"I kept my eyes shut half the time. All the lights, one by one, here they come"

Hamilton Leithauser: "I wrote these songs about individual people. I wrote stories and I wrote music; and then I matched them up. Not one story was originally intended for the music it ended up marrying. These are people I know, and strangers I’ve come across in the last few years. All of the stories are based on some kind of truth, but I’m not afraid to get loose with the facts. Most are both fact and fiction, and some tilt pretty far in either direction. I guess people might call this "creative nonfiction" or just "embellished stories". I wrote and recorded these songs in a studio I built for myself in New York. It’s a tight New York kind of space, and I’m jammed in with all sorts of instruments and equipment."