Hamilton Leithauser quizzes Kevin Morby on ’90s pop punk for Track Star, shares theme song for Jon Hamm show ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’

Hamilton Leithauser is very busy. His new solo album This Side of the Island came out in March, and he just wrapped up a residency at NYC’s Cafe Carlyle. As part of the promo cycle for the album, he guest hosted an episode of popular online name-that-tune game show Track Star where he quizzed his friend and onetime tourmate Kevin Morby about music, including a lot of ’90s pop punk. During the episode, Kevin reveals that he booked Osker to play a DIY show in Kansas City when he was still in high school and that he sometimes covers Sublime onstage if a show is going bad. Watch that below.

Leithauser also performs the theme song to Jon Hamm‘s new AppleTV+ series, Your Friends & Neighbors, which just premiered its first two episodes today. It’s called “The Joneses” and you can listen to that below.

If you haven’t heard about Your Friends & Neighbors, here’s the plot synopsis: “After being fired in disgrace, Andrew ‘Coop’ Cooper (Hamm), a hedge fund manager still grappling with his recent divorce, resorts to stealing from the homes of his neighbors in the exceedingly affluent Westmont Village, only to discover that the secrets and affairs hidden behind those wealthy facades might be more dangerous than he ever imagined.” The series also stars Amanda Peet, Olivia Munn, Hoon Lee, Mark Tallman, Lena Hall, Aimee Carrero, Eunice Bae, Isabel Gravitt and Donovan Colan. You can watch the trailer below.

“Our composer Dominic Lewis wrote ‘The Joneses’ after seeing our cuts of the show, and we all loved it so much that the musical themes in it also became part of our score, It just seems to capture the darkness and irony but also the fun heightened nature of the show,” says Your Friends & Neighbors‘ creator Jonathan Tropper who then thought of using Hamilton after catching one of The Walkmen’s reunion shows. “Hamilton’s got such an interesting and unconventional voice – it’s raw and epic and intimate all at the same time. When we were thinking about who should record Dom’s tune, I started to imagine the song in Hamilton’s voice, and I thought it might be a great match. There’s a melodic weariness to it, a perfect imperfection that I thought captures the angst and irony of the song and, by extension, the show.”

“This guy is dumbstruck,” Leithauser says of the song. “His house-of-cards materialistic lifestyle has just collapsed, and he never saw it coming. He’s suddenly alone in this bizarre world of extravagance. The lyrics juxtapose images from inside of these Connecticut mansions with his utter loneliness and disbelief.”