In The Dark Where You Can’t See The Stars

Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam “Rough Going (I Won’t Let Up)”

Rostam Batmanglij is a great collaborator for Hamilton Leithauser for a lot of reasons, but primarily because he has such a great grasp on exactly what makes Leithauser such an interesting and distinct performer. In “Rough Going,” Batmanglij taps into my favorite aspect of his work with The Walkmen, a bleary-eyed late night drunken vibe, and pushes that to a theatrical extreme. The song sounds like it was written, arranged, and recorded on the spot in some ancient dive bar around 2 AM. Like a lot of the best studio recordings, it evokes a feeling of improvisation and immediacy despite being calculated and artificially constructed by design. I’d love to know just how much of this is live in a room, though – it feels so loose and Leithauser sounds so present in the moment and totally connected to the swing of the beat. The sax solo is wonderful too, and sounds completely off-the-cuff in the best way, like the sax player just happened to be in the room and decided to jump in when the moment was right.

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