The musical partnership between Hamilton Leithauser and Rostam Batmanglij began, as so many do, by disturbing the parental peace. The former lead singer for the Walkmen and former multi-instrumentalist from Vampire Weekend are both originally from the city of Washington, D.C., and they’d meet up when they went home for the holidays.
Leithauser, now based in Brooklyn, and Batmanglij, who was based in Brooklyn but now lives in Los Angeles, released their first collaborative album together, “I Had A Dream That You Were Mine” ,
Written and recorded from July 2014 to February 2016, the record pairs one of rock’s great voices with a pop auteur . The result are lush arrangements and doo-wop tropes Batmanglij toyed with on the last Vampire Weekend album and fills them with another charismatic vocalist from indie rock band The Walkmen, Hamilton Leithauser, who brings his smoky croon and elegantly rumpled lyrics.
The two first met in March 2008, when Vampire Weekend were in Atlanta to open for the Walkmen, Leithauser and Batmanglij didn’t start working on songs together until years later, beginning with “1959,” which turned out to be the final song on I Had a Dream That You Were Mine . Batmanglij ended up writing, producing, and performing on two tracks from Leithauser’s solo debut LP, 2014’s “Black Hours” (“Alexandra” and “I Retired”). “It was a progression from there,” Leithauser says. They recorded almost the whole album in Batmanglij’s home studio in Los Angeles making it the first LP cut there—except for the drums, played by the White Rabbits Stephen Patterson, which they did in an outside studio.
They decided to bill themselves by their names, rather than as another Hamilton Leithauser solo record that happened to be co-written and produced by Batmanglij “We wanted to put the record out in that way that both of our identities would be intact, said Batmanglij .
The Fat Angel Sings 