After fronting The Walkmen for 13 years, New York’s Hamilton Leithauser has become an esteemed singer-songwriter — and over the past year and change, a productive one.

“I’ve been working on a lot of new music by myself, alone in a home studio, because I haven’t been playing a lot of shows lately,” he joked with today’s Free at Noon audience at World Cafe Live. So while it was on the one hand a release celebration for last year’s The Loves of Your Life — from which we heard several songs, such as “The Garbage Men,” “The Stars of Tomorrow,” and “Here They Come” — Leithauser also played several very new songs for the midday crowd.

“Virginia Beach” is a collaborative single Leithauser is releasing next week with his tourmate Kevin Morby, and was performed as a solitary acoustic number to open the show; “Off The Beach,” by comparison, is a variation on the theme, performed with his full band, reflecting on a character who tells themself it’s time to quit…something. We also heard several songs from Leithauser’s 2016 collab with Rostam Batmanglij, I Had A Dream That You Were Mine, including the show-stopping “A Thousand Times.”

Listen below, and check out a gallery of photos from the show by XPN’s Paige Walter.

Hamilton Leithauser Free at Noon 10.08.2021
Setlist
Virginia Beach
The Garbage Men
The Stars of Tomorrow
Here They Come
Off the Beach
In A Black Out
Sick As a Dog
A Thousand Times