Hello, My Name Is Albert
Hello, My Name Is Albert
Q&A With Albert Hammond Jr.
IE: When you decided to put Yours To Keep out, did you think you would tour?
Albert Hammond Jr.: When I first realized I had a record to put out, I wasn’t gonna do any press. I was just gonna put it out in the U.K. Then it became, “Come over and do any show” and “Come over and do four shows,” then we got offered the English tour and then the Bloc Party dates. And then, I don’t know, we do our own tour, then we almost did a tour with the Kings [Of Leon]. Things just started going well and kept growing.
IE: Is this your off time from The Strokes then?
AH: Yeah, we said we’d take a year off from the last show, so basically if I wasn’t doing this I’d probably be on a beach somewhere.
IE: About the guests who show up on the album, are they just people who were around at the time?
AH: Yeah, just friends. Like Sean [Lennon], I would call him to go see a movie, instead I was calling him from the studio so I said, “Will you come and play bass?” I didn’t call him in advance to say I was going into the studio, just the day of. “What are you doing? Wanna come down? Real fast? Just for an hour?”
IE: Were there takes with other people that you discarded, that didn’t work out so well?
AH: We were trying to do a Phil Spector kind of Wall Of Sound acoustic for “101,” to kind of mix the electric and acoustic together or maybe just use the acoustic — we didn’t know at the time. At the end it just sounded better to just use the electric. We had a bunch of friends come in — we had six acoustic guitars, piano, bass, drums, all at the same time. We had Sammy [James Jr.] from Mooney Suzuki, Ben Kweller on piano, Jody Porter from Fountains Of Wayne, and Sean — a whole bunch of people all in one room trying to get this wall of sound, which we didn’t use at all. It was a fun day.
Albert Hammond Jr. plays the Metro on June 8th. He’ll rejoin The Strokes to begin work on their next album this fall.
