share it with.
Did knowing that you would also be playing these songs solo affect how you wrote them?
WH: Not so much. It’s more of an added benefit, I think. It’s not so much how I write a song, but how it gets Produced, when you talk about adding harmonies, or a lead guitar that you might not be able to do live. I whistle, and I’m pretty good at it, so I throw that in every once in awhile instead of a guitar solo. Otherwise, I just write the song in the way that I would like to hear it.
With this album, it has a theme, but I didn’t even realize that I was creating a theme of relationships. I was just writing all these songs, and it turned out that something that was going on in my life that made the songs the way they were. In terms of style, it’s just kind of all over the place. It’s just about how each song comes to be. With the first song, “Anyway, Come Over”, there’s a lot of excitement, and then it gets darker at the end of the record.
All of the songs were just written and Produced the way that I wanted to hear them, and I wasn’t really thinking about the strategy of how to play them. You just kind of figure that stuff out at the end. I wish I had the bells with “Stay”, when I play that. Actually, that song is good because it has so many vocal harmonies, and I probably can’t recreate that live.
That’s actually a really profound song! I can see how it would be a challenge.
A lot of the songs on the album were songs that I started writing in 2020, so I’ve had these songs for four years already. I’d been playing them live, acoustically, in different ways, before recording them. So I had already figured that out before this tour. It’s interesting for some people because they are now hearing the full band version.
This album has a really big sound and a lot of energy to it. I’m glad that you were able to get together with other people and blow each song out to its biggest version.
That was something about this album, too, was that there was something of a band mentality. I have my ideas about how the drums should sound, but to have someone come in who can really do that, or to have someone like Neil Hennessy, who’s been around forever and knows exactly what he’s doing, recording, engineering, playing bass, and a little guitar, is another thing. Having those other brains in the room is great. The little things that you hear throughout, and the little things that we all came up with, were the product of having other heads in the room. When there’s just a guitar and me singing, there’s only so much I can do.
I can see that one of the hardest things about songwriting and recording alone is going down rabbit holes and not having other perspectives to bounce off of and bring in fresh ideas.
A lot of people say, “I like this band, and I want to sound like this band.” But I think one of my most favorite projects that I was ever in was called The Hamburgers. My favorite band at the time was probably Green Day. Our drummer’s favorite band was the Beach Boys. Our bass player was into 60s Rock ‘n Roll. We all came in with our different perspectives and created something, which none of us were expecting. That’s really, I think, the best way for me to go. That’s why I think a lot of my songs don’t sound the same. I just write from whatever mood I’m in at the time.
I certainly have my influences, like everybody else, and certain styles of music that I prefer, but I try not to lock myself into, “I sound exactly like this.” But that also seems a little dangerous sometimes. Even some of my favorite bands, when they come up with a new album, and it’s a slightly new song, I think, “What the heck??” But so far, with this album, the responses have been pretty good.
I feel like the album is really accessible. The lyrics really come across, and the instruments all have their own place, and that’s part of where the energy comes from.
I think that when you do a record, and actually have time to do, it’s just as important to subtract stuff that doesn’t work as it is to add stuff. So we were trying to be very careful. Some of my previous albums were intentionally under-Produced, to sound like demos, the original versions of songs. But now, I am aware that just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should. I do think that we got a really nice group sound out of it, which is hard to do when you’re not exactly a band, per se. I would love to actually perform some of this stuff with them, but it was fun to do in the studio.
The song “Insolence” has a particularly packed performance. How did that come about, that you had this whole crew involved in that song?
It’s funny. Jon Snodgrass was on tour towards the end of Covid times, right after vaccines, and live shows were a little weird. The studio I was at was actually Katy Perry’s former home. It’s actually a guest house to the mansion next door, but it was big enough that you could spread out. Jon and Mikey [Erg] were actually on tour, and they were staying there. It crossed over with when I got there to record. They were just there, swimming in the pool, and I said, “Hey guys, want to come in and do some recording?” It was just as simple as that. They just came in and it was nice timing. It was random luck!
I think it impacts the song to have them because it just feels a bit more epic in the storytelling to have all this energy coming in. For me, it made it feel like the subject and scenario is important, and the way that it impacts peoples’ lives.
WH: Yeah! I’ve never done online dating myself, but I’ve watched people do it. It seems to be like you take a relationship of what would usually happen in two or three months, and you jam it into a few days, or one night, but you still experience everything. I had friends who were getting pregnant, and not wanting to be pregnant, and that’s kind of what inspired me to write it. I was thinking, “Wow, being hot seems really fun, but it looks like there are some unintended consequences now.”
Something that stands out to me is that there’s a phenomenon now in dating, apparently, where you intentionally share really intense emotional information on your first date, to see if the other person will be put off. Or to accelerate the relationship to an artificial sense of intimacy. People are protesting against this as being really unnatural. It doesn’t have a good outcome, either.
Yeah, it’s not natural to do that. Everything changes. Though I have been lucky in these last four-and-a-half years with my partner, in the times when I have been single, it has sometimes seemed a little creepy to do the old-school approach where you just introduce yourself to someone at a bar. Now, instead, you’ve got to have an app and put it out there that you’re available and that you want them to contact you. It’s a whole new system. It’s fascinating to watch the whole Darwin experience of who is good at it, and if you were good at it, does that mean that you didn’t take it very seriously? I had a lot of thoughts, good and bad, when I wrote that song.
The song made me think of ways in which expectations and realities collide in dating.
This whole record, I didn’t realize it had this theme of relationships, but when I started doing interviews, I realize that it does. When I started writing these songs, I was single, then I started to kind of get happier, and that gets into the “Do Crimes” song and “Anyway, Come Over.” I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing, but it is a fascinating thing. That song “Insolence” is probably the most modern take on anything that I’ve written. It all fits into how love works now.
